comments

I think the material I learned will be very helpful. Actually, that afternoon I had friend in my department ask about transcribing programs and I was able to tell her about express scribe and trancenda (I think that's what the video transcribing program is called). So I already see the materials value. I think one suggestion would be to add more content. For example, compress the first 4 weeks into 2 or 3 weeks and then spend more time on the data mining programs. Also, even though all of them aren't free, it would be good to include programs you have to pay for like NVivo. That's by biggest suggestion- spend more time on the data analysis tools and combine the first few weeks into fewer classes.

QDA Miner. Recently, I've had to learn about QDA Minder for a research project the quarter. First, it's good to know this program goes beyond simply statistical analysis of text. My interaction with QDA Minder has been slightly frustrating. I've found it difficult to use the document converstion wizard. When I've tried to import fies, I've gotten error messages. However, this may be a problem with Symstat and not with QDA Minder, which I believe is the program for running statistics on documents. I will also add that the directiosn included in the program are not the best I've ever seen. The directions make things seem simple and they often skip simple steps. For example, I was tring to create a dictionary to run an analysis, but I couldn't figure out how to move words into the dictonary. Although there were directions, it skipped a simple step in the process that would have saved me around 20 minutes of my time. Overall, I think that if you spend some time with the program or find someone who knows the program it could be an especially useful tool, especially with the potential to do both quanitative and qualitative analyses.

I've decided to write about EndNote. About a year and a half ago a friend gave me a copy of EndNote, and told me it was a great program that would help organize my references. This was echoed by other people in my department who said EndNote save them a ton of time when it came time to putting together a reference page. At the time, I was sill using putting together references pages together by hand, which was an excedingly tediuos task. Shortly after instaling the program on my computer, I started using EndNote and found that my friends were right. It was a great program. I used it for one paper and I could see that putting time into building a library would save me a ton of time in the long run. The problem I had was that when I worked on old papers, EndNote would open and try to insert cites I didn't need or had already included- I'm sure some of the problem was that I didn't know how to use the program. Because EndNote kept popping up evertime I opend word, I decided to disable it, just so I could work on this old paper. Unfortunaly, I didn't know how to get EndNote and Word talking to each other again, so it sat in my harddrive for about a year before I got motivated and made it my goal to get the two programs to communicate with each other again. Now that I've got the two programs on speaking terms, I plan to start builidng my reference library. From my experience, EndNote is a great program that save researchers tons of time. I would just advise against blocking the two from communicating with each other.