My Thoughts about Discourse Analysis Course - Fall 2013

    This was my first experience of taking a course in Educational Psychology department at UT and it turned out to be a good one. Also, this was my first qualitative research course. Although I learnt a lot in this course, I still have a long way to go until I get a good grasp of what qualitative research is.
    One of my favorite parts of this class was the weekly blogging. It made reading the class materials more interesting  and also motivated me to take notes while I was reading and made me reflect on the material as I was reading them because I knew I had to blog and as it's sort of a public social media, I had to post something that was really worth in terms of exposing my thoughts to the the public. Any ways, this experience was totally new to me and I am thinking of using it in the classes that I will teach in the future.
    Another great thing about this class was that we were supposed to post a draft of our deliverable on BB a few days before the deadline. This was really helpful to me because in case something (e.g. the structure of the project) was not clear to me in some parts, I had the opportunity of taking a look at other students' drafts and get an idea of how other students have approached the project.
    Honestly, even after taking this course, I haven't become a big fan of ATLAS TI. I have used QDA MINER before and I am still not sure what the extra values are that ATLAS offers that are not provided by QDA MINER. One of the very few things that I like about ATLAS is its family manager capability but its anchor setting drove me crazy several times. It is not user-friendly at all and is very confusing and time consuming. In addition, I think CODING in QDA is much more efficient than that of ATLAS. May be my exposure to ATLAS has not been enough; however, I am  more in the dislike mode about it rather than in liking mode.
 I found the session when we watched a section of a movie and applied CA and CDA to it in a group setting very helpful. The group exercise made it easier for me to understand how I should apply each of these methods to data and also helped me tease out the differences of the two techniques.

     In general, I am  excited about what I learnt in this course. When I signed up for this course, I used to consider a paragraph as a number of sentences that are linked together but now, a paragraph means beyond this to me. In other words, I  have learnt about the rich meanings that underlie the structure of sentences in a single paragraph and also  the ways people take turns in naturally-occurring talk. It's amazing that there are so much there even in an unplanned naturally-occurring conversations.
    All this learning has happened in this class and I am truely grateful for Dr. Paulus who led us through out the course.