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.

Theme 2 - Reflections

This blog post will reflect on the topic of Theory in science and also what I have learned about Theory after discussing it further.

This week I couldn't come to the seminar due to another course, but after discussing the topic further with my friends I got some new insights. Often we use the word theory in common communication, one example could be when we tell our friends that we have a theory about something. Most of the times these "theories" is not actual theories, but instead they are hypothesis. The big difference is that a hypothesis does not have to be based on facts or other theories and does not have to be confirmed as valid by others.

When talking to my friends they told me about Copernicus and his hypothesis. This discussion was about when does theory become "Theory"? In the Copernicus case they came to an understanding that even though Copernicus had data backing up his hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the common thought of the sun revolving around our earth, his hypothesis did not become a theory because the society (read church) did not accept his idea. However there seems to be no good answer to how many people that has to confirm ones findings for it to become a theory.

Since I missed this seminar I feel that I have a lot of unanswered questions, but I think I have gotten a better grip around the idea about what theory is and what it's not.

Theme 2: Theory

Select a media technology research paper that you argue is using theory in an excellent way. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above.
I have selected the paper Symmetry and aesthetics in website design; it’s a man’s business by Tuch, Bargas-Avila and Opwis (2010). The paper was featured in the journal Computers in Human Behavior with a Impact Factor of 2.293.


Your tasks are the following:
Briefly explain to a first year student what theory is, and what theory is not.

Theory differentiates to some degree because of philosophical and disciplinary orientations. But the most common type is explanation and prediction according to (Gregor, 2006) table 9. However Gregor points out that one type of theory is no more valuable than another therefore I will keep this short. I will quote Gregor “different perspectives on theory at a general level shows theories as abstract entities that aim to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world and, in some cases, to provide predictions of what will happen in the future and to give a basis for intervention and action.”
According to Sutton (1995) a theory requires empirical support to show why a process might be true. These methods could be a small set of interviews, a demonstration experiment or a pilot survey. This means that theory is not based on subjective opinions of a researcher.


Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

In the paper conducted by Tuch, Bargas-Avila and Opwis (2010) the theory is analytic (Table 2) since they use diagrams and tables to represent their research but it could also fall in under another category. Theory for Predicting could fit since they figured out how only men are sensitive to the studied symmetry effect which should be taken into consideration by future website designers. But not why this occurred. Also their data comes from a laboratory experiment with a large test group.


Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The big limitation about Theory of Predicting is that it doesn't explain why something happens. In Tuch et.al (2010) case this particular why might not be as interesting as their findings but it is still something that could help us understand the matter better.