Shifting offices and getting re-acquainted with nVivo

I shifted offices four weeks ago from a shared office with the Adult Education team to another, with the elearning team and digital librarian. The office is just off to the side of the second level of the CPIT library. So a great place to be since I can now browse the stacks whenever I need a bit of time to do some contemplation.


Other Centre for Education Development (CED) staff are just around the corner and  the main reason for the shift is to try to have all the CED staff offices in closer proximity to each other. Our manager designate from the UK, starts work at CPIT at the end of October. So it will be less daunting for him if all the CED staff are not scattered all over the campus.

I have enjoyed my first weeks (interrupted by a week away due to the earthquake) with the elearning team members. They have just about got used to seeing me in the office when they get in each morning as I am an early starter. I have now worked out all the security issues and liaised with security so that my early starts, once a week or so late finishes and study on Saturdays and on wet Sundays do not disrupt their security patterns.

It’s all also much quieter as the three others in the office beaver away at their computers and have few meetings whereas the adult ed. office was always a hive of activity with meetings and students and other visitors dropping in all the time. Therefore, I have made good progress with data analysis for the ‘first year apprentices’ project. The bulk of the data is now migrated to nVivo and various nodes (themes) have been established. Have also been able to make a start on the reports to each of the ITOs, due for end of this year. Also revised how to do ‘queries’ on nVivo, to compare demographic data and various coded text fragments. So far some patterns emerging as to ‘prior contact’ with a workplace or occupation and apprentices’ ‘stickability’. A common sense finding but well reflected in the data. While using the help feature on nVivo to work out various features of the software, came across the announcement on nVivo 9 launches October. Will need to re-evaluate nVivo9 for suitabitity for multimodal discourse analysis using video data once our version is updated.