Written for South African Visual Arts educators and decision-makers.

Eight requirements for optimal online portfolio adoption
My research into online portfolio software use in two secondary schools suggests that there are eight key requirements to meet before a school's Visual Arts educator(s) can optimally adopt online portfolios into a grade's syllabus:

Written for South African iTunes US Store users and online music buyers.

I recently enjoyed reading Thyon Design's blogpost on Apple's failure to offer games, music, books, movies and television shows to South African consumers. Interestingly enough, Apple calls its local offering an "App Store" to clearly differentiate its local offer from an iTunes Store. Further, a search for 'itunes store' on www.apple.com/za shows no results. Apple is certainly consistent in its online message that there is no iTunes Store for South Africans (if only local resellers would modify the international marketing material they use to reflect this truth, too!).

Given Apple's opaqueness (at best) around its future plans for launching an iTunes ZA Store, I agree with Thyon Design that the best course of action is to organize an iTunes (US) Store account. Once done, It's simple to buy online from iTunes voucher sellers including; wildtwig.com, mediawob.co.za, mp3sa.co.za, Maximus Cards, Evo Points and cardscodes.com. 

As I use my iTunes US account to buy music only, it is interesting to compare pricing there for popular music albums and singles versus local online retailers prices for similar pop products:

Cost per voucher.
Let's say one pays a premium of $3 on a $25 a voucher, which one purchases on a South African credit card via PayPal. This translates into paying 10% extra on every online purchase versus a US consumer.

Cost per song.
So, a $0.99 cents song actually costs $1.09. Multiply that by today's exchange rate ($ 1 = R 8.232) and one pays R 8.97 per song. By comparison, Look and Listen charge between R 9.99 and R 10.99 per song on their most downloaded mp3s list, while OMusic charges either R 9.99 or R 11.99.
Cost per album.
For pop music albums (predominately by international artists) you pay either R 69.99 or R 99 on Look and Listen for any of its top ten and R 99.99 to R 129.99 for pop albums featured on OMusic's banner ads. In the iTunes store the cost ranges from $ 9.99 to $ 14.00. At today's exchange rate, that is between R 82,24 and R 115,25 per album (this excludes the voucher surcharge).

What does this mean for the South African consumer?
While it is at least 10% cheaper to buy singles using the iTunes US Store, South Africans will find it cheaper to buy select albums locally. This is interesting as I mistakenly assumed before writing this post that both songs and albums would inevitably be cheaper given the relatively huge US market. Despite the smaller South African market, our exchange rate and much lower level of competition, it seems that local online retailers believe our market is not willing to pay album prices at US prices. I'll definitely keep this in mind for future online album shops :) !

Written for thrifty, value-minded, South African PhD students and HUMA, UCT.

To do a PhD full-time often involves financial sacrifice, especially if moving from a full-time job. Below are eleven ideas to help South African PhDs get the most value from their tuition and student status:

1. Regular supervisor access and feedback.
Since regular contact and advice from your supervisor is key to progressing on the right track and finishing your PhD, it's important to gauge his or her interest and availability. At best, your contact and feedback expectations should be documented in a PhD memorandum of understanding. This will assist in three years of tuition fees not turning into four or more...

Written for South African individuals interested in registering a personal, non-profit domain, as well as the .za Domain Name Authority.

Given that www.travisnoakes.co.za is the least inappropriate choice for me to register my personal, non-commercial domain with as a South African researcher, what could be an ideal choice and more long-term customer offering in a better domain name system?

In my humble opinion, the ideal domain must first include South Africa's top level ZA domain; this is relevant as its developing world context not only shapes and informs my research and what I write on, but also serves the audience I am most interested to reach.

Secondly, the domain should include my first and second name to ensure ease of searchability; http://travisnoakes.za is a simple solution that is easy to remember for typing in. Since my blog features posts related to research, plus other interests, I am keener for it to be a personal blog than one featuring another descriptor, such as http://travisnoakes.research.za, which may not be relevant should I decide to work full-time outside academia after completing my PhD.

This is what I really, really want and I shall be asking the .za Domain Name Authority if offering a choice like http://travisnoakes.za is feasible. I hope to and include their feedback in a future post on this issue; hopefully this idea can move from pie-in-the-sky to reality :) !

I shall also ask whether I can purchase an 'archival' domain option to store my blogposts for digital posterity. For this, adding 'archive' as a second level domain could work nicely: http://travisnoakes.archive.za. Here's hoping it won't be needed anytime soon, though...

Would you prefer domain name solutions like these? If so, please leave your thoughts in the comments box below. Thanks.

1 What problem does my research address? 
There is a research gap regarding the multimodal choices that online portfolios afford, the choices that secondary school students make and the resonances of their choices. There is also a gap in describing how students negotiate with educators regarding choices the latter view as 'problematic'.

1.1 Who supports the presence of a problem?
David Buckingham (2003, 2007) argues that exposing students to media production in new school curricula can be a very effective form of media education. The new Visual Arts curricula that this Action Research project contributed to launching; “Create your own online portfolio” and “Improve your online portfolio” were intended to serve this aim.

In following these curricula, students made many multimodal choices in creating their online portfolios. Multimodal Theory, developed by Gunthar Kress (1996, 2010) and Carey Jewitt (2006, 2010), is highly appropriate for describing individual choices and their relationships; to each other, the page they help construct and other portfolio pages.  

Jewitt (2006) has used Yrjo Engstrom’s  (1987, 2001, 2005) Activity theory to explain the complex schooling context in which multimodal choices are made. Second generation Activity theory will be used to explain how the contradictions and tensions that result from a change to the traditional Visual Arts' classroom's 'tools', 'rules', 'division of labour' and 'community' in the new online portfolio activity system contributed to students negotiations with educators concerning 'problematic' choices.

2 How, where and when does the problem impact?
Although Buckingham’s body of research on media education (1990, 2007) suggests that teaching students media production is beneficial, there are few examples in the literature of these interventions by Visual Arts educators. There is also a research gap in students’ choices with online portfolio software.

By supporting successful initial curricular adoptions at a private (2010, 2011) and public (2011, 2012) school, this project enabled research into: select South African students’ multimodal choices with online portfolio software; their choices’ resonances; and uncovers how changes in creating an online portfolio as an adjunct to a traditional one contributed to students’ negotiations with educators regarding 'problematic' multimodal choices.

2.1 Who supports the impact of the problem?
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2011) have also identified the importance of students being taught “new media literacies” through digital media production and describe the challenge of educators’ “outsider mindset” being an obstacle to digital media’s successful adoption. This project has helped Visual Arts educators to develop “insider mindsets” that are better suited to support the initial curricular adoptions of online portfolios.

Both the private and public school’s curricula support students with creating showcase Visual Arts electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). Barrett (2008) has written about the importance of educating students to use e-portfolios for life-long learning. She has also blogged on the decline in North American secondary schools’ adoption of e-portfolios (2010), listing many challenges that e-portfolio adoptions face.

Hazel Owen (2009) did an e-portfolio literature meta-review, which showed that although there are pedagogical benefits of e-portfolio use in well-resourced, tertiary environments, there are many hazards too. My research has supported secondary school educators with exploring the benefits and hazards of their Visual Arts students’ e-portfolio use as an adjunct to the traditional portfolio.

3 Why does the problem exist?
The conceptual basis for the problem is that online portfolios are a new cultural form; freemium Web2.0 services only emerged from 2003. Their novelty partly explains why so little research has been done into the multimodal choices they afford.

3.1 Who supports the conceptual nature of the problem?
There are distinct resourcing barriers confronting adoption of Information Communication Technology in tertiary education in the developing world: Laura Czernieciwz and Cheryl Brown (2004) identified four key resource categories; 'technological' (i.e. availability of ITC resources), 'personal', 'agency' (i.e. access to digitisation and computer equipment), 'contextual' (i.e. formal enabling networks) and 'online content' (i.e. articles written for local audiences) where barriers to adoption occur. These categories arguably apply in secondary education too, as it is a similar formal environment. 

My research project project has assisted two secondary school educators in overcoming some of these obstacles and has facilitated the curricular adoption of online portfolios for studying multimodal affordances, students’ selections, their choices’ resonances and uncovers the background to negotiations regarding 'problematic' choices.

Written for users of video analysis in NVivo 9 qualitative research software. Attention: Technorati blog aggregator. The code GCJXS6STZCJQ confirms this blog as mine :) !

With your video file in the right format, size and descriptively named, it is ready to import as either external or internal source into NVivo 9. Using the analogy of an Adobe Illustrator's use in graphic design, one can either choose to embed files internally within the file (like a poster graphic with fonts and images saved in the .ai file itself) or linking to them externally (the poster file is smaller as it links to the files outside itself).

QSR encourages users to only import the files that are core to their research, since importing source internally increases file size and, if very large, may impact on NVivo's responsiveness. An important limitation of importing video files as external source, however, is that it does not afford you the same opportunities to code material that internal files do. See the screengrabs below:

Screengrab of an external source video in NVivo 9

Screengrab of an internal source video in NVivo 9

Our research project has 26 subjects and for each at least two video interviews and two Day Experience Media (DEM) videos. We could try to import all 104 videos internally: at a conservative estimate of an average file size at 50 MB for interviews and 30 MB for DEM, that's 
2 600 MB for interviews and 1 560 MB for DEM. This could total 4,160 GB, a big file. NVivo's Offline Help says a standalone NVivo file has a size limit of 4GB, so we may need to reduce the low settings used in our optimized encoding process to ensure that internal files are well within this limit!

In starting the initial coding, we will focus on four subjects (Ace, Edmore, Thabang & Khanya): all four were hosted at a digital storytelling workshop at UCT recently thanks to their comprehensive contribution to the ICT Access and Use research project. I will use their thoroughly documented examples to initially test file imports:

After consolidating all their first and second interview files to a shared intranet folder, I have imported these videos as internal source (Adoné will also be providing a transcribed interview shortly). The research team can now begin to code these internal videos, while the research leader can test the import of codes and classification attributes from the researchers' NVivo master copy files back into her project master.

Written for research leaders to copy-and-paste for briefing their field researchers.

If your NVivo project involves working with a team of data-gathering researchers, I would recommend you email them the following:

Written for current and prospective users of qualitative research software at the University of Cape Town.

My blog's NVivo posts aim to provide an example of the use of a qualitative data analysis software (QDAS)* in a South African (or developing world) academic context. Hopefully by posting on the experiences of using NVivo 9 in completing a PhD and working for the ICT Access and Use project, I can stimulate much needed discussion about how students and staff could (or should) be better supported in their QDAS-use.

There is considerable scope at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to improve its support for student and staff QDAS-use: currently, UCT does not do even one of the four key activities listed by David & Jacobson (2008) for QDAS institutional success as exemplified by the University of Massachusetts Lowell! 

Based on my experiences at UCT, the status of these key activities are:

1. Software is not readily available - UCT (and its Humanities Faculty) does not have an NVivo site license;
2. Training is hard to access and costly- my NVivo workshop attendance was self-funded;
3. There are no user-groups - there is no user group at UCT, such as a "Qualitative Research Software Users Network" for students and staff;
4. There are no forums for open discussion - UCT has no fora dedicated to fostering discussions on technology and qualitative analysis.

As a result, it is unsuprising that there is; limited decision making support in choosing the most appropriate QDAS software to use, little or no materials on QDAS in the library and no readily accessible online guides by UCT researchers on their QDAS-use.

This does present opportunities for UCT's staff and/or students to take the lead with:

1. Establishing a UCT QDAS Users group;
2. Setting up a regular QDAS forum;
3. Documenting how may researchers are, and intend to, use QDAS software;
4. Using usage statistics to justify:
5. - investment in training staff and students to teach about QDAS and its use;

1. - b
2. uying a site license for UCT.

If you are interested in working with me on these actions, please get in touch or add your feedback in the comment box below. 

* Also more commonly known as Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS).

Davidson, Judith and Jacobs, Cynthia. The Implications of Qualitative Research Software for Doctoral Work: Considering the Individual and Institutional Contexts [online]. Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008: doi: 10.3316/QRJ0802072.
Availability:<http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=425496252675286;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1443-9883. [cited 05 Dec 11].

I've just learnt that a step and a process described in an earlier post are problematic: in testing file imports into NVivo 9, I learnt that (1) the MP4 format is optimal for sizing, but heavily reduced files are not importable. Also, (2) NVivo 9 does support importing files bigger than 40MB as internal source (contrary to the software's help file advice, ahem!):

Written for QSR International and NVivo 9 users on Apple Macs and NVivo 10's software developers.

Written for researchers importing video into NVivo 9.

• The choice of a first name protects the research subject's privacy; whilst not over-complicating the researcher's codings for subjects.
• Researchers conducted several interviews with each subject and these need to be distinguishable.
• Wherever possible, the date of interview should be added to ease citation for research articles.