I have knocked my 21 interviews into more-or-less usable form. I now have about 27,000 words of interview response data which is a fair amount to work my way through.
To give me some initial pointers, I have made it all into tag clouds using the very user-friendly site tagcrowd.com
The picture below shows a tag cloud for all my interview data, including the frequency of the words in the tag cloud. Ignore the highlighting (Snag It put that in as it was doing the screen grab) it’s the size of the words which is important.
‘Group’ and ‘work’ are obviously key words, and the fact that this is an ‘online’ ‘course’. Moving beyond the obvious, though, I’m interested in the words which relate to constructing knowledge together: answers, asked,chat, collaborative, communication, discussion, experience….
Reading this post, I’m wondering if there’s anything more I could do with tag clouding. NVivo (that I’m wrestling with at the mo) does a 1000 most used words display, but it includes common words whereas tag cloud allows you to use an exclude list. Another problem I’m running into with NVivo is response time. I’m wondering how it will cope with your number of words as it’s really choking on my 659 survey responses.