I'm glad to say that I have now finished all my marking am able to concentrate on PhD work.I have a trial copy of NVIVO and I'm starting to code my data. This is time-consuming but reasonably straightforward. I haven't yet decided whether or not to spend the £400 and actually buy NVIVO; I'd like to see how useful it is going to be first.

Work on Foucault has also gone reasonably well. I think he and I are beginning to come to an understanding! I'm getting to the point where I can start to contemplate putting all of this together. I'd like to be able to apply some of the ideas from both Foucault and Bahktin to the data that I have collected from my interviews. I can already see, for example, that some of the ideas about dialogue and how this develops from a master/slave relationship through a platonic type dialogue could be seen as too linear, too structured from a Foucauldian perspective. What I am seeing in the 1st year interviews is a lot of confusion about whyand how they should be reading.

I have tutorials tomorrow.

NVIVO - Wow!

The highlight of the week was an NVIVO training course, which shows what a sad bastard I am becoming! It is seriously exciting software. I know that it does not actually analyse the data for me, nor write a dissertation. Although I must admit there were times when it seemed that even this might be possible! But with over 60 interview scripts to analyse and a very poor memory, I think this software is going to be an absolute necessity. The big problem, of course, is that it costs nearly £400. Luckily, I am truly appalling with money! I do have the capacity to convince myself that something is essential, even if I can't actually afford it. Still, I think I'm at the age where deferred gratification is becoming seriously untenable philosophy. Buy now, worry later!

I have also done some writing this week. I have continued to work mostly on stuff that will become a literature review. I have looked at study skills approaches to teaching reading, particularly some of the American literature. I have decided to call this a strategic approach, partly because this is what the Americans call it and partly because it does seem to much better describe the ways in which particular strategies are taught in order to, supposedly, improve reading skills. Underlining, highlighting, notetaking - certainly all really useful skills, but I am questioning the the universality of them and how transferable they are across different sorts of reading.

I am on a union training course on Monday and Tuesday next week, but I'm hoping to do some more writing later in the week. I might even have won more interview lined up!

This has been a reasonably successful week. On Thursday I went to University Z and recorded two more interviews. Unfortunately, one person was unable to attend and has now dropped out of the research project. This means I now have 14 students from three different universities. The week before I also received an e-mail from a student in University Y telling me that she has had to withdraw from the course. I am slightly concerned that having 14 students at the end of year one might mean that I do not have enough by the end of year three. However, I think that given that I am also interviewing lecturers, I am going to have more material than I can reasonably manage.

I am attending an NVIVO training course next week and after this I'm hoping to make a start with data analysis. I have still got five interviews to get transcribed, but I've now got a grant from the DSA to cover the costs of this.

I'm reading lots of Foucault at the moment. I've looked at some of The Order of Things, some of The Archaeology of Knowledge and are now working their way through the whole of The Will to Knowledge. I am trying to take notes on this material as I read it. I know from experience that if I just read stuff and don't write anything that a) I forget what I've read; b) I lose the opportunity to capture my own thoughts as they arise from the reading. I don't very often used the notes that I've made in any verbatim way, but they do feed into reflective and analytical pieces of writing.

I'm also experimenting stylistically with what I'm writing. Given that my project is looking at academic reading, and that I am myself doing a great deal of academic reading, it seems daft to not include my own experiences of reading and writing within the research. I am, after all, the one subject to whom I have (sort of) unlimited access. I don't think I would want to use myself as a central research tool, but to ignore the fact that I am engaged in intensive academic reading would seem to miss very important source of data. I would not want this to become an autoethnographic project and I also realise that there are dangers of subjectivity, but I quite like placing myself into the work. I guess one of the tests of this will be what my two supervisors think when they read it!

A Long Gap

The long gap between the last entry on this blog and this one is more to do with a technical problem than any lack of progress on my PhD. I had somehow managed to block cookies from blogger.com. This meant that I couldn't open the blog site. Now the problem is solved, I have no excuse.

In fact I have made some progress, even though it is much less than I would have liked. I have recorded 13 interviews with students from three different universities. I have three more to do next week which takes me up to my target of 16. Unfortunately, one student has now dropped out of university which leaves me with 15 for the next year. I am also making some progress in getting my participants to send me their essays. My most interesting interview was with a student who had done no reading whatsoever during her first semester. Sod's law was operating that day and I failed to tape record what was said. I have tried asking her to come for another interview, but she's not replying to my e-mails.

I have been reading lots of Foucault in the last weeks. In particular, I am slowly working my way through The Archaeology of Knowledge and (even more slowly) The Order of Things. Foucault is not a man who can be rushed! The more I read, the more convinced I am that he and Bakhtin will be my two central theorists. I have also got a lot written. I was surprised when I re-read what I had written last summer: it was better than I thought it would be. I'm also now managing to write new material. The aim is to get to the MPhil stage by the end of the summer. I certainly like to be in the position where I had enough materials ready to be able to start talking and presenting my research.