Monday, June 27, 2011
First day technicalities
The first day of qualitative data collection in any context is glitchy, I'm afraid, and today is no exception. I think anytime you get brand new equipment and/or new systems there is an adjustment period. Today so far one of the wireless headphones is not working at all; iEtherpad (our system for taking collaborative field notes) has gone offline; several (all?) of the microphone/headset combinations are hard to listen to, either because they are buzzing or they are too loud; the new cameras generate a file type we have never heard of before and don't know how to convert; and we only have one still camera. Sheesh. However, the classes are going well, the data is being collected (knock wood) even if the real-time access is messy, and it seems like things are getting worked out.
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I forgot to hit record this afternoon, so we've also had our first videographer error loss of the week.
ReplyDeleteWhile losing iEtherPad was a blow, we are making do with GoogleDocs. Some drawbacks to the GoogleDoc compared to iEtherPad
ReplyDelete1) No automatic tagging of who wrote what. Enrique began highlighting his comments in blue, and I followed up by highlighting my comments in yellow.
2) We won't have the "TimeSlider" functionality, so we won't have as fine control of going into the historical records of the field notes.
3) Typing comments/notes near each other on the "page" is definitely challenging. When the observing scholars tried to do that, we would often interfere with the other person's typing. It's not a problem if we are each typing in our own sections, but there were times when it was convenient to support each other by taking notes on the same interactions (generally when there was a whole class discussion, so one person could finish what they were noting and the other person could take over with the real time note-taking).
These are relatively minor. And given that we don't have much sense of if/when iEtherPad will come back up and how stable it will be if/when it does, I think we might be better off working in GoogleDocs for a while.
The headphone buzzing in the UE2 class was distracting. At first, it seems that there was buzzing in both ears of both headphones. After a while, the buzzing stopped in the left earpiece of both headphones, but continued in the right earpiece of both. When Enrique figured this out (he notes that he 'pretended to be a DJ' so he was attuned to this) he showed me how to wear my headphones askew so that I was only listening to the left earpiece. Did we look awesome or ridiculous, you ask? I maintain that we looked awesome. At the end of the day, we did some trouble-shooting using a wired head set instead of the wireless set-up, and discovered that the problem actually seemed to be due to the cameras themselves. We weren't able to proceed any further in trouble-shooting, but Hunter suggested that maybe we could switch the camera to a mono speaker audio mode instead of a dual speaker audio mode. Maybe that will work? But the one earpiece mode is also an acceptable workaround.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the "headphone buzzing:" You might have to switch the setting for the headphone jack from "A/V" to "Headphones" in the camcorder menu. I remember that we had this problem with the old cameras, last year, and the new cameras (at least ours here in Maine) came with "A/V" as default setting.
ReplyDeleteThanks Benedikt! That was the problem and I fixed it. We've had this problem before, and I even blogged about it, but hadn't made the connection that this was what was going on here.
ReplyDelete