Preparing the Diary

A book I was given for Christmas titled Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society has inspired me to get on with preparing the diary instrument for recording how students spend their time. The book by Jonathan Gershuny is an excellent introduction to the issues of societal change and whilst it does not focus especially on students but on the wider population it has some very good sections on the use of time-diaries (and their problems) for collecting data.

As a result I spent the last three days building the diary form. This is actually an Excel spreadsheet which allows the student to enter up to three codes to describe their broad activity in each hour of the day. As I am less interested in the detail of what they do I am only using ten codes. Three of these cover different aspects of distance study - physical study time, online study time and time caught up in administration. One is for rest covering time asleep, two cover time spent at work and travelling (essentially commuting) and the last four cover home related activities such as domestic duties, social and leisure activities and time spent on the Internet shopping, banking and so on.

I am also asking students to record the time they spend on different aspects of the five learning activities they are scheduled to complete during the recording week. Clearly this is likely to be a best estimate unless anyone is keeping a stopwatch by their side but should provide data on the time they spend reading, reflecting, taking quizzes, posting and reading messages etc.

As well as setting up the student spreadsheet (together with instructions and guidance) I've also created the import file to analyse the base data once it is exported. This will give a clear picture of how an individual student uses their time across the week and will provide an at-a-glance view that should make initial comparison easier.

All in all it's been a good few days work to end 2007. I wish everyone well for 2008.