Theme 6 - Reflection

This week’s theme was qualitative methods and case study research.

After the readings I think I just got enough out of it to write last week’s blog post but didn’t really reflect if I learned anything.  Therefore I’ve tried to find some more information from other sources about case studies to understand what it really contains, and after I read the short summary in the CourseWiki I finally felt like it all made sense. So I would like to add some more information to what I wrote about what a case study is, and make the description clearer.

A case study is a research method using one or several examples of “real-life”…

1)   …Phenomena

2)   …Events

3)  …Persons

… to analyse and give a deeper understanding about something. It often includes a combination of quantitative and/or qualitative methods together with empirical and theoretical studies. It can also involve different cases and multiple levels of analysis.

After writing my new description about what a case study is, I feel like I also understand better what it can be used for. One example is when there are several theories that contradict each other. I realized that it can be very useful in the area of media technology because it’s possible to use a variety of methods since media technology is constantly developing. Case study research is used to provide description, test theory or generate theory, which is very useful in media technology just because it’s constantly developing and therefore theories sometimes are new and need to be tested, and sometimes new theories will be generated.

Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

This week I chose the media technology research paper From Moodle to Facebook: Exploring students’ motivation and experiences in online communities by Liping Deng and Nicole Judith Tavares from the journal Computers & Education. The qualitative method used in the paper was individual interviews with 14 pre-service teachers. The interviews lasted between 30 and 80 min, and both authors conducted most of the interviews together. The paper examines the student teachers’ experiences with and perceptions of using Facebook and Moodle. The purpose was to see which factors have bigger impact on students’ engagement in online discussions on the two online platforms. The paper investigates why they were not actively involved in voluntary online discussions on Moodle, and how they were encouraged to voluntarily participate in online discussions on both Facebook and Moodle. The usage data from Moodle was collected and analyzed, but the data from the Facebook group that the students also used was only collected in the interviews when the student teachers gave them the information since the researchers didn’t have any access to the Facebook group.

The benefits of using qualitative methods are that you get very specific information, which can be valuable for certain topics and types of research. In this case they used interviews and interviewed 14 persons that were in the target group of the research. The interviews were explorative which means that they had a few topics and guiding questions for the participants to answer and from there they would rather explore what was going on on the online platforms rather than expect anything and ask already decided questions.

The limitations are that it’s impossible to generalize the information that they got during the interviews. This case is only possible to apply to that group of student teachers, since they all were from the same university in Hong Kong. They were all part of the same online community on both Facebook and Moodle. To improve the results I would have interviewed both students and teachers to get both sides. It would have been interesting to see what the teachers did to encourage the students to use the discussion board on Moodle, if they did so.

Case study

A case study is research method with the aim to give a deeper knowledge of what the research is about. The basic idea is to collect empirical data with both qualitative and quantitative methods for example interviews, questionnaires and focus groups. There are numerous of aims with the use of case studies; providing description, testing or generating theory.

I chose a paper called “Structuring the discourse on social networks for learning: Case studies on blogs and microblogs” in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. The paper was about blogs and microblogs and how they can be used in education to improve student interaction. In the case study in this paper the authors used questionnaires with both open and closed questions. They interviewed some participant sand collected data from the applications for the blogs and microblogs.

Theme 5 - Design Research - Reflection

The theme this week was design research. We had two lectures and the first one was with one of the writers, Ylva Fernaeus, of the paper that we read last week; ”Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses.” The lecture was very interesting and gave me a deeper understanding in what they thought during their research. Fernaeus described their process very well, which I think was one of the most interesting parts of the lecture she held. The first thing in a research process according to Fernaeus is to see something that everyone else missed out on. Then you start doing some research about it, you take notice and then you convince the people around about your idea/research and then they finally accept it.

Haibo Li held the second lecture, which was about ideas and problems. Great ideas, how do we come up with them? Li wanted us to think about the possibilities to come up with great ideas and make it happen. The lecture was more focused on the economic part of design research than I though at the beginning of the lecture but it was good to see the subject from a different angle. Li said that more focus and energy should be within defining the problem instead of trying to solve the problem. If you don’t know exactly what you research is about, if you don’t have a defined problem, then it’s going to be hard to solve the problem too. The timing should be right too, to be able to get a return on the investment of the research. I liked that it was more business in his way of seeing research than when I’ve been thinking about research before. It was like a quick introduction to how you can both do research and business at the same time, which I found quite inspirational.

Theme 5 – Design Research

Technology is taking more and more space in our lives and the more we use it the more people want to personalize it. It’s everything from stickers to put on your computer, to cases, bags, covers etc for your phone. Fernaeus and Jacobsson talked about such accessories in the paper Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming; outlining the concept of actDresses.

actDresses is created so the people can personalize robots by dressing them differently. Depending on what the robot is wearing the robot acts differently.

I think this is necessary to develop more if the robots are making their way into our lives to stay. This week I also watched the documentary Mechanical Love, and I can easier apply the readings from this week to what it actually is about personalizing robots. Seeing a robot that is supposed to look like a human for me is just scary. It’s dressed up as a human, kind of looks like a human but somewhere there it feels like something is definitely not normal. I think it’s a long way to go, but by doing research on the subject I think we can reach far, and develop interesting solutions for the future.

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?
When designing media technologies there is always an end user for the product or service. Therefore it’s important to bring in the users during the development process to test the product in the different stages of the process. There are many different design evaluation strategies out there that all fit for different purposes, but a common denominator is that they all want to eliminate the problems and make it easier for the users. The best way to test new technologies (or even old ones for improvement) is to test it with the real users in the environment it’s supposed to be in. There might be a lot of things going on in the surroundings that you might not think of while developing the technology, something that will have an impact on the way the user uses the technology.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?
Prototypes are already a big part of design processes in many different areas of professions. Prototypes is an easy way to test a product at an early stage to see what improvements need to be done. It’s called iteration when you take something, test it, develop it a bit more based on what you learned from the testing, test it again, adjust, test again, and again until the product reaches the final product. I think prototypes can be used more at an early stage, but they don’t have to be very advanced from start. I think that if you put a bit of time and effort into prototypes and evaluation of them earlier on in the process, the results will be reached earlier since you have the chance to avoid problems that may occur and in the end this also can give more return on the investment since the product will fit the users better.

3. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
Some limitations of prototypes are that it takes time to develop prototypes. Some ideas are really complex and a prototype for such a product might take more time, effort and money than what you will get in return after launch. From my point of view prototypes differ a lot depending on what kind of technology it is about. A web application prototype differs a lot from a prototype of a robot. Anyway, in both cases the prototypes are playing a big role in the design process to reach the final product. I’ve done a bit of prototyping for mainly smartphone apps. And the first prototypes in the process are very basic, usually on paper. This is obviously not a prototype for the final product but regarding the limitations it’s a useful way to early on see if I’m on the right way towards the goal. Later on in the process the prototype gets interactive, and even later the design is included and at the end the prototype is basically the final product. When it comes to web applications and such things there are many useful tools out there that eliminates many limitations, mainly cost related ones. For example Omnigraffle is a tool made for prototyping apps, websites etc. It might be a bit time consuming in the beginning, but the prototyping is easy when you learn how the program works. I know that there is a totally different part of prototyping when it comes to physical media technology products, when hardware is needed. The limitations in that case are often that it’s expensive and very time consuming.

Theme 4 - Reflection

This past week I’ve learned a bit more about quantitative research methods. I read the paper Canadian university students in wireless classrooms: “What do they do on their laptops and does it really matter?" from the journal Computers & Education last week but since then I haven’t had the chance to go to the seminar nor the lecture this week. But this week I actually feel like I gained something from the readings and from reading the fellow classmates blog posts from both last week and this week.

I chose my paper last week because of my interest in e-learning and felt like I should take the opportunity to learn more about a subject I’m interested in and at the same time understand more about the research methods used in the paper. The paper made it a lot easier to understand how the chapter Methodology is supposed to be. I think that many of us before we start with the master thesis have an idea that this chapter is supposed to describe you have done to get to your results. And that’s true. It’s supposed to describe that. But what I haven’t reflected about before is that you should describe every single detail of the decisions you made on the road, and back it up with theory to make it valid. Another person should be able to copy your method and do it all over again and get the same results.

I see from my classmates’ blog posts that one of the topics at the seminar was the importance of testing a survey/questionnaire before sending it or handing it out to the participants. People often interpret the questions differently, and it is of great importance that no questions are written in a way that makes it as easy as possible for everyone to understand them. Short descriptions can help out throughout the questionnaire. By testing the questionnaire before, you can eliminate the risk of participants misunderstanding the questions. I remember when I handed out a questionnaire for my bachelor thesis at a university in Argentina, I realized that the students interpreted the whole survey different than the student at KTH (the same questionnaire for both universities). We did the test of the survey at KTH and not at the university in Argentina, so if I ever do a similar research I’ll remember to test the method in the actual context where it is supposed to be and not expect that it should be the same just because the groups of participants in the research are similar.

Another topic related to questionnaires that I could see was discussed during the seminar was if the questionnaire was printed and handed out, or sent to the participants by the web. There are a few pros and cons regarding the two ones, for example papers are platform independent but sometimes it can be hard to read the handwriting.