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!