Note-taking

1
Note-taking Record Keeping

• BRACE (Building Research in Australasian
  Computing Education)
• First Workshop, Dunedin, 23-26 January 2004

2
What are notes?

• Lab Book?
• Verbatim (interview) transcripts?
• Field notes? Diary?
• A log of design rationale?
• A place to explicate assumptions?
• Diagrammatic representations?
• Annotated bibliographies?
• Audit trails?

3
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
havent 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 wont 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 doesnt know that. So it has
a specific example, so thats a bit different to
programming because, yeah, in a computer program
it would know because it wouldnt need to look it
wouldnt need to flick through things. It could
go straight there. So.
4
Taking notes

• Intention
• record of fact?
• aide memoire?
• part of analysis?

• Practice
• On every sheet
• your name
• identifier
• date (place? time?)
• page x (later page x of y)
• duration?
• state of mind?

5
Not just notes

• Photocopies of articles
• Print out of web-pages
• Print out of slides
• Photographs
• Audio tapes

6
What are the problems?

• What is the status of your notes?
• What are you going to use them for?
• Phenomenon -gt Secondary evidence -gt Primary
  evidence
• Unit of analysis
• Intermediate concepts

7
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 9-12
  July 2000)

8
How will you organise them?

• Whats 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?

9
Pirsig

• Unassimilated
• Program
• Crit
• Tough
• Junk

10
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

11
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