We generally swap cards, that's about the extent of it really! I think it is a bit of a 'blown out of proportion' celebratory day if you know what I mean... but at the same time if the other half forgot to get me a card i'd probably be a bit p'd off!!!

You know what else is rubbish for the DS... My Word Coach - and My French Coach too. Word Coach is just boring but I thought I would learn a bit more French with the French Coach - but why doesn't it say the words or get you to say them so that you would learn pronunciation??? The DS has speakers and a mic surely that is what they are for??? Instead there is just really annoying music...

But ChessMaster is brilliant I'm so hooked - I'm playing it for hours every night before bed, then my brain is too active too sleep!!!

That's really what someone needs to hears two days before their viva blueberry

Maybe you should ask your supervisor's opinion tigger, I'm not sure what the best course of action would be!

Hi hannah, no I'm not analysing interviews actually - initially I used it to analyse some open-ended answers from a questionnaire - so actually I didn't have that much data and I probably could have done it manually! But my next phase will be analysing text in learning journals so it'll be way too much information to tackle manually. Boy am I looking forward to that Good luck with whatever you decide to do!

I know how you feel badhaircut I am going throught the exact same thing with a class at the moment. Talking is not the problem but blank stares are unfortunately. I thought they might 'come out of their shells' after a couple of weeks but I had the class for the third time yesterday and it's just getting worse.

It is especially confusing because I taught the same class last year and it went great - everyone got involved in discussions and people actually said to me that the class was really interesting! Oh well I guess that teaches me a lesson - what works with one group may fall flat on its face with another group. I don't know what I'm going to do next week

The only thing I would say is that some people think it is an 'automated analysis' - including one of my sups - and it's NOT... you still do all the analysis yourself it is just the coding etc. that is made easier with NVivo. I suppose you might see trends more easily because of the way data is organised but you do still have to do that analysis by yourself...

If there are any NVivo workshops near where you are maybe you could go to one - there was a workshop here and it was a great introduction to the software.

Hope that helps

Yes, I have used it... I think it's a great tool, I can't imagine doing that type of analysis in a totally manual way!!!

I would say basically what it does is make coding of data very easy (just a click-drag) - you can then browse through data that you have coded to a certain 'category'. Also you can annotate data, put in links and search/query data. That is the extent of what I have done, there is a whole other section to do with modelling that I haven't even gone near yet!

Lol now that is funny

No Smilodon you are not the only one - my supervisors would probably drop dead if they saw that - I hope that Ahmed's supervisor has a sense of humour

Oh ok you win... No wait now I win!!! This could go on...

We don't have any antics here, it's like a morgue. Plus all the porn sites are blocked by Websense... too bad huh?

I am writing notes on everything from now on... I just spent the day trying to figure out which articles from a big pile I have read and which ones I haven't - had no memory of most of them initially and then realised halfway through 'oh yeah I HAVE read this'

Methinks this was the list you were talking about Olivia... it's part of (or affiliated somehow with) this site...

http://www.findaphd.com/students/life.asp

I love the "I did a PhD and did not go mad" one... and the link is broken so I just googled it... so here is a working link!

http://public.randomnotes.org/richard/PhDtalk.html

I win...

I have that book too and thought the same, it's not very inspiring! I got another one at the same time which is much better - "The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research" by Rugg and Petre.

Huh, I'm like a one-woman library today