Transcript Note-taking & Record Keeping

Note-taking & Record
Keeping
BRACE (Building Research in Australasian
Computing Education)
First Workshop, Dunedin, 23-26 January 2004
www.ukc.ac.uk
What are “notes”?
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Lab Book?
Verbatim (interview) transcripts?
Field notes? Diary?
A log of design rationale?
A place to explicate assumptions?
Diagrammatic representations?
Annotated bibliographies?
Audit trails?
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I: Do you see any relationship between that and programming? … skills …
abilities?
S: Yes. I can. I can see a relationship. Because the way I went about doing it was
probably different to what … I would have thought about programming ….
something to do because I mean … the way I think … well, I haven’t done much
programming yet … but I think of things a bit more systematically than I did
there because I naturally cut corners, I naturally, you know, open the phone book
randomly. A computer won’t do that. A program … I mean you can make it do
something randomly, but … I also had other, I knew that roughly half-way
through would be where I was … or something. Whereas the computer doesn’t
know that. So it has a specific example, so that’s a bit different to programming
because, yeah, in a computer program it would know because it wouldn’t need to
look it wouldn’t need to flick through things. It could go straight there. So.
Taking notes
• Intention
• record of fact?
• aide memoire?
• part of analysis?
• Practice
• On every sheet:
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your name
identifier
date (place? time?)
page x (later page x of y)
• duration?
• state of mind?
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Not just notes …
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Photocopies of articles
Print out of web-pages
Print out of slides
Photographs
Audio tapes
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What are the problems?
• What is the status of your notes?
• What are you going to use them for?
• Phenomenon -> Secondary evidence -> Primary
evidence
• Unit of analysis
• Intermediate concepts
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Unpicking vocabulary (reprise)
Intermediate Concepts
Intermediate concepts are intermediate in that they are between
concepts (theories, theoretical principles, conceptual lenses) and
empirical observations, materials, and data. An intermediate
construct is not given at the beginning of research but rather is
built from what researchers come to know in the field - how
concepts “live”, how they are situated in multiple contexts.
Intermediate concepts are means for reciprocally making sense of
field research and making sense of concepts in relation to
empirical research and theory-building … intermediate concept
construction contributes to the basis for generalization from
particularized qualitative case examples.
Judith Gregory Activity Theory in a “Trading Zone” for Design Research
and Practice (Doctoral Education in Design Conference, La Clusaz 912 July 2000)
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How will you organise them?
• What’s the indexing mechanism?
• Type? (interviews/diagrams/stats – other papers? – annotated
bibliography?)
• Themes/subjects?
• Alphabetically/numerically?
• Chronologically?
• Knowledge bombs?
• How do you build new knowledge?
• Log books?
• 5x3 index cards?
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Pirsig
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Unassimilated
Program
Crit
Tough
Junk
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Which principle?
• Pose significant questions that can be answered
empirically
• Link research to relevant theory
• Use methods that permit direct investigation of the
question
• Provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning
• Replicate and generalize across studies
• Disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny
and critique
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Which principle?
• Pose significant questions that can be answered
empirically
• Link research to relevant theory
• Use methods that permit direct investigation of the
question
• Provide a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning
• Replicate and generalize across studies
• Disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny
and critique
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