Final Digital Tools Post

In general, I found this glass very useful. I absolutely plan to use several of the tools mentioned in the class in my own work, in particular I've already started putting Zotero to use for Firefox, and I'm really liking some of the things that I can do with WEFT QDA. I'm not entirely sure when I will have the opportunity to use Audacity, but I love all of the things that it can do, in particular clearing out background noise to make transcriptions easier on the ears. I'm not a fan of Windows Moviemaker, I admit, and probably won't use it in in the future. It's a very standard and widely available tool, but I found myself frustrated with its lack of user-friendliness (ironic for a Windows product) and it doesn't actually seem to be all that compatible with my video recorder, which led to much frustration. Other than that, all of the tools seemed useful, and it will take a while and my own experimentation to find out which ones are the best for me.

As far as the course content itself, I found it immensely helpful. The walkthroughs for the technology were clear, comprehensive, and responsive to my concerns, and I came out of each class feeling that I had a really good idea of where to start with each piece of technology. I enjoyed the assignments, particularly the encouragement to play around with the tools for ourselves; I'm still sad that I couldn't get NVivo to work, however.

All in all, this was a very useful and entertaining course. Honestly, I would have liked for it to be a full quarter long and go in more depth with some of the programs, particularly the analysis tools.

Review - HyperRESEARCH

So, my attempt at getting Nvivo continued to fail, and fail hard. Eventually, I decided to just shelve the whole idea and move on to another program. In this case, HyperRESEARCH.

And it is everything that Nvivo wasn't, including easy to install. It's a compact program, clocking in at just over 20 MB, which is nice for use on a laptop, or you can even install it without fuss or muss to a flash drive, which is /excellent/ if you're going to be taking your research to different places to work on it. The interface is simple, free of bells and whistles, which I like. It is also somewhat free of a tutorial, which I like rather less. I am, however, impressed by the 'Theory' tab, which allows you to automate some of the analysis by your theory, creating cases and rules for the program to follow throughout the research. It's interesting.

I've only played around with it a little at this point, but I like what I see so far, and look forward to using it for studies in the future.

Attempted Review - Nvivo

I wanted to go ahead and choose Nvivo for the analysis software that I would be using, if only because of the name recognition and some lingering affection for my program evaluation days. Unfortunately, Nvivo seems to hate my computer. Although the process of finding and downloading the software was not particularly painful, I've yet to successfully install it, between the constant restarts it mandates and its flat-out refusal to continue the installation process even after updates and give me a working product.

I will continue to troubleshoot, or give up and choose another program.