Well, I did my first case study interview today – lots to note, and a huge transcription job to do over the weekend, but I do feel that I’ve passed a milestone. In truth I’ve been struggling a bit with my introductory chapters, but given the fact that actually visiting the case study involved a total of 6 hours on trains I was able to get a bit of reading done which helped me focus in a bit. I can’t say too much about the interview, and the field notes I took at the site as I have promised them anonymity, so I’ll be starting a private blog/research diary, where I can include photos and site related comments.

One of the things I can say, which came out of my reading rather than the visit was that perhaps I need not spend so much time trying to pin down the idea of the University. I’ve been getting slowly more convinced that there is no single idea of the University and that we have to work within a complex framework of multiple models. There were a few pointers in the interview that suggested that too.

The other interesting, and relatively successful feature of the day my use of digital recorders to record the interview. Previously I’ve used an ancient analogue cassette recorder but I bought a digital recorder some time ago, and was quite impressed, but didn’t realise at the time that files on that particular model weren’t downloadable to a PC.I have since bought a second which does have a USB port, and transferred the file to my PC in seconds (31mb, but there you go.) I had both recorders running in the interview and they both worked – nothing like belt and braces!  Interestingly when I did copy the file onto my PC it didn’t want to convert it to MP3 – which could be the audio cleaning software I’m using, but I’m too tired to investigate now.  I’ve been out of the house for 13 hours and tidying up work stuff and blogging since I got back, so I think it would be wise to sign off for now.