aTrain and noScribe are local, GDPR-compliant, Whisper-based transcription tools that can genuinely save hours of work in qualitative interview research. They also make methodological decisions on your behalf without telling you. If you do grounded theory, you need to know which decisions those are.
The classroom videography manual we published in 2023 was about filming teaching. Music education has the same word in it — teaching — but it is a fundamentally different recording challenge. Sound is the subject matter. The lesson is often one person, in a practice room. And the feedback cycle the teacher needs to reach is mostly the one that happens when no camera is present. A reflection on what the manual missed, and a software prototype that tries to address part of it.
Three years after writing about why classroom video works, Charlotte Kramer, Kai Kaspar, and I wrote a manual on how to actually do it. The gap between knowing that video-based learning is effective and being able to produce usable footage turns out to be substantial. The manual is open access. Here is what is in it and why some of it surprised me to write.
When you are a physicist doing education research, methodology feels like a bureaucratic formality standing between you and the interesting work. Everyone told me to use grounded theory instead of design thinking in my thesis. I ignored them. This is the postmortem.