A Treadle! A Treadle! My Kingdom for a Treadle!

Newly ethics-approved and now officially 'in the field', I have undertaken my first group interviews with the teachers in my department.

I have about an hour and a half's worth of audio split across two sessions, so far, and have now begun the process of transcription. I've been trying to use a well know transcription app (one that sounds like St George may have tried to fight it at one stage) and, it would be fair to say that has not been terribly successful.

The first ten minutes of audio took me nearly four hours to transcribe that way.

Then I remembered that in a past life I was an audio typist (those long summer holidays had to be spent somehow) and so I just ditched the technology and got on with the transcription manually. Oh for a treadle like in the good old days at the insurance firm...

I have got faster and faster and I am up to approximately an hour's labour for twenty minutes of talk. 1:3. I don't know if this is a good ratio or not. What I do know is that I feel thoroughly familiar with these discussions - I know them inside out. They are fascinating, incredibly rich; dialogue which felt pretty ordinary as it happened is absolutely loaded with ideas and suggestions for reading teaching - ideas which might easily get lost if such careful attention were not being paid to them. Which makes me wonder what gems might get passed by, acknowledged but then not acted upon, in an ordinary department meeting when pedagogy is under discussion.

At least through the collaborative action research model that I am using participating teachers will be able to review exactly what has been said at each stage as we shape our project more fully.

Now, on to coding...shudder.

Back In the Room

The 'Drowning in Data' courses offered at the university seem particularly attractive now, since that is what is beginning to happen.

Session 1 of the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course has galvanized me into action. I was put into a 'group' and had actual 'homework' with a deadline. That's been a while. An essay is required at the end of this module. That has also been a while.

And, since our next topic is interviews, in preparation I have been busy transcribing the first of my group interviews.

I have begun to arrive at some (unscientific) conclusions:

1. The dictation app I am trying to use is worthless.
2. Transcription is extremely labour intensive. The first ten minutes' worth of talk took nearly four hours to transcribe.
3. It gets a bit quicker. The next ten minutes I managed in an hour. Though this is still an unfeasible ratio.
4. These interviews generate a huge amount of data (insightful, this one).
5. I need to back out of the talk more. I seem to have dominated the discussion at one stage in the middle.  Note to self: shut up!

Still, if nothing else, it seems I am definitely back in the room. I have the second class today, followed by my first supervision session of the year, and I feel that I have been working at it non-stop since last week. I have done (most of) the reading for today's class. Deadlines, gulp. Odd being taught again, but I quite like it.