I am afraid I have been lurking as we have so many projects on at the moment but one of them involves interviewing colleagues about participatory research and we have been using Skype, F2F and in the past I have used Eluminate as well as Talking Communities which is more accessible. In fact I was interviewed by Prof. Norm Coombs using this service and it was very easy. The EASI website has examples of the EASI webinars along with their podcasts and vodcasts.
It is the transcription that takes the time and I have to agree that the technology when using a webcam can really get in the way if the connection is slow, jerky and you are constantly stopping because the line drops out! It is often easier to stick to one medium - just text or just audio and dip in and out of the visual side as has been suggested.
I have also completed the JISC funded LexDis project that involved working with students over a two year period, discovering via interviews (both off and online) all about their elearning strategies. We used Skype, MSN, Facebook, texts, F2F, email and in fact any chosen method that suited their skills. I feel it was the flexibility and real sense of participation that allowed it to work. There is a final report available.
I am off now to work through an Excel spreadsheet with student comments! I will admit I am abandoning QSR NVivo for the coding, in favour of scissors and cards for the moment. The program is failing to load yet again! Technology can be so frustrating at times!
Best wishes E.A.
E.A. Draffan
Posts made by E.A. Draffan
Your book is available on Amazon.co.uk but sadly we can only pre-order... do you have any idea when it may be for sale in the UK? Looking forward to the discussion and I hope there may be a moment to chat about the best ways to analyse the data gathered after the interviews - the sort of tools that make it easy to annotate transcriptions, store, develop themes and code content. I have to admit I have used NVIVO and I am not sure it is the easiest of tools but am happy to be persuaded! 
Many thanks.
Many thanks.
I think these are all very important issues but I just wish institutions would also have concerns about usability and accessibility of all the social media, players and networks. Having spent last August re-testing over 100 Web 2.0 services I was struck by the lack of progress in accessibility, despite the fact that many were being advised for use by educators. Most services had not changed over the preceding year although some had alternatives such as mobile Facebook, or there were other options like accessible Twitter and captioning for YouTube plus an accessible YouTube player. The results of all the testing are available on the Web2Access web pages. The main issues tend to be with registration difficulties, the lack of ability to add captions or even alt tags (short descriptions) to images and alternatives for video and audio podcasts when uploading items. Best wishes E.A.
I find receiving the discussion by email on my PC makes me read more items, as I forget to go to the discussion forum. But I can also do this using Outlook on my mobile phone. There is Moodle for Mobiles
I agree with all the above statements and find a wealth of information and links as a result of lurking and taking part in the discussions when I have a moment. Thank you Sylvia and I am sorry I missed you at Alt-C in the UK. I would just like more of the same to keep me up to date!