I am learning qualitative research methods this semester, and the following are some excerpts from qualitative methods books. They resonate with my belief about research and sort of make me feel better.

Changes

“No one should plan or finance an entire study in advance with the expectation of relying chiefly upon interviews for data unless the interviewers have enough relevant background to be sure that they can make sense out of interview conversations or unless there is a reasonable hope of being able to hang around of in some way observe so as to learn what it is meaningful and significant to ask.” (Dexter, 1970, p. 17).

“Well-structured, focused questions are generally the result of an interactive design process, rather than being the starting point for developing a design.” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 66)

I got to know that changes happen during research, and it is normal. There are practical reasons such as IRB review, financial and time limits that constrain changes during research, but I should not feel bad when changes happen. They do happen!

Personal Goals, Practical Goals, and Intellectual (scholarly) Goals

“Traditionally, students ave been told to base this decision [of the topic, issue, or question selected for study] on either faculty advice or the literature on their topic. However, personal goals and experiences play an important role in many research studies.” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 16)

“Choosing a research problem through the professional or personal experience route may seem more hazardous than through the suggested [by faculty] or literature routes. This is not necessarily true. The touchstone of your own experience may be more valuable an indicator for you of a potentially successful research endeavor.” (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, p. 35-36)

“Traditionally, discussions of personal goals in research methods texts have accepted, implicitly or explicitly, the ideal of the objective, disinterested scientist, and have emphasized that the choice of research approaches and methods should be determined by the research questions that you want to answer. However it is clear from autobiographies of scientist (e.g., Heinrich, 1984) that decisions about research methods are often far more personal than this, and the importance of subjective motives and goals in science is supported by a great deal of historical , sociological and philosophical work.”  (Maxwell, 2005, p. 18)

“In addition to your personal goals, [...] there are practical goals (including administrative or policy goals) and intellectual goals. Practical goals are focused on accomplishing something–meeting some need, changing some situation, or achieving some objective. Intellectual goals, in contrast, are focused on understanding something–gaining insight into what is going on and why this is happening, or answering some question that previous research has not adequately addressed.”   (Maxwell, 2005, p. 21)

I got to know that research questions are usually based on intelectual goals rather than practical goals, and actually, questions based on practical goals are usually not directly answerable. Practical goals are the “so what” piece, the implication of the research, and are of particular importance for justifying the research.

The following figure is from the article, and it provides a framework for thinking about students’ experience as a whole. I may adopt this model for my data analysis, though not data in every categorizes in this model can be found online.

Figure from: Keeling, R. P. (2004). Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience. National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.

Second, regarding what is wrong, I think the key failure point is that each of us has too much freedom for ourselves, but not enough freedom for participating the class with Adobe Connect. We cannot see others if they are not the current presenter, and other people cannot see us if we are not presenting. Other people cannot hear us either if we do not press the “talk” button. We lost the supervision, and self-discipline doesn’t work all the time. Basically we could do anything else–eat, do homework for other subjects, check Facebook feed, etc. We had too much freedom, and I ate too many milk duds while listening to others’ talk. Adobe Connect may be perfect for people who have to attend boring conferences all the time, but definitely not for engaging students in class.  Although all of us had talk priorities, we had to press the “talk” button at the risk of interfering the presenter, overloading the network and introducing lots of echos. So many of us would rather type in the chat box rather than speak. The social affordance of Adobe Connect doesn’t support free discussion as much as in Google+ Hangout.

Finally, Adobe Connect is designed for formal conferences, and Google+ Hangout is designed for informal friendly hangout. Experiences of using them for Tech621 made me realize they do have lots of differences depending on their specific purposes. Any such software in the future, if the purpose is for remote class, should consider how to engage students (let students want to and feel easy to participate) as the highest priority.

It is not the machine, not the algorithms. It is human nature. The machine is learning from the human beings eventually, and the machine is just augmenting human reality. My argument is that for a person who has relatively open and balanced mind, the machine personalization results will be fairly balanced, and the recommendation results will serve good knowledge discovery. Only for persons who initially themselves have huge biased opinions and worldviews towards certain things, the machine personalization results will be biased. I don’t think the machine is making things worse, the machine is just reflecting the reality, and it is good that machine is making us see the reality so we can figure out a way to solve it. What results these biased and closed opinions are essentially human nature, and it’s not the machine’s responsibility to solve this problem.

Close minded people always exist, no matter whether Google search exists. Even if there is no Google search and other things, these people will not seek or listen opinions outside of their chamber what so ever. We dream that actually machine can solve this problem by providing opposite and diversity opinions (effort like Findory news), but the thing is not that easy, it is difficult to move people out of their comfort zone, so Findory failed.

To solve this problem, we have to open our mind first, or some of us. Then we figure out a way that could open other people’s mind more effectively, and make the machine do it.

To sum up, what I am arguing it that, at this moment, machine personalization and recommendation is not doing bad things (not that good either, just fact) it’s just reflecting human reality. What we have to realize is that the problem is not the machine, it’s ourselves, machine is just letting us see our flaws that we don’t want to face sometimes. In the future, we need to figure out ways to let the machine do good on this.

2. Definition:

Social Discovery: the collaborative processes that promote creating capabilities and seeking solutions. “In its most ambitious form social discovery is the detection of new and important relationships, patterns or principles that advance disciplines and make valuable contributions to society.”

3. Purpose

Propose a framework of design of search tools that support social discovery.

4. Methods

Based on previous theories of information seeking, work in CSCW and the Reader-to-Leader framework of social participation.

Figuire1. The Reader-to-Leader framework suggests that the typical path for social media participation moves from reading online content to making contributions, initially small edits, but growing into more substantive contributions. The user-gen- erated content can be edits to a wiki, comments in a discussion group, ratings of movies, photos, music, animations or videos. Collaborators work together over periods of weeks or months to make more substantial contributions, and leaders act to set policies, deal with problems, and mentor new users.

5. Main Findings

(1) The shift of searching tools: specific fact-finding–> open-ended exploratory search –> social discovery (collaboration in creating capabilities and seeking solutions)

(2) The Social Discovery framework. “The social discovery concept extends the ideas from the creativity and discovery support tools based on information visualization, team coordination and design tools.” It emphasize not only the information seeking, but also participation and creativity. “Valuable contributions also come from those who tag, taxonomize, comment, annotate, rank, rate, review and summarize.”

Figure 2. The Social Discovery framework describes the two stages of work: creating capacity and seeking solutions. These are carried out by a dialog between those who initiate requests and those who provide responses over a period of weeks and months.

5. Analysis: This is a theory paper from a computer scientist. Ben Sheinderman is a big figure in HCI and Information Visualization. He advocates the revolution of science to science 2.0 to really consider real social problems utilizing the web. This is a framework or guideline on design of computation tools that better support human and their social interaction in the processing of searching for knowledge. It is set to “promote thinking about and conducting research into the mechanisms that facilitate social discovery”. It mentions that “the implications are profound for academic, industrial and government researchers, since they force re-consideration of reward structures, especially for creating capabilities, which deserve more recognition in tenure or promotion reviews.” I am excited to see a big figure in computer science really embraces the idea of social media to do good for our humanity, and admire a lot of his thoughts and insight.

I wrote this at Valenti’s day this year. Still looks a brilliant post~

This is a reply to Eli Pariser’s idea of filter bubble.

I feel this blog post is talking about the future of recommendation and personalization, that is, where recommendation and personalization should lead to. However, Eli Pariser is talking about the existing recommendation and personalization (how it is being done now). There are maybe a couple of recommender systems now are doing the right thing, such as Findory’s news recommendations mentioned in the blog. Yet many of them are doing what Eli Pariser is saying as filter bubble. Actually, both of Eli Pariser and Greg Linden in this blog post are hopping the future of recommendation would support discovery and serendipity–they are talking about the same thing. This post mentioned that the Findory’s news received a lot of complaints for recommending diverse news, so they may very well go to the filtering path because of these complaints which Eli Pariser is against.

Also personalization and recommendation is a bit different. Personalization is more of personal control and filtering, while recommendation is about new knowledge discovery.

(2) The insightful Google+ post accidentally shared with the public by Steve Yegge.

(3) An thoughtful post by one of our ENE colleagues about opening up academia.

I will mention why I put this video here at the end of this post.

I briefly summarize a few papers and add some of my thoughts following each two papers.

01. Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our Brain,  by Nicholas Carr

Claim (argument): The Internet is changing our way of processing information to become shallow and make us less capable for concentration and contemplation.

Evidence: Start with personal experience of not being able to concentrate on reading and writing–>Expand to friends, acquaintances (literacy types)–>Bloggers he followed–>Scholarly studies that the web is changing the way we read and think ( simple, clear and well-structured way of generalizing and developing the argument)

02. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by Maggie Jackson

Claim (argument): Modern technologies is eroding our attention, thus the ability of deep, sustained focus and analytical reasoning as a society. We are facing a real risk of social decline if we do not nurture our attention.

Evidence: parallel to history; ADD; busyness, multitasking; empirical studies about kids multitasking, low patience, and lack of analytical reasoning ability; Power Point; Theories about attention and it’s importance, etc.

My thought on the topic of the two papers above:

I think maybe we can make an analogy of the society growing to a human child growing. My mum always tells me how she was astonished about and even “admirable” to me about how much I could concentrate on things when I was around 1-3 years old. When I started to learn how to use  scissors, one night, I was using the scissors to cut papers and I refused to go to bed, when my mum woke up from her sleep, I was still cutting papers maybe already for 2-3 hours. I was so concentrated and forget about the time, or I think I didn’t really have the concept of time, all things in my world was scissors and papers.  Another time, I would sit on the floor and play lego (the Chinese version of similar building block toy as lego) for 2 hours nonstop.  However, as I grow up, I start to be aware of time, I start to need to process more and more information, and my world is not that pure anymore. I feel I could never go back to that kind of mental status anymore even when I try my best to concentrate. When I spend too much time tackling some hard problems I get panic about time, because I have so many other things to do, so I start to look for some easier solutions, then I lose the spirit of never giving up, drilling on the hard part, and deeply polishing my analytical reasoning ability. This is almost inevitable as a part of growing up. Most adults’ worlds are much more complicated than children’s. We have to consciously process lots of information, and we need to worry about lots of things. The growing process is also the process that we go out of the ego stage (Piaget developmental theories) and start to be aware of the outside world, the cost is that we are inevitable exposed to more information, and maybe distracted by this information.

As a society, we are growing like a human child. As we growing, we inevitably need more information and communication with others. Modern technologies esp. the web went a long way to promote this growing by allowing easy information diffusion and communication among people, so we become aware of way more things than before. Also, inevitably, we get distracted by these things, but this is part of growing up. We are getting more mature, we need to learn how to deal with this and cultivate our lost attention.

If this analogy is appropriate, is the society going to die some day just like a human being is going to die eventually? Do modern technologies somehow speed the dying of the society at the same time it speeds the growing of the society? How old is the society now? Is death the dark age Jackson predicted?

05. Self-interruption on the Computer, by Jing Jin and Laura Dabbish

Research goal: Why do people interrupt themselves on the computer and switch to doing something else? What do internally generated interruptions look like in practice? What are their potential negative and positive side-effects?

Methods: Shadowing observations of 13 participants doing their normal work tasks on computers followed by 30min to 1 hour retrospective interviews; grounded theory; theoretical sampling to only analyze the internal interruption data; verified using independent coders

Main findings: A typology of self-interruption on computer. Seven types of self-interruptions were identified: adjustment, break, inquiry, recollection, routine, trigger, and wait.

06. Multitasking and Monotasking, by Dario Salvucci and Peter Bogunovich

Research goal: To test a claim that when users are alerted to interruptions at points of higher mental workload, they delay processing of the interruption until they have reached a point of lower metal workload.

Methods: 20 users participated the study; Participants have to do a mail task on customer support, while answering interrupting chat messages. The chat prompt was generated at a pseudo-random point: the system tracked the user’s events, after one of eight different events, triggered a chat prompt 50-200ms after the event. Users can choose to defer the chat. System recorded all the transitions and researchers analyze the transitions between events.

Main findings: Verified the claim. The experiment also helps to clarify one source of mental workload, namely the problem state—temporary information needed for task processing.

My thought on the topic of the two papers above:

The second paper above mainly talks about external interruptions, but it also says in the discussion section that “we would suspect (though further research would need to be confirm) that this ability also generalizes to user self-interruptions and discretionary multitasking”. I highly doubt this assumption/hypothesis. Users maybe capable to deal with external interruptions when they are inconsistent with the users working mode, however, internal interruptions are more difficult to control.

07. The Laptop and the Lecture: the Effects of Multitasking in Learning Environments, by Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay

Research goal: To test two hypothese:

H1: Students in the open laptop condition would perform significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the lecture material.

H2: The memory decrement observed would not result from the relatedness of the content viewed in the secondary task (laptop use) to the primary task (lecture information). In other words, content relevance would not contribute significantly to the variance observed in the main effect above.

Methods: Two groups of students (22 in each group). One group was encouraged to use laptop during the lecture, while the other group was not allowed to use laptop. All the students were tested about the content of the lecture immediately after the lecture. ANOVA analysis.   

Main findings: The two hypotheses were proved, but this is only for immediate test of memory after the lecture. For the overall performance, the average score of using laptops in class is B+, which is very good. This is largely because the structure of the class was nontraditional, highly interactive and dynamic. Had the class been more traditional and grades determined by conventional test of memory the outcome of students who use laptops may have been different.

09. Caught in the Web: university student use of Web resources, by Yu-Mei Wang and Marge Artero

Research goal: 1. How do students use web resources (academic vs. non-academic); 2. What are the students online search behaviors? 3. What are the students’ perceptions of web resources? 4. Do students evaluate information on the web? 5. What types of training do students perceive they need to successfully utilize web resources?

Methods:700 questionnaires about information literacy skills. SPSS.

Main findings: the findings of this study show that there is an urgent need for students to develop information literacy skills and apply these skills in the electronic information environment.

My thought on the topic of the two papers above:

Whether or not to use internet in classroom has been a huge debt. Some think technology will fail education, as it can hugely distract students. Most say technology will save education. The question needs to be discussed is not whether or not to use, but how to use. How to guide the students to properly use, and how to change the structure of the class and the assessment methods to be more supportive for using web in class. There is a digital ethnography video provoking lots of thoughts on this. I loved this video a lot. I put this video at the beginning of this post to call for your “attention”.