Comments

Theme 1 

Andreas Rehn

I found your article interesting aswell, would love a link to it! And plz can you fix the text of the blogpost I have to mark everything to be able to read it.

Andreas Rehn Carl Oskar Stenvall

Did you remove my comment? I posted a pretty long comment about a MIT research that related to your paper(They were looking at how much time it takes to read different fonts while driving). Could have been to some technical issues maybe? Anyways this article could be interesting for you if you are interested in car security. Send me a msg if you want me to find it for you!

Andreas Rehn Christian's courseblog DM2572

I found your paper interesting, but I would have liked to know more about your view on the topic. Do you think there is a need for a new review?

Andreas Rehn - Markus Warne
I don't know why my comment is not here anymore, must have forgot to fill in the captcha when placing it the first time. I did find your paper extra interesting since it's not about social networks and other more regular topics. Id love to see more papers like this one so we as Media Technology students can get a better feel for what you actually can study and work with when you are done here at KTH.

Andreas Rehn Johan Blomgren

I forgot to fill in the captcha I can see now since I have a comment in my google docs linked to this post but It doesn't appear here. Anyways here it comes once again!

Interesting article and interesting findings. However I think it is hard to draw any real conclusions on a international level and you mentioned this which I think is good. A weakness could be that they don't pin point what type of devices being used. I think this could have some impact on the results.

Andreas Rehn Clas Engström

I forgot to fill in the captcha I can see now since I have a comment in my google docs linked to this post but It doesn't appear here. Anyways here it comes once again!

I like the article you choose and I think you are right when saying its difficult to categorize music. However isn't there some sort of framework defines all different genres? If so it shouldn't be that hard to divide them?

Theme 2

Andreas Rehn Xueqi Gong
I really liked the idea of applying niches theory to the media landscape. But do you think it is applicable to reality? Could the landscape of media be changing to fast now for us to be able to analyse it?


Andreas Rehn Katerina Micheli

I'd also like to know how the authors describes those predictions?

Also I'd like to know the IF of the journal.

Andreas Rehn  Kunthika Macharoensak
Interesting article! Did the authors give any examples on how governments can reinforce its related social value or find another approach or did they just state that?

Andreas Rehn Philip Andersson
You did not state from what journal your article is in. Could you update your post with this and the IF?


Andreas Rehn - Simon Roth

I agree with Jonas point of view, its important to keep an open mind if you are to find the best solution and not focus to much on the theory in this case.

Andreas Rehn Florian Klinger
Yeah that sentence should go up on the course webpage! Also I found a mistake in your text under point 2. You write that your paper has an IF of 185, but a paper does not have a IF it is a term only related to Journals. Instead you should say that the paper is cited 185 times. :)


Theme 3

Andreas Rehn Maksym Feshchuk

Interesting thoughts, but you should try to shorten your text a bit since it's 911 words long and I don't think most of us will read it because of that. :(

Andreas Rehn  Johan Lundh Heinstedt
Interesting articles, I'm posting here to remind you about theme #4!

Andreas Rehn  Sebastian Brieger

I totally agree with your thoughts about the last lecture. I also thought she focused too much on her own work and should instead have given us a better insight of data analysis as you said.

Andreas Rehn  Johan Blomgren
Interesting thoughts on the lecture. You made me realize that her lecture wasn't that bad maybe. :)

Andreas Rehn Philip Andersson

I found this part interesting: "Now, one could argue that if you actually are into education research, you wouldn’t have any problems understanding this article. That is probably true, but then, how can you get “into” education research if all papers are written in a way that prohibit newbies like me from understanding them."

I would say the answer to that question is: Go to a university and attend lectures to find your answers. Daniel Pargman talked a little about these phenomena in his class about SMT. When you think about it, it is not strange that it is written in this way. It is a way for the different professions to protect their status and their jobs when they no longer have information monopoly because of the internet setting information free.

Andreas Rehn Carl Oskar Stenvall

Hi,

First I will reply to your comment Marina, I do think you will have to ask people at different schools since I think there is a big difference in what type of people attending the different schools.

To Carl: I like how you reflect over the importance of getting your sampling right and that you interlink it with the quality of one’s research. Do you know if there is any form of guidelines for how many people you need for different types of studies?

Theme 4

Andreas Rehn Love Larsson

You are saying three test subjects probably don’t reflect the whole group. How many do you think is needed to get accurate data? I agree with you on that they might need more people in their study. When I read research papers with as few participants I take them often very lightly if the paper doesn't clearly explains why there is no need for a larger test group.

Andreas Rehn Mikael Juntti

I also think it was interesting to read your reflection on what research is. You really spelled out my thoughts regarding this matter. I think you are right when saying this themes main objective was to broaden our perspectives on what is to be considered research.

Andreas Rehn Christian Croona

I think you have picked an interesting paper and thoughts on how they could have improved it. Although they used a literature study it feels like their main method were a Design one and not a qualitative one. What do you think?

Andreas Rehn Miriam Gauffin

When reading about the article you chose I instantly came to think of internet trolls. For a study like this one you could easy be a target for someone who wants to have some fun. This is a big problem I think with all kind of internet surveys or studies. A solution to get around this is that the participants really have to go the extra mile to be in the study but that might scare a lot of participants away from it. Maybe they had some other solution to this problem or did they know all the participants in the study?

Andreas Rehn Niklas Fyrvald

The website clearly states that the lecture and the paper were supposed to serve as a bridge between this theme and theme 5. On the webpage it’s formulated like this:

"The lecture of this week will serve as a bridge between this theme (qualitative methods) and the theme of next week (design research). Read the following paper. Reflect on the key points and what you learnt by reading the text. Prepare one question that you would like to discuss during the lecture."

On question #1 I think you are on to something that I also see as a big weakness with focus groups. If you have one person in the group that is more dominant they can take over the discussion and therefore harm the outcome of it.

A solution to this can be online focus groups. Here there is no input from the person’s appearance if it’s done without video or sound which can help quiet people to open up more and have their say.

Andreas Rehn Viktor Wennström

Interesting study that maybe saved a few people from the trackball mice back in 2007! :D I would have liked you to write a little more about how they studied these people in a qualitative way. I’m asking for this because when I’m reading that they are measuring something I directly think of a quantitative study and not a qualitative one.

Theme 5

Andreas Rehn Maryia Shalukha

At first I didn't understand which paper you were talking about in your first paragraph, however this became more clear when continuing reading “How can media technologies be evaluated?”. I think you have some interesting ideas here that I didn’t think about and I like how you divided it in to 3 main aspects. However this analysis only answers how to evaluate a specific type of media technologies in my mind. Your answer to question #2 How can design research be communicated/presented? I think is spot on and I agree on that the paper could become a great example of how to present a design research.

Andreas Rehn Johan Olsson

I think the reason for why a user would not want to stream a whole game is due to the intensive input u get from a vibrator going on for 90 minutes when watching a football game, but also because the costs for data traffic via mobile phones were a lot higher when they conducted their research compared to today.

Andreas Rehn Jonas Jönsson

I agree with you on that the paper by Réhman et al. (2008) could have described more in detail their different design steps. This would as you also mentioned help the reader to follow their work closer and get a better understanding for their work and their decisions.

Andreas Rehn Jacob Carlbaum

I really liked your reflection regarding “How can media technologies be evaluated?”. I never thought about the importance of taking cultural differences into account. However I think you are on to something big here that could and maybe should be a part of our program. This could be as a part of some other course or maybe one could create a course on its own about just this phenomenon around the world.

Andreas Rehn Nicklas Holmgren

Interesting article with a great goal. however i dont get the idea of 36 people sharing the same display?! Anyway this maybe were better explained in the text? I also wonder if the study compare results of individual computer mediated learning with a collective one?

Andreas Rehn  Christian Croona

I think there is something very true to your last lines. many of us might not write academic reports in the future but more likely develop things that can be seen as research. Therefore I also think it is great that we get some insight on how to do design research. :)

Theme 5 - Reflections

The past week has been quite interesting and has given me a lot of new knowledge in how research can be conducted. Therefore when I look back on the four previous themes I think this one is the most interesting one since it’s totally new for me. As a result I might even use this method in my master thesis even though I’m so new to it. However I’m still a bit afraid it will consume loads of time since the needs of good documentation when conducting it and in combination with maybe 2 other methods this could be a deal breaker.

This week’s lecture given by Professor Haibo Lee was about how to get an idea, how to sort them, how to evaluate them and how to decide which one is good or bad. He also talked about when to leave an idea and how you test your ideas/find proof of concept. I found this lecture very interesting because of his background as an engineer, and it shined through in his presentation. Haibo had this idea that the definition of a problem is at least as important as the question of how to solve the problem. This means that one should therefore put great effort in the concept phase since it will save you a lot of time later on.

Sadly I missed this week's seminar due to other courses. After talking with some of my classmates who were there, I got the impression that it was a good seminar and that they had gained more clarity about different types of design research. Hopefully I will be able to catch up even more during the next seminar if there is a group that has written about design research.

Theme 5: Design research

How can media technologies be evaluated?

This is a tricky question because media technology is a very broad term and it covers a lot of different types of studies. Because of this you can't use one method to evaluate "media technology" and therefore I can't give one good answer to the question. However I do think feedback from end users will help to evaluate in many areas of media technology since it can provide you with valuable data.

What role will prototypes play in research? Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

I think prototypes have a big role in media technology research because many parts of its science field are still new and not yet explored. It is therefore important to test your ideas with prototypes at an early stage of the research since you have nothing to compare with. If this is done right it can provide you with valuable data that could save time, money and a lot of headache.  Also it’s important so you don’t spend a lot of time building on something that nobody wants in the end except yourself.

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

When talking about prototypes there are two distinct groups of them. On one side there are early stage prototypes and on the other side there are almost finished products. The early stage ones should be cheap, fast to build, and easy just so you are able to test out some specific functionality. The almost finished prototype products could be really advanced prototypes that are used just for fine tuning of an artifact.

After spending more than 3 hours looking for an article and the deadline 3 hours away I will write about a dissertation I found instead of an intended research paper we were supposed to find. I hope this is ok even though it does not qualify as a research paper since it’s not published in a journal.

Design and Evaluation of a Humanoid Robot for Autism Therapy is the title and it’s written by Daniel Ricks at Brigham Young University 2010. I found this paper interesting since it as the article I chose for Theme 4 is studying autism and how you can help kids that are diagnosed with it. The paper focuses the design of a robot called Troy. According to Ricks, recent evidence has shown that children with autism may behave more pro-socially when interacting with a robot than with a human.  The objective of the research was therefore to develop a robotic system for use in the clinical treatment of children with autism. Troy was therefore developed to fulfill such a role in a clinical setting and Rick’s primary objective was to design a robot that would be engaging to the children.

When reading the paper I learned that design research requires a lot of documentation to cover what you are doing since you can’t simply express your results in a simple table or graph. A result of this can be seen in the length of the paper since its 94 pages long. Another thing is that design research often requires a user study to give the design credibility in real life.

Theme 4 - Reflections

Theme number fours topic was about qualitative methods but when looking back on the lecture and the seminar I feel like they didn't belonged together. The seminar lived up to my expectations since we discussed qualitative methods thoroughly and therefore gave me a better understanding of the different methods. However I felt that the lecture given by Ylva Fernaeus didn't bring anything new to the table in terms of qualitative research. But I think it did what it promised on the course webpage, it served as a bridge between this theme and the upcoming one.

During the seminar we discussed the four major types of qualitative methods. These methods were Interviews, focus groups, content analysis and observations. Some of us also discussed some other less known methods such as diaries and qualitative surveys. However these different methods had one thing in common. This is that there are a lot of different ways on how to conduct them depending on what type of data you are looking for. For example focus groups can be homogenous or heterogeneous. Depending on which one you choose you are more likely to come up with very different answers to your questions. A homogenous group can be used to examine differences in perspectives between groups while heterogeneous groups are more likely to produce unique or creative ideas. This shows us that there are a lot more than just four different qualitative research methods and how important it is to pick the right one when conducting a survey/research.

A method I got further interested in after this week is ethnographical research. During the second half of the seminar Bobby Falck and Stefan Hrastinski brought this method up and Stefan gave us a good example of it. A friend of his moved to Umeå and started working for a call center. But he didn't do this because he actually wanted to move there or because he was in need of a job. He did it because call center workers were his target group and he wanted authentic data of them that would have been hard to collect if he told them he was going to study them for his PhD-Thesis.

Theme 4: Qualitative methods

Select a media technology research paper that you argue is using qualitative methods in a good way. The paper should be of high quality. The following are examples of questions to discuss in your blog posting:

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

I chose the paper: Using multimedia to reveal the hidden code of everyday behaviour to children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) by Theresa Doyle & Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sánchez. The paper was published in the journal Computer & Education with an impact factor of 2.621. I choose this paper not only because I thought it is using qualitative methods in a good way but also because I can relate to the research since my little brother is diagnosed with ASD.

The paper describes a framework which was developed for carers (teachers and parents) to help them create personalized social stories for children with autistic spectrum disorders. It focuses on how technology can facilitate the implementation of this intervention by utilizing multimedia authoring tools. To do this Doyle & A-Sánchez make use of three online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, telephone conversations, journal logs, field notes and postings on a discussion board to find evidence that could be corroborated. The benefit of using a variety of methods is that they obtained very valuable insight into the experiences of a small cohort of subjects and were able to develop a report that was both accurate and credible. However I think the most important method were the semi-structured interviews that gave them a lot of valuable information that a questioner wouldn't have picked up. Since the group of people in this research had very different needs I think the use of this kind of method was spot on and really gave the study valuable information that would have been hard to extract with another method. The limitation of this method is that it is very time consuming as it takes a lot of time to both collect and analyze the “results”.

From this paper I have learned not to just stick to one method but to broaden your horizon. Also it got me thinking about using discussion boards that helps with getting information that sometimes can be hard to collect since the persons you interview tend to forget things, therefore it could be a good complement to let them write down their thoughts on a forum.

It is hard to pin point a methodological problem of this study since they only discuss some of the methods they used and therefore don’t give any in depth data. But I would have liked them to use focus groups and not only the discussion boards. Then maybe they would have gotten more discussion going and with that maybe even better and more defined results in the end.

Theme 3 - Reflections

This week has been quite different from the others. Instead of the Seminars we were supposed to have a lab exercise with SPSS. However the computers would not cooperate and therefore the exercise got canceled, so I did not get the chance to actually try it out. For me it was the first time I heard about SPSS, but I don’t see the benefits from it over for example Excel. I hope I will get some time over during the next week to actually try this program out and maybe I will be able to understand the benefits of it.

Now let’s talk a little about the topic of the week namely quantitative methods and mixed methods. I found the lecture by Martha interesting and it got me thinking about what a random selected group actually is. It also gave me further understanding of what mixed research is after we discussed it at the end of the lecture in smaller groups. I think this kind of exercises is great since it activates the students and gets us to discuss the topic further so we can come to a mutual understanding of the topic. Therefore I would like to see more activates like this in the future!

Theme 3: Quantitative methods

Reflect on the key points and what you learnt by reading. You can use some of the questions in Performing research article critiques as support for a critical review of the papers. Please note that some of these questions might not be relevant, especially not for the Lowenthal/Leech chapter since it is not an empirical study.

After reading the two articles by Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech and Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P. I felt that the topic of this week should have been Mixed methods instead of Quantitative methods. It could also have been “How to make research on online learning” since both of the texts dealt with this problem and it is a interesting and somewhat new way of learning. Anyhow I will analyze the texts separately.

In the first article by Lowenthal, P.R & Leech, N. Mixed research and online learning: Strategies for improvement they try to bring fourth the problem about that available research about online learning has been synonymous with low quality. To combat this problem, they suggest that we should start to make use of mixed methods to improve the quality of these researches. They explain the mixed method as a combination between both quantitative data and qualitative data. The difference between these two methods can be described like this: quantitative data is when you gather large amounts of questions that can be rated with a simple yes/no or 1-10 value. Qualitative data is non numerical in nature and therefore it is much more abstract since you gain your data through In-Depth interviews and direct observation. Combining these two methods will therefore help us investigate problems in ways that quantitative/qualitative alone or side by side cannot. Hopefully we will see more of this type of research methods in the future and it would be interesting to try it out on our own (maybe in this course?)!

The second text “Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment” by Cleveland-Innes & Campbell is also about online learning but focus on emotions and how they affect how we learn. In the text they argue that emotions can’t be separated from learning and due to the increase of people studying online this subject has gotten a lot of attention lately. The interesting thing about this paper is that it is using a mix of a quantitative method, qualitative data and quantitative analysis which links it to our first paper and therefore is an example of a mixed research in some way. However this mixed research may not be spot on to how Lowenthal & Leech (2009) describes it.

After reading these two texts I’m looking forward to discuss them with the group and I’m curious how they interpreted these texts. I would also like to learn more about mixed research and I will finish my post with a quote that rimes well with it I think: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” - Albert Einstein


References: 

Lowenthal & Leech (2009). Mixed research and online learning: Strategies for improvement . In T. T. Kidd (Ed.), Online education and adult learning: New frontiers for teaching practices. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Cleveland-Innes & Campbell (in press). Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.