The comments
I do like that you focus
mainly on your thoughts about the concepts given in the texts rather than only
repeat what is to read for anybody with access to the texts. Considering this
is before the lecture and the seminar presenting the answers to the questions I
think you manage to present the answers with a easy to understand manner. I
would say that people that haven’t read the text would still get some kind of
contextual understanding of your text. Really nice blog post!
Interesting that you wrote
about the wax example and that you are of the understanding that everything has
a potential to change. I believe that it would be rather advantageously for
society to implement some basic philosophy in the lower classes of education.
By doing this I think we could reduce the segmentation in opinion within our
society by giving the people an instrument to better understand each other.
I do like the fact that you
account for your struggle to understand Kant’s text as did I.
I honestly thought I just read
the most daring text for this theme, but then I read your text and saw the line
“Kant was confused”. With that said I like that you present how you perceived
the text because I think you weren’t alone to struggle with Kant’s text. Never
the less you manage to present the essence of the both texts and the authors
intentions with the texts. Keep up the good work and don’t stop to include your
own thoughts in future blog posts.
The most interesting with your
text appears in the last paragraph where you speak your mind and give a theory
of your own. Although I don’t agree with you in this case I do think you are
one of the few that dares to make an assumption this early in the course and
that is a good thing, according to me anyway.
Would be nice if you could
make it clearer when you reflect over the texts and when you just interpreting
the texts as is. Very nice to get the blog text started with a longer citation
from the text. It sets some kind of frame or context for the rest of your blog
post.
I think you manage to answer
the questions with satisfaction. If you have read the texts I find it unlikely
that you wouldn’t agree with you review of the texts.
I find it interesting that you
actually took time to examine the dialog and not only read it. I do agree that
their discussion is kind of binary and sometimes near naive, reading it in the
21st century. I, for one, wonder how Plato and the like would describe the
world of today, or how this discussion would look like if it had happen this
year. I like that you also take the time to describe from what doctrine you
come from. Which applies to many of us taking this course.
I think you written a good,
easy to follow and down-to-earth reflection which sum up the both texts in a
very understandable manner, even for people that haven’t read the texts.
In particular I like that you
present your own thoughts of the matter in the end of both paragraphs.
You have come up with an
extensive text for the first week’s theme and you refer to the texts in an
ordered fashion. Maybe it lacks some kind of own examples to show that you
really understand what the texts states. Although I do believe you showed that
you know how to utilize the concepts in both texts within the frame given by
the both texts. Considering my own struggle with Kant’s text I salute you for
presenting his work-around with intuition and cognition so exposed as you did.
Your way of interpreting the
concepts pre-seminar are in line with my own thoughts. Especially the way you
review the possibility that there isn’t a thing such as false knowledge until
you are opposed by another possibility. When this is applied to a more abstract
concept such as opinion you could also interpret this, as there isn’t a thing
as “false opinion”. Which in turn can be both good and bad. I do like your
examples which help a lot to understand your arguments about the concepts.
I find your text interesting
and very structured, maybe too structured considering this being a opportunity
when you are supposed to interpreting the texts at hand. I would love to see
more of your own thoughts about the theories the theme presents. Although I
think you are spot on about what you review in your blog post.
At the end of the text you
state “Personally I find this quite hard to understand, because as I understand
it, we need to experience certain things to have knowledge about it.” I do
understand the feeling that we really need to experience things first hand to
have true knowledge about it. However, the society are most of the very quick
to embrace knowledge that we doesn’t know much about. As an example we can
discuss the ongoing debate about beggars where the next guy seems to be an
expert on the topic when in reality their only experience with beggars is when
they pass them on their way in to the supermarket. With that said I think we at
KTH accept knowledge that we haven’t verified ourselves most of the time. This
is of course nothing unusual and highly necessary for us to be able to complete
our education in 5 years time. But if we see on this case strictly
philosophically, I guess we actually learn what we hold as knowledge based on
uncertainty because we haven’t been able to verify the knowledge by experience.
Nice to read what you had for
relation to the word theory beforehand. I would probably say about the same if
asked before this course. I also liked how you listed the different categories
a theory can be described with.
I have come to an
understanding that you are not alone to think that this theme was a bit
abstract. Nice to see that you guys had a good talk about the papers we had
read to the seminars. I agree that the latest seminars, including the seminar
for theme 3, hasn't been as good as the first two.
I like the first part of your
post. In a short and understandable sentence you manage to cover how the course
seems to describe theory and thesis. Think you explain in a good manner how a
theory is an abstract thing and that theses not necessarily need to be true. A
not true or a lack of answer is also a result for a thesis.
I guess I agree with you in
some way, especially that part about us being done with our B-thesis already.
However I do feel that this course let you stop and think about things,
concepts and words you though you already knew and test your interpretation of
these objects. For me it hasn't changed my way of see on these objects, or
maybe theory, in general but I do think it is a good thing to constantly be
aware that other point of views other than your own exists.
When not even the
"elite" of the research field can agree on what theory actually is in
one simple phrase then I can't see how we are supposed to come up with a
definition in less than a week's time. I do agree on most things you review in
your post though.
Thanks for an interesting blog
post. I didn’t reflect much over the design process of questioners but now that
you mention it I remember the lecture explicit talked about this process.
Anyways, I find it obvious that you need to work a lot with your questioners in
a research to get non-affected answers. It is so easy to misunderstand people
in a face-to-face conversation but, most of the time, it’s easy to correct
these misunderstandings on the fly. In a text based situation, as questioners
you need to take into account that if the text is interpreted in a way you
never intended you will get a fluctuation that could affect the end result. So
one can understand that you need to keep an eye on the detail when designing questioners.
Enjoyable reading and you sum
up the concept of the both methods in a short and understandable manner.
However, I don’t think you could say that the quantitative method is more
scientific than the qualitative, although I think many of us do because we are
soon-to-be engineers and therefore understands numbers better than words.
I really like your thoughts
about theme 4 and it was refreshing to read a blog by someone that hasn’t just
recently done their bachelor thesis as many of us have done in this course.
Easy to follow and understand how you see on both methods and I think you did a
great job in understanding the basics when it comes to quantitative and
qualitative research methods.
I didn’t care much for the
“drummer” paper prior the seminar or lecture but must say that I was intrigued
when the paper was presented during the lecture. I believe that in most cases
there is no work around to not use both qualitative and quantitative data.
Those methods are strong major methods when combined with the other minor
method, then if the major should be Qual. or Quant. I guess you need to figure
out for each individual research.
I think most of us discussed
this in the seminars. Our group came to almost the same conclusion. Interesting
paper you decided to read prior to the seminar.
I think I agree with most of
your reflections. At one point I was like “Didn’t we iterate in the
Reflekterande Designprocess” but then I realized that we did that in the HCI
course. The point I think Haibo tried to make about the 90%/10%
defining/solving the problem would probably be that if you don’t come up with
an answer to the problem (Which probably happens a lot more often that we
think) the research can still contribute vital knowledge for future research.
Take the research to cure H.I.V or Cancer. We all know that today it doesn’t
exists a cure or vaccine to those to deadly illnesses but the research done in
both fields has generated vital knowledge to others that want to contribute to
solve the problem of how to cure specific illness. I know it is a long fetch to
compare medicine and ICT research but I think that people in general focus to
much on actually try to solve a problem that when they don’t solve a problem
all their work is for nothing because of lack of the “defining the problem”.
With a good defining of the problem maybe you can evaluate your own research
and make another go which will hopefully go better and generate a solution
thanks to your previous research with a no-solution answer but still helpful
information.
How strange that you don’t
truly miss something before you don’t have it anymore. For me I didn’t care
much for the seminars but when we this theme didn’t had any seminars I felt
that I missed out on much from this theme. I still believe that you did a great
job by review the both lectures and I felt about the same.
Normally I’d say that the seminars
haven’t been that helpful in this course but for this theme I did wish we had a
seminar, go figure. I think you manage to describe the essence of the second
lecture quite well and I remember the lecture presented the prototyping as you
just did in your blog post.
Seems like we didn’t go to the
same lectures at all for this theme. I do like your reflections and what you’ve
learned from this theme. Especially the point about that research design is
kind of a new practice. Will check out that journal.
Couldn’t agree more about the
content of the both lectures. For me the second lecture for the theme was a
complete waste of time. I feel that most of the time, except for the first two
themes, that the lectures could have tried harder to focus on the important
content of the course.
The 1000 words comment.
Without to drag it for to long
I will start to say that this course, for me personally, had the worst timing
in my entire time at KTH. Why? Well because I with many others in this course
has just finished our bachelor thesis and we are 1.5 years from start up our
master thesis. Never the less I think the course presented interesting reviews
of the most common sets of tools available for science research. I for one
especially liked the part of the course focused on what theory is and what it
is not. In this post I will however present my idea on how to use this new
acquired knowledge in a near future.
The first things I think I’ll
make use of in my master thesis would probably more defined versions of
qualitative and quantitative methods. And as in my bachelor thesis continue to
compare others result in the quantitative part of the report to set values on
my gathered data. I find it interesting to work with case studies as well and
think, if possible, I will try to work with case study in my master thesis. But
the choice of method or methods will in the end be very dependent of the
subject in my master thesis.
If my master thesis will focus
on HCI as my bachelor thesis did, then I can imagine that case studies and
qualitative methods will be favored over qualitative methods because of the
nature of the input, in this case the input is humans. When it comes to UX I
find it unlikely that you can do research without qualitative methods such as
questionnaires and interviews because in the end the result should weight the
voices of the users higher than the quantitative data. Unfortunate it is very
hard to present a coherent data representation from qualitative methods which
makes it a lesser appealing approach when you are to present your work for people
not active in the given field of practice you conducted the research for. In
this specific scenario I picture a report that has been ordered by a company,
e.g to evaluate a homepage or an app.
If I think about research in
general and try to see how you can apply them, then I would probably say that
most of the time you can do a quantitative/qualitative but not always a
qualitative/quantitative research. By this I mean that many things that you can
quantify will in some sense almost always involve humans. It could be the end
user, a consumer, the workers etc. But when it comes to qualitative focused
research then it isn’t always necessarily the case that you will be able to
back you qualitative research with quantitative methods and presentations of data.
Also, I think that research that is
solely based upon qualitative research could very well stand strong on it’s own
compared to the quantitative methods that at least need to be compared with
other studies or case studies within the research to get a true value. I think
that we in the western society trust numbers too much sometimes or give them
more influence than necessary most of the time. They saying, “everything is
relative” is applicable on quantitative methods but not on qualitative in the
same manner. Take money for instance, is 500 SEK a lot of money? This fairly
simple question will probably get a rather hard-to-draw graph because 500 SEK
is valued different depending on the living conditions of the person or persons
you ask. Then we could say that let us instead ask them what is 500 SEK to you?
And we might get answers as “a restaurant visit” or “an after work” or “money
worth a month of food”. Now we get a chance to categorize the answers and start
to see patterns in the answers. But still we can’t get rid of the distribution
of the answer so it is still hard to say or present in pure data what 500 SEK
is actually worth, except it is worth 500 SEK which in turn is more than 100
SEK but less than 1000 SEK. With this example we can see that numbers is valued
compared to other numbers and as this is valueless in its own. Especially in a
research if not compared to other numbers. Let’s say that in a given test that
a test-user scores a 4 out of 10 when interacting with a prototype system. The
first view of the score seems low because 3 is under ½ of 10 but if compared to
the implemented systems test-scores with a average score of 3/10 then maybe
4/10 is really good in this case.
If we instead look at the
qualitative methods and the information generated from these methods I will say
that the results in it’s own gives us a more rigid picture within the frame of
the research, the case study if you so will. The problem with qualitative
methods and the result of these methods will probably be that it is very hard
to use the arguments outside it’s context which would be the case study or the
frame that the research sets before the research starts. I remember that I read a research paper in
the course that was named “Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among
Homeless Youth” we can see that already in the title the usefulness of this
paper in other settings are quite low. After having read the paper I can inform
you that the paper focus is in the U.S and a single city. This makes it even
less useful in a bigger context. The outer frame is the borders of the U.S but
U.S is a big country and the findings in this paper would probably not hold
true if the same research was realized in an other city within the U.S.
The problem with qualitative
focused papers is at the same time the strength and validation they offer.
Because it is probably easy to re-do the research when you have set clear
frames beforehand and you can say very much about the phenomena you research
within the frame or with given attributes.
This course has been
interesting for me and I will make use of some of the things the course
presented when the time comes for me to start with my master thesis.
