Final posting for class

I truly appreciate all that I learned from this class. It is amazing to me that I was able to get so much out of such a short class. I unfortunately had to miss the last class due to problems with my babysitter but was able to play around with WEFT QDA on my own. I think this is a handy tool that I plan to utilize on a project that I am working on right now. I have fully embraced Dropbox and Mendeley. I am convinced these are the best inventions ever! I think that all of the resources that were reviewed in class were great. Although I will not need to use all of the resources that were reviewed, I can really see the benefit in each of them and beleive that fellow qualitative researchers may find them really useful. I plan to continue exploring some of the resrouces listed on DiRT (awesome website) once I complete my comprehensive exams next month and hope to learn about more cool resources that can augment my research. Thank you so much for the opportunity to take this class - it totally rocked :)

Wordstat

I spent about 30 minutes clicking on each of the main topics and skimming the list of resources under each topic. The amount of resources available is quite overwhelming. The topic that caught my eye first was "focus" - as a grad student who works about forty hours a week , is preparing to take the comprehensive exam next month, and has a 10 month old child at home, I would gladly appreciate any tools that can help me focus on the task at hand. However, I was disappointed to find a limited number of resources listed and, of those resources, there was only one option for Windows users (I knew I should have invested in a Mac!). I settled on exploring text analysis tools since I plan to conduct a qualitative dissertation and could use as many helpful short-cuts as possible. I spent most of my time reviewing WordStat. I watched the demo from the website. It seems that it could be a helpful tool in visualizing data. It has the ability to create all kinds of graphs and tables. It also has an option for comparing subgroups, which I found really cool. Just as with all analysis programs, Wordstat still requires a great deal of user input (in terms of coding). However, it seems that the tools offered within this program would make coding easy. One of the possible downfalls of Wordstat is the massive amount of features that it offers - I would probably find myself losing focus and struggling to learn where the tools I need are located within the program. I am not sure it is an easy-to-learn software package, and that is what I need. So, I will keep searching for something a little more simplistic in nature.

My first ever blog!

What an exciting moment! This is the first time that I have created a blog. Despite the excitment that I find from learning how to create this blog, it is heavily overshadowed by the relief and thrill I felt when I began playing around with Mendelay. It is funny that I chose to decribe this experience as a thrill because I initially searched the web for mandelay, not mendelay. The initial search brought up plenty information about male enhancement. Once I found the correct site for Mendelay, though, the process for signing up and downloading the tool to my desktop was very simple. This application is very easy to use. I was able to import all of the PDFs that I have saved on my computer into Mendelay in a short period of time. I played around with the citation tools, which seem to work like refworks and zotero - super exciting. I love that I can actually add notes and highlight directly onto the PDF, what a handy tool. I definitely wish I would have add access to a cool tool like this at the beginning of my studies. It would have saved me a ton of time and headache (I lose flashdrives way too much). You can use the application online and offline, and there are a ton of extra options for collaboration with others online. This option will be helpful for several projects that I am currently working on. The WebImporter option allows me to search tons of databases and import the citation to my library within seconds - very handy.

Overall, I believe I will use the crap out of Mendelay.