Thinking about interviews

As part of my research proposal, I need to revise and rework my interview protocol, being explicit in what I say, and how I sequence the questions and conversational prompts. As part of this process or revision, I thought it would be good to try using the draft protocol with someone in my open educator network. I reached out to G. T. who is a teacher educator in a context not in Canada. We connected through direct messaging in Twitter. I knew, from my own reading of current research G. T. has produced, that this was someone who could provide me with insights and critical feedback on my research protocol.

I booked some time with G. T. to actually go through a mock interview with her and then debriefed afterwards. I made notes in my research journal immediately following this event to ensure that I captured my thoughts and her feedback. I asked her if she was OK to record the interview, only for the purpose of informing my own research practice, which she agreed to. In this way, I can revisit my initial interview recording, my summary observations, and my process of transcription and data analysis. The word cloud I created from the transcript keywords, as provided with Otter.ai, confirms and ensures that the interview did focus on key ideas relevant to my research.

With this feedback and additional work, I was able to revise the research protocol. With this in mind, I can use this for the upcoming research ethics board (REB) application in order to gain approval to move forward with this research.

Many thanks to G. T. for taking time to engage in this process. I’m sure opportunities will arise for future collaborations from her practices in open education from her global context since there are similar issues and concerns with media and digital literacies, student engagement, and course design to my own.