Bachelor Thesis Log 11

September 14th, 2010

The regular Tuesday report is rather short today. I just put the last one online last Friday. Since then not much has happened for the following reason: due to exhaustion I took the weekend off, visited my family and rested a bit. Yesterday morning, the outstanding interviews with Carola Lilienthal and Christian Späh were completed. I'm two thirds done with transcribing the interviews, more about that below.

Procedure and Results of the Interviews

Carola and Christian are (in contrast to Axel) external people who are hardly or not at all involved in my thesis. This makes them thematically less biased. This is even more true for Carola than for Christian, since he was at least present at the brainstorming meeting in the summer and has a rough idea of what I am working on.

Both interviews took place in the offices of the respective interviewee. The one with Carola lasted just under 20 minutes, the one with Christian just under 30 minutes. I recorded both with my laptop, which worked sufficiently well. After the interview with Axel, I made some minor adjustments to the guidelines:

1. What experiences have you already had with the teachlet concept?
2. How did you experience teachlets compared to other forms of teaching you know?
3. What advantages do you see in them? What contexts are well-suited for them?
4. Where do you see limitations of the concept? Where would you definitely not use teachlets?
5. Do you have any hints for future teachlet moderators? What is not yet established knowledge, but should be considered in any case?

Overall, both were able to respond to the questions very well and in detail, and some valuable ideas came together. Some answers were fundamentally different, others unexpectedly consistent. The interview with Axel was already typed up, the one with Carola is now as well. I haven't finished the one with Christian yet, but that should be done tomorrow. After that I will send the transcripts to all three so they can give their OK for publication. Are you interested in seeing them in advance? I could upload them when the time comes. Otherwise they will be published together with the rest of the thesis next month.

By the way: the transcript of the interview with Axel has about 4300 words, the one with Carola about 2700.

Future

That's it again for this report. I don't want to make a hard commitment for when the next one will come, but by then there will be news about the chapters again, I promise. See you then!