the hardest thing

Today, I'm making the final final changes to my revised book chapter on restricted interactional activity. I'd have to say that it has been very challenging to do. Part of the challenge for me was returning to data from my PhD and re-analysing some of it. I also needed to get up to speed with literature produced since I last wrote from my PhD. I wondered today if I am still missing some of it because I don't appear to have a lot (still) of CA work around classrooms in the early years of schooling when children are working on individual tasks - such as writing (although there is considerable literature about other classrooms. It was hard going back to thinking about classrooms and realising that got me thinking about how much I've enjoyed analysis the data recorded of young children interacting on the computer. I will be happy to have more of that once our ARC data has been collected early in 2012.

Meantime, this morning I have started thinking about another article I might write on methodology. i think it could be a lit review about the application of methodology in literacy research. there has been a call from a journal that I wouldn't mind writing for and an abstract is due in Dec. that could be a good deadline for me.

Now where was I?

I've just read through the last post I made here. The good news is that I've completed everything on the list except for one thing (the revised book chapter). the fact that I started a research fellowship here has really helped me start to focus again.

For the last two weeks I have been in Brisbane meeting with the ARC Discovery team led by Professor Susan Danby. This project promises to be very exciting, in part because we have such an interesting team. For me it is particularly exciting to be working with other conversation analysts. Although the recordings of home and pre-school interaction won't me made until next year, we have already spend time talking about aspects of the data collection. It has been very rewarding for me to see how the work from my CQU seed grant has enabled me to make a useful contribution to discussion of data collection, particularly in the home.