Final Blog

For my reflection to the entire study of the course “theory and method for media technology”, it can be described as a process from abstract concepts to virtual or practical knowledge. As the aim of the course is to provide us a deeper understanding of scientific theories and methods relevant for media technology research, now I am more confident to deal with the scientific research with the knowledge gained from this significant course. 

Actually during the first weeks I was confused that only abstract philosophy was discussed in the class, while later I was aware of the essential guidance for our further scientific research of media technology. As media technology mainly focus on developing application interacted with human, it is obvious that learning humans from philosophy such as the relationship between knowledge, cognition and perception. Furthermore discussing and studying media in philosophical way is necessary for us to figure out what role of media technology plays in human society.

Based on six themes, here I intend to collate knowledge I learned to conclude two main research methods according to the key concepts and relative sample literatures required during the preparation of every lecture. That is also the most impressive and useful benefit I got from this course.

One is mainly using quantitative method to obtaining knowledge. Like the paper I read for theme 4 as Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth written by Eric Rice, Anamika Barman-Adhikari is a typical research paper based on quantitative method. When we try to explore some interesting social phenomenon or human behaviors, the whole procedure can be structured as formulating a hypothesis, selecting sample objects, designing an experiment such as interview, observation and questionnaire test, gathering data, analyzing statistics by comparison or classifying to summarize results, discussing results and verifying the hypothesis. One thing we may ignore generally but shows strong impact of reliability of empirical data in one of my practical project for another course is testing the questionnaires before conducting the experiment. Without validating the test we just asked the participants to do the test in which time recording of reaction for every question and the rate of correct answers are used for data analysis. During the test, a very serious problem appeared that the test is quite long so it is obvious that user became fatigue at the test and the results were misleading.

The process from getting an idea to selling it can be regarded as another typical research method. According to five steps from Haibo Li, first step which also occupies 90% of our effort is coming up with an idea. The left steps are filtering the idea, validating the idea, evaluating the idea and marketing the idea. Designing a good prototype of the solution to the idea I think would be the best choice to evaluate the idea and also help interact between desired system and users. As the prototype is developed by the original method and key ideas, it should cover almost considered features or possibly it would cause application not to be used as the full system was designed. Liking “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” written by Shafiq ur Réhman, Jiong Sun, Li Liu, and Haibo Li, it is a complete model sample of this kind of research method which covers proposing the key idea, designing the experimental platform and even user experience.

No matter what kind of research method it is, theory undoubtedly appears and supports the research. A very impressive conclusion about theory to me is that theory is something we construct to explain what, why and how of an event or study. Therefore when we want to pick up theory as reference, we need to be patient to selecting the real theory rather than misunderstanding empirical data, hypothesis and references as theory.

There is a interesting view about case study i got from llias’ lecture that case study can be a way to start a big study, once we got enough knowledge about a particular situation, we can move it to a widely use. Although I know case study applied both in quantitative and qualitative research, one problem I still confused about is when and why case study can be used in scientific research . As the definition of case study is explained as an in depth study of a particular situation to group, it has a significant limitation which is difficult to generalize result to larger population or situation. For example, if defining an idea from a case study and then designing a prototype referring to the method, it seems that probably only a small market is suitable for the idea.

I learned a lot of knowledge about doing a good scientific research from the course, but it is not enough, reading more excellent scientific paper and practice developing complete research constantly is also important because knowledge is always obtained from experiences.