Paper over

I presented my paper on Friday to the other postgrads and I'm glad the Research Coordinator cajoled us into participating in the 'mock conference' despite it falling at a busy time for me. I received some very valuable feedback and didn't feel as nervous presenting as I have in the past. I also found out that one of the other students has used a diary technique and today I'm going to email her and see if I can find out more.

I've received four consent forms from participants at the council who indicated their interest in being involved in the research. I need to follow up on some of the others who haven't sent their consent forms back. This part of finalising the participants and scheduling the fieldwork is really fiddly and takes much longer than you expect. I'm hoping to go down to Melbourne in the next week or two just for the day to visit the Business Development Unit of the Telco. I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm still dreaming about a delicious apple crumble that a friend made for Sal and myself on Saturday night. Mmmmm.....

Writing up draft paper

I'm presenting a paper this Friday on my research to a group of postgraduate students at Uni. Been freaking out about this for about a week. Will spend today trying to bed down the draft. On the field work front, I've received nine positive replies from participants at the Council since the mass email was sent out. The Head of IT is sending out a repeat email today. I have to make a trip to Fisher library tonight. I have six books overdue. I couldn't renew them because I exceeded the number of times I can renew them darn it.

Back to the paper...

Chasing up participants

Both of the organisations I've recruited have sent an email around to staff inviting them to participate in my research study. The text was prepared by me and they put in a few words in support of the project. The day after one of them was sent around I received a flurry of interest with five replies but since then nothing. I think I will have to generate some more interest in the project by going there in person and presenting my project to staff. I've just sent an email through to one of them to try to arrange to do this. The other organisation is in Melbourne and I'm planning on going down there in late May.

Field work in the slow lane

Well I've got my research sites - two to be exact. Both organisations have received my email text to be sent to all the staff in the organisation inviting them to participate in my research but I haven't heard anything back yet in terms of actual replies from participants. It's slightly frustrating not knowing the status of the recruitment within the organisation since this is largely in the hands of the key contacts I have in those organisations. It's a fine line to tread between giving them time to follow through with the tasks at their end and hassling them to get them done...

In the meantime I've been working on the design of the interview and technology diary to be handed out to all the participants. The technology diary is proving to be quite challenging to conceptualise but I do have a template to refer to that is quite a good fit - one of my supervisor's everyday water diaries. Today I have been doing a bit of brainstorming on what it is that I hope the technology diaries will reveal about everyday use of information and communication technology in the office and then break them into themes and exercises that can act as guides for the diary users. I thought I'd try it out on a couple of friends in draft form to see how I can improve it.