Final Comments Blog Post

·         Hello Sofie,

The truth is that I don’t find the content of this specific design research that interesting but I liked the idea of using the method of comparison which is not very common. The scientist is creating the new prototype and then he compares both old and new methods for getting to his evaluation. (Reply to Sofie’s comment, Theme 5)

·         Hello Bart,

I find your post very enlightening. I was also surprise that design research can be either more qualitative or quantitative. Furthermore I find very interesting that a design research can be also about an absolutely theoretical topic. You can use design methods to prove a pure theoretical idea. A good example of this was the paper “Prototyping for tiny fingers” that was presented during the seminar and was one of the first studies to argue for the use of Lo-Fi prototype. (Bart, theme 5)

·         Hello Tana,

If I understood it correctly during the seminar, design research method can be applied when one wants to develop a new product, service, system, device or tech but also when someone wants to prove a new theory, as the topic of a design research doesn’t have to be strictly technical. I also like the way you summarize this methods goal, even though I would like to add that as Prof. Haibo underlined, if we want to become great we should spend 90% of our time in the identification and 10% in the definition.  (Tana, theme 5)

·         Hello Maksym,

Well this design research is centralized in the development of advanced rectangular microspeakers that can be used for wide liquid-crystal display in mobile phones. The development of mobile phones as multimedia devices has led to limited insertion space for microspeakers, particularly due to wider liquid crystal displays. So the paper proposes a technique in order to enhance the performance of microspeakers in a limited area. (Reply to Maksym’s comment, Theme 5)

·         Hello Stefan and thank you for your comment,

I do think that triangulation is a very interesting method for any research. As your results are of a much better quality and every other researcher can agree with that, they (the results) will be treated with more respect and probably the other researchers will use them as a source for some of their future researches.

 I would like to use triangulation in my master thesis; but this depends on how comfortable I will feel with the thesis theme, and if the obtaining of multiple kind of data will be possible. In the case I will decide to use triangulation in my thesis, I think that I would choose to use data and methodological triangulation, where the researchers use different data sources and collection methods, as I feel that are easier to implement and the whole process will be more intriguing. (Reply to Stefan’s comment, Theme 4)

·         Hey,

I totally agree with your comment. Additionally, I believe that in every research there is subjectivity, either in a bigger or in a smaller grade. Scientists have to be critical with any kind of method they use, both in qualitative and quantitative research. Furthermore, I share your opinion about reflecting on their “doubts” about the results; this could be very helpful for the improvement their research by other scientists in the future.  (Reply to Media Manager Master’s comment, Theme 4)

·         Well after Marina’s post above, I came to believe that content analysis in collaboration with observation seems to be a more common and useful method. It still remains time consuming but at least the results are of a better quality.

Sorry for the long post I will try to stay to 400 words in the reflections’ parts. (Reply to Stefan’s comment, Theme 4)

·         Hello Marina,

I can say that you have a point and your comment was quite enlightening. I hadn’t really thought that the next step after the observation, something that we do with everything and all the time, is the content analysis. In order the things that we observe to make sense and be useful data, we have to analyze them. So basically in my mind observation and content analysis are two common methods that can be combined for a better outcome. (Reply to Marina’s comment, Theme 4)

·         Hello Nicole, it is nice that you actually can give an answer to Martha’s question, I have to say that I was quite confused..  I read an article about e learning written by Selma Vonderwell and one of her conclusions was that during an online course, students do not feel an intimate connection with their instructors; what do you think about that? (Nicole, theme3)

·         Hi Bart, I absolutely share your opinion that the lab exercise on SPSS was introduced too fast and we did not have enough time to “play” with it. Hope that in future courses we will have the opportunity to work with this program again as it can be a very helpful tool for our master thesis. About Martha’s Cleveland-Innes lecture, can you give me some examples about the assets and downsides of Mixed Research Methods? (Bart, theme 3)

·         Hello Marina, Professor “Vanessa Camilleri” in one of her seminar’s about 3D learning stated that face-to-face learning is a very passive form of learning. Moreover, she strongly believed that this is not the appropriate type of learning especially in higher education, as students do not have a strong enough motivation to “dig” deeper in different topics of knowledge. What is your opinion about that? Personally, I do not thing that I share her opinion as I like the idea of getting into a classroom every day, creating bonds with my constructor and classmates and having the source of knowledge right in the same room with me. (Marina, theme 3)

·         Hello Jessie, you have mentioned above that only narrow range of questions that represent specific aspects in reality can be reached by quantitative methods. I don’t actually understand that, can you give me some examples of this type of questions? (Jessie Tian, theme 3)

·         It is very interesting that people were trying to understand and create a format of what THEORY is, since old times. I agree with you that this conversation will always be a "hot topic" in the scientific researches. What type of theory are you thinking to use for your master thesis? (Katya Ksenof theme 2)

·         I absolutely agree with you Katya!! Nicole really nice article! Can you tell us some of the suggestions that were provided in order to help in making users more apt to using interactive websites? (Nicole Deandres, theme 2)

·         Hello Bridget, i think that you should also emphasize that theory is something that ´we´ humans have created. Also i find very interesting your group's discussion about 'The Theory of Transmedia Narratives' and i can say that you have intrigued me to read more about Narratology. [Bridget, theme 2]

·         Hello Marina, I don´t actually understand what you mean by saying that theory isn´t the complete truth. Can you tell me some of your group´s conclusions according to which theory has to be replicable and actually theory itself isn’t the complete truth. [Marina, theme 2]

·         In the third stage of Dutton’s paper Internet is presented as a network of networks, what do you think about that? I believe that as the years pass the internet is becoming more and more powerful and its presence in our lives in becoming more and more necessary. Everyone owns a connection of internet so everyone (individuals and groups) can establish a link with anyone he wants. (Katya Ksenof. Theme 1)

  

·         Sometimes it is possible to "train" our mind or "human computer" to see what we want to see. For example until recently, people did not know that the color orange was a different color, they had convince their brains that it was a close nuance of red, and they were referring to it as the red color. (Marina B. theme 1)

·         Hello Nicole, do you think that one day internet social networking campaigns will replace completely the “old” campaigns? In my opinion, I believe that no matter how profitable the “new” campaigns are they still cannot replace the old, as people will always want to see for example their favorite actor giving an interview in their home town. (Nicole deandres  -theme 1)

·         Hello Bridget, if you were a scholar do you think that you would try to maintain a blog and keep on using the SMT in a great scale? [Bridget, theme 1]

Reflections vol 5...

What have I learned after this week about Design Research ???

During this week we examined the “Design Research”. In the beginning of the week we attended a lecture by Professor Haibo Lee on the topic “Media Technology from Engineering Perspective”. I have to say that, even if the lecture was quite interesting I don’t really see the connection with the week’s theme. However, I would like to present some of Professors states that I found interesting. As Prof. Lee underscored, the Golden Rule of being an engineer is how to solve a problem. First you define the problem and second you try to solve it; and if you want to become great, you have to spend most of your time in the defining.

Furthermore, he presented us some guide lines on how to manage our ideas. The first step is to have an idea then you have to make this idea come true. Often we have too many ideas, so which one should we choose? We need a formula for been able to judge without making a mistake. So, in order to filter our ideas for finding the really good one, we need a check list, the so called “Business Plan Check-List”.

It is important to commercialize technology and to be able to see if an idea is a “Great” one when you see it. But what does “Great” means? “Great” idea means that you can generate billion dollars for the business that implements the idea. An idea can also be “Big” which is about million dollars or “Innovative” that is a really new idea. Here I would like to highlight that a good idea does not need to have a technological innovation. For example Facebook is based on already known technology while its idea/concept was a Great one. In conclusion, to validate an idea, get some sort of proof of concept, and even potentially get some costumers, this will help you to raise some money.

“Want to start a business? Forget the MBA. Just do it!”

Samara Mitra [1]

Additionally, in this week’s seminar we examined many different types of design research methods. With my group we focused on the design research article “Prototyping for Tiny Fingers” written in 1994 by Marc Rettig; this is one of first studies to argue for the use of Lo-Fi prototypes. Rettig is based on the old methods for creating a new prototype through which he conducts a new method. Thereafter, he compares the methods, old and new, and after his evaluation the new standard is set [2].

Reference:

1.       http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/institute-of-electrical-and-electronics-engineers/want-to-start-a-business-forget-the-mba-just-do-it-tU2ABrcHA0

2.       http://faculty.unlv.edu/thatcher/is485/readings/Prototyping%20for%20Tiny%20Fingers.pdf

Fifth theme...

This week’s theme is the “Design Research”. As Professor Panthea Lee stated in one of her articles (February 19, 2012), design research is a research that deals with very specific topics. It is a radical element in meeting people’s actual needs about services, products and systems/programs. In a design research, the data collected can be considered as narrative. This is because in order to understand and cover human’s needs, the researchers in the design area will gather the data through people’s words, photos, gestures, drawings and in some cases stories.

One of this week’s tasks was to read the article “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). In this research the authors present a method of rendering live football game information using the already existing vibrator in mobile phones. Their main idea was that different vibration signals corresponding to the ball’s states and positions can provide the user with a spherical picture of where the ball is during a football game. After a certain survey was conducted, they decided that for getting the best results in rendering a game, they should use five vibrotactile signals. Their next step was to perform a number of experiments in order to get to their conclusions. In the end of their research, the authors concluded that: 

• Vibrotactile rendering of live information through mobile phones is highly a desirable process but also a very challenging one.
• The design of vibrotactile signals can be a very tricky procedure, so someone has to be very careful while designing their coding scheme.
• The training process needs to be very carefully designed.
• Rendering a wider range of information by vibration on mobile phones is quite a new topic for both researchers and mobile users.
• Both visual and audio displays are necessary for better interaction with users.

In every design research, like the one above, prototypes have a very important role. But what is exactly a prototype? After some research in the net I find the following definition that I personally like: “A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from” [2]. More specifically, in the research above, the prototype was designed to test and trial the new design theory that the authors proposed. Prototyping is more common in researches with a more tangible technical that theoretical background. Furthermore, we should highlight that it could be necessary to develop also a proof of concept prototype so that the researchers can validate that their idea actually works and functions as they have envisioned [3].

For the second part our post, the design research paper that I have chosen is  “Development of advanced rectangular micro speakers used for wide liquid-crystal display mobile phones”, written by Chang-Min Lee1 and Sang-Moon Hwang  and  published in the JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS.

This paper presents a design prototype about improving the performance of the microspeaker that is commercially adopted today, while maintaining its dimensions in the same size. In their research, the authors used the method of comparison as they compared different types of conventional microspeakers. Subsequently, after processing the collected data, they proposed new improved types of microspeakers. For their presentation, the authors adopted a 3D electromagnetic FEA (finite element analysis) and a mathematical approach. Among their conclusions, is that a structural alteration in the center magnet and yoke, can lead to a reduction of the equivalent stiffness and moving mass. So the sound pressure level (SPL) of any frequency range in the new proposed type will be higher than the conventional one.

References:

[1] Lee, Panthea, “Design Research: What is it and Why Do It?”, THEREBOOT.ORG, 2012.

[2] http://gigamaster.blogspot.se/2012/07/wireframe-mockup-prototype.html

[3] http://leardon.com/why-a-proof-of-concept-prototype

Reflections vol 4...

What have I learned after this week about Qualitative methods and ???

During this week’s seminar, I gained a more proficient knowledge about qualitative research methods. Also, I would like to highlight that if we want our research to be of a high quality, we are to use methods in a mix. The official term for this technique is “Triangulation”. The benefits of triangulation include “increasing confidence in research data, creating innovative ways of understanding a phenomenon, revealing unique findings, challenging or integrating theories, and providing a clearer understanding of the problem” (Thurmond, 2001, p. 254). On the other hand, one of the primary disadvantages of triangulation is that it can be an extremely complicated process. This is because this technique combines more than one method for collecting data and their process can be very time-consuming (Thurmond, 2001). Moreover, I would like to state that in my opinion, a fundamental element of qualitative research methods is observation. It helps to analyze data, irrespective of the method type that is applied to the research. For example, even if a researcher chooses interviews as a method to his research, after he collects the data he will have to observe them in order to get to his conclusions.

Furthermore, this week we attended a lecture by Ylva Fernaeus, during which she explain more details about the article “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses.” that she has co-written with M. Jacobsson.  This paper belongs to the field of tangible interaction and more specifically is a study about semiotics (signs like acts, sounds, gestures etc.). During their research, the authors realized that comics are simple to understand and they can explain programming in a good way, as 1)they (comics) are a very direct reading experience, 2)combine text, images and visual markings and 3)are based on a sequel of panels that make the story to flow by showing a before-after case scenario.

In addition, authors’ interest was also intrigued by clothes. Clothes constitute a fundamental element of human’s culture and are a hot topic to observe, as they combine modular qualities, layers and collections in many ways and they serve communicative functions. The idea that people love to dress up and personalize their personal robots, leaded the authors to the conclusion that robots can have the same characteristics. So after that, scientists thought “why not programming robots by dressing them up??” Finally, authors’ conclusion is that actDresses are aiming to a meaningful interaction with robots and they are a design concept in which there are two basic features: 1) displayed in the immediate physical context of the objects that they refer to, and 2) close connection between appearance/action by focusing on perceivable actions e.g. sound, movement, interactions.

Reference:

Thurmond, V. “The Point of Triangulation”, JOURNAL OF NURSING SCHOLARSHIP, 2001.

Fourth Theme...

This week’s theme is the Qualitative Research Methods. What exactly is a Q.R.M.? According to the book “Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide”, a qualitative research is very efficient method applied mainly in cultural researches. With Q.R. scientists can get deep information (data) about certain groups’ social behaviors, values and opinions. The data are collected through audiotapes, videotapes, and field notes. Moreover it is important to highlight that qualitative and quantitative methods share many differences.  The primary one is that in quantitative researches the applied tools adopt a more strict methodology like closed-ended questionnaires. While in qualitative researches is used a more flexible methodology like open-ended questionnaires.

- Q.M. in my paper : 

I have chosen the article “An examination of asynchronous communication experiences and perspectives of students in an online course: a case study” by Selma Vonderwell”, which was published in the journal “Internet and Higher Education” that has an impact factor for 2011 equal to 1.015.

The main purpose on this qualitative case study was to examine the asynchronous communication (communication through discussion forums, blogs, e-mails etc.) experiences and perspectives of undergraduate students in an online course. The whole study was conducted with two particular questions as a guideline; “What are the implications of asynchronous communication on student learning?” and “To what extent does asynchronous communication and interaction enhance student learning?” The author used many sources in order to collect a bigger and of better quality amount of data. His main data sources were interviews with 22 preservice teachers, student and instructor email transcripts, discussion board transcripts, and two independent peer reviewers’ reviews. By using multiple sources for data collection, the author gained the benefit to cross-check his findings and so to have well-grounded results in his research. The results of this study are important basically for the instructors. They get to reexamine their techniques about communication with their students.

- Reflections of the course’s article:

The main purpose of the paper “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Y. Fernaeus and M. Jacodsson, is “the design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products”. In this paper, the authors introduce us the design concept of actDresses, which has been envisioned by two informal kinds of sign systems that are widely popular today.  The first kind of sign systems is the one applied in comics. Comic book artists are combining text, pictures and visual markings in order to communicate with their audiences. There have been researches shown that such a multifaceted method can be applied also in visual programming. The second kind of sign systems that the authors examine is dealing with practices of clothing and accessorizing, and how these practices could possibly be used in order to control the behavior of physical interactive electrical devices. Over and above that, the authors wanted their research to be more solid. So they worked on three different example scenarios about “how physical decoration and labeling can be used for controlling, programming, and predicting the behavior of robotic systems”. The first scenario was role assemblage outfits for the Pleo robot dinosaur, the second was a behavior pin collection for the experimental GlowBots platform and the third and last one was comic signs for a prototype consumer vacuum cleaner robot.

References:

“Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide”, Familly Health International, 2005.

Reflections vol 3...

What have I learned after this week about Quantitative methods and online learning???

During this week, we had the luck to experience the statistics program SPSS, and hear a very intriguing lecture from Mrs. Martha Cleveland-Innes about quantitative methods and their application in the research of online learning’s impact.

SPSS is a statistic program used for statistical analysis. It is a program with a big audience as it has one big advantage; it is highly user friendly. Anybody can use it regardless of its background, i.e. scientists, journalists etc. Its basic functions are statistical analysis, data management and documentation. I strongly believe that this first acquaintance with SPSS is to help me a lot with my future master thesis.

Quantitative methods are significant “tools” that lead to a ‘translation’ of things into numbers and these numbers (data) hopefully, can give to the quantitative researchers a clear image of what is going on. Researchers firstly get the data and then analyze them. We should also keep in mind that when we are making a quantitative research on a specific topic, the bigger the sample the bigger the variation we will have in all the “mess”. But which are the key prerequisites for doing a quantitative research?? We have to be good at the conceptualism; create an argument why we do what we want to do. This among other will be a very helpful tool for the researcher to convince and get a founding! Also, it  would be good to state that if people want to do a research with a more grounded background, then they should use more mixed research methods; both qualitative and quantitative.

Furthermore, as it is mentioned in the book "The Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research", internet has change the way people react with each other, so internet has to change and the way people do scientific research. In quantitative analyses on online learning, researchers assign numbers to patterns of behavior, something that is valuable information for teaching. These analyses have shown that e-learning can be a very emotional experience for students as internet is a very emotional environment. An online environment is not ‘teacher presence’ but ‘teaching presence; individual students feel comfortable to be the teachers too, so they talk and interact with each other.

Today researchers support that we need some face to face and some online learning. They cannot say yet which way is better, but hope that one day with the help of quantitative methods and big enough samples will be able to know and have proofs on it.

Reference:

Nagy Hesse-Biber, S. “The Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research”, OXFORD University Press, USA, 2011.

Third theme...

Until recently, there were not many researches conducted, about people’s emotional response when entering an online environment. But Cleveland-Innes & Campbell’s research paper shed light on this topic. According to them, emotions are always present in any kind of learning environment and have a radical role in students’ learning process. Therefore, emotions will be present in an online learning environment too. Furthermore the researchers, through some empirical data, get to the conclusion that emotional presence may contain a primary element in online communities of inquiry as well.

For their study, they interviewed 217 students and they collected the out coming data using a modified Community of Inquiry instrument. This instrument included past information about cognitive, social and teaching presence, but also new measures about an emotional presence.

Their research consists of two main phases. During the first, they are examining the interviewee students’ responses and through this they get to confirm an emotion existence in online learning environments. After that, comes the phase number two. Now the authors examine the students through indications of presence and get to confirm that online students do obtain emotions in addition to the emotions obtained by social presence.

 Over and above that, according to another research paper conducted by Lowenthal & Leech, researchers until recently were separated into two and very distinct types. So in the one hand were the quantitative researchers (positivists) and in the other hand were the qualitative (constructivists). However, recently there were some discussions about the formation of one additional group, this of the mixed researchers (pragmatists). Scientists belonging to this last group support that in order to obtain results of higher quality in a scientific research, we have to apply both qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed research).

Today, the majority of research about online learning is conducted with an application of either quantitative or qualitative methods (mono-method). However, if researchers want to ameliorate their search results on this topic, have to abandon the mono-method and adopt the mixed research. So as the concept of mixed methods is newly formed, there is very little research about online learning conducted in this new way. And even this existing one is considered of low quality as it suffers from a high number of problems.

In order to avoid these problems, Collins, Onwuegbuzie and Sutton (2006) formulated 13 steps that are to assist researchers in conducting a mixed research study, from start to finish. These specific steps, as they are presented in their paper, are the following:

“1) determining the goal of the study, 2) formulating the research objective, 3) determining the research/mixing rationale, 4) determining the research/mixing purpose, 5) determining the research question(s), 6) selecting the sample design, 7) selecting the mixed research design, 8) collecting the data, 9) analyzing the data, 10) validiating/legitimating the data, 11) interpreting the data, 12) writing the mixed research report, and 13) reformulating the research question(s)”

Moreover, they formulated seven specific stages about the step 9; the data analysis:

“1) Data reduction, 2) data display, 3) data transformation, 4) data correlation, 5) data consolidation, 6) data comparison and 7) data integration”

References:

Collins, K. M. T., Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Sutton, I. L. (2006). “A model incorporating the rationale and purpose for conducting mixed methods research in special education and beyond”. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 4, 67-100.