Getting it all together

There has been a heavy NVivo theme to this week. The problem seems to be the sheer energy of trying to join everything up. I am failing at this.

Some of it is easy. I have almost got myself into the situation to record the next NVivo Video. It is coming along and now I have "found" some items through Creative Commons Search that I can legally use as examples to add to the project. It should take me less time to prepare future videos. The problem is that while it was easy to find a photo or a video, it was a lot hard in the context of the project. I was however so successful that I got as a video that actually links to a document that is already in the project. It was much easier with NVivo 8 because then you were given Videos, pictures and transcripts that you could incorporate.

However two other things were on the go as well. Firstly I have said I will teach a session as part of the Social Research Masters programme in December. This was at a time when our technicians were confident they could get it onto the Managed Desktop which is what is on the machines in open access rooms. Let me be clear the Managed Desktop is an unusual setup, as we do not have around 500 staff we do not have the time to sort out a lot of problems on machines that occur if people have relative freedom to do what they want with an open access machine. Therefore a lot of system is tied down with pretty tight security. In particular we like to be able to control where people are able to write to, it stops a lot crap being put all over the system.

However NVivo is not a tidy program. It does a lot, but a lot of its functionality is built on secondary suppliers software. The one I am most suspicious of causing a problem with the writing begins with M who are responsible for the database that QSR use to store everything in. Basically our technical guys are not finding a way to install NVivo without having to give it rights that they see as dangerous. That means it is not on the Managed Desktop yet.

This is in marked contrast with the phone calls I am getting from QSR that are trying to sell to this University NVivo in the Classroom which is basically a training for those who wish to integrate NVivo into their qualitative analysis courses. It covers things like course design and marking. These are not issues that I have to worry about in my Introduction to NVivo as it is one session and really only introduces the software. It makes little sense at present lecturers including Nvivo into their courses if we can't get the software onto the managed desktop so their students can use it.

I also know that for staff to find a solution to this impasse I need to establish a demand for the software as a taught package. So I am going around in ever decreasing circles. My saying there is demand won't get it done, it is only when someone outside the department starts making a fuss that a solution will be found. I can run a fairly decent service for Researchers for NVivo without it being on the Managed Service but as is going to be increasingly the case, when students on taught masters and doing final year projects are expected to use it, this starts to fail.