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Note-taking & Record Keeping

Stepping Stones: Investigating Engineering Education

First Workshop,Johannesberg’s Slott, 12-16 June 2006

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Beatrice Webb

"It is difficult to persuade the accomplished graduate of Oxford or Cambridge that an indispensable instrument in the technique of enquiry - seeing that without it any of the methods of acquiring facts can seldom be used effectively - is the making of notes"

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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?

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.

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Taking notes

• Practice• On every sheet:

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

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Not just notes …

• Photocopies of articles• Print out of web-pages• Print out of slides• Concept maps• 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 ConceptsIntermediate 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)

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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?

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Pirsig

• Unassimilated• Program• Crit• Tough• Junk

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How to deal with data

• Data is necessary, but not sufficient …

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The working practices of others in similar fields

• Jean Lave (anthropology)• Beatrice Webb (sociology)• Alan MacFarlane (Keith Thomas, Claude Levi-Strauss,

Charles Darwin, C.Wright Mills)

• The “one fact, one card” method …

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Jean Lave

I find it helpful to write my ideas down, one to a card. You try, in this way, to write some sense of your changing understanding of what is going on. You keep piles of these cards. Every now and then, maybe once a week … you lay them out on a table and look at them and try to write summary notes that say “Here is what I think this whole stack of cards/ideas is about” You keep a record of each sorting you make … you begin to file groups of closely related cards in half-a-dozen or a dozen envelopes, and you begin to get a sense for yourself of what the major issues are.

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Beatrice Webb

“To put it paradoxically, by exercising your reason on the separate facts displayed, in an appropriate way, on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of separate pieces of paper, you may discover which of a series of hypotheses best explains the processes”

“It is by just this use of such a mechanical devise as the shuffling of sheaves of notes, and just at this stage, that the process of investigation often becomes fertile of actual discoveries, rather than the previous stage of making observations and taking notes.”

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Data comes together

Reprinted by permission from Contextual Design by Hugh Beyer & Karen Holtzblatt, InContext Enterprises, http://www.incent.com, © Morgan Kaufmann, 1998

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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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References

• Beatrice Webb (1887) My Apprenticeship, Longman, Green & Co.

• Lave, J. & Kvale, S. (1995). What is anthropological research? An interview with Jean Lave by Steinar Kvale. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8, 219-228.

• MacFarlane, A. (1993) “Only Connect”: Some thoughts on Discovery and Creativity http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/METHOD3.html