The first thing that I really noticed, or came to my mind, after reading the two papers for this theme was that I once again came in contact with grounded theory (Cleveland-Innes et al. 2011), as I did in Theme 1. Although the name would suggest that it is a theory, it is, however, more a methodology on how to construct a theory. But since that is the case, I guess you could say that grounded theory (GT) is kind of a type V theory as Gregor (2006) proposed as a theory type. Anyway, GT seems to be very flexible when it comes to analyzing and making relations between data, both quantitative and qualitative. So maybe it’s something that I’ll use in some future school paper, who knows.
The theme for next week is supposed to be quantitative methods, but the readings touch more or less mixed methods, although the one by Lowenthal et al. (2009) is explicitly about mixed methods. Although the paper purpose itself as an examination on how to do proper research on e-learning, I think it serves a better purpose as a general guide on how to do mixed research. I found the emphasis on e-learning not getting so much attention in the paper, which is why I think it serves a better purpose as a general guide. Despite missing it’s own point/purpose, I think the paper excels in explaining the problems with conducting research and a must read before you yourself conduct mixed research.
Going back to Cleveland-Innes et al. (2011), I would like to examine the conclusions and the impact (adding knowledge and implications) of the paper. I think the conclusions are indeed logical extensions of the data; however, it’s hard for me to really tell because I have no relation or understanding of data tables presented in the paper. I’ve tried to read through a couple of more times, but I still have hard understanding the numbers. Maybe after having conducted the workshop next week I’ll have a better understanding of quantitative data. The conclusions says that, “yeah, emotion is present in e-learning”, paraphrasing it down to easy to understand english. So it’s kind of a kickstarter; they make suggestions on how to do a more rigid research in the same field, so the conclusions are kind of useful if you yourself want to know where to start.
What impact does the paper then have on future research? Well, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, they make suggestions on how to carry on. However, I don’t think that they have brought so much new things to the table, so to speak. They themselves says that the results are in line with previous work, that suggest that emotion is present in e-learning. Even though that is the case, I understand that social sciences needs to redo the same research from time to time, incase of cultural change, different times etc. However, I find it kind of odd asking if emotion is present in learning, or in this case e-learning. Of course emotion is always present regardless what we humans do! But alas, you can make no such assumption when doing research, so I suppose the paper add a small step to the common knowledge of humanity. If I could change one thing about the paper, it would be to better explain the diagrams and numbers. Maybe it is explained good in the paper, but then I’m totally missing it. Next week may bring some clarification to that.
I look forward to next week and I hope I’ll learn a lot about quantitative methods!
References:
Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P. (2011). Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.
Gregor, S. (2006), The Nature of Theory in Information Systems
Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N. (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.
The theme for next week is supposed to be quantitative methods, but the readings touch more or less mixed methods, although the one by Lowenthal et al. (2009) is explicitly about mixed methods. Although the paper purpose itself as an examination on how to do proper research on e-learning, I think it serves a better purpose as a general guide on how to do mixed research. I found the emphasis on e-learning not getting so much attention in the paper, which is why I think it serves a better purpose as a general guide. Despite missing it’s own point/purpose, I think the paper excels in explaining the problems with conducting research and a must read before you yourself conduct mixed research.
Going back to Cleveland-Innes et al. (2011), I would like to examine the conclusions and the impact (adding knowledge and implications) of the paper. I think the conclusions are indeed logical extensions of the data; however, it’s hard for me to really tell because I have no relation or understanding of data tables presented in the paper. I’ve tried to read through a couple of more times, but I still have hard understanding the numbers. Maybe after having conducted the workshop next week I’ll have a better understanding of quantitative data. The conclusions says that, “yeah, emotion is present in e-learning”, paraphrasing it down to easy to understand english. So it’s kind of a kickstarter; they make suggestions on how to do a more rigid research in the same field, so the conclusions are kind of useful if you yourself want to know where to start.
What impact does the paper then have on future research? Well, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, they make suggestions on how to carry on. However, I don’t think that they have brought so much new things to the table, so to speak. They themselves says that the results are in line with previous work, that suggest that emotion is present in e-learning. Even though that is the case, I understand that social sciences needs to redo the same research from time to time, incase of cultural change, different times etc. However, I find it kind of odd asking if emotion is present in learning, or in this case e-learning. Of course emotion is always present regardless what we humans do! But alas, you can make no such assumption when doing research, so I suppose the paper add a small step to the common knowledge of humanity. If I could change one thing about the paper, it would be to better explain the diagrams and numbers. Maybe it is explained good in the paper, but then I’m totally missing it. Next week may bring some clarification to that.
I look forward to next week and I hope I’ll learn a lot about quantitative methods!
References:
Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P. (2011). Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.
Gregor, S. (2006), The Nature of Theory in Information Systems
Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N. (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.
I totally agree with you about the vague explanation of the diagrams and the numbers. Also, I expected a more clarified explanation of the method and the result especially when so many abstract terms like emotion, social and presence are involved. I read several sentences many times as well, but was still very confused in the end. In addition, I believe it´s quite difficult to accomplish reliable general studies about emotions obviously because it´s hard to make comparatively objective conclusions and they could in turn easily be questioned.
SvaraRaderaI felt like you did regarding the analysis. I did not really understand it, even though I read it a couple of times. And it also seemed that they drew very simple conclusions from the analysis, by just saying that they were right and emotion exist in online learning. I would have liked to have more discussion, but I think it might be hard because of that it is hard to do quantitative analysis with qualitative data (like I believe they did in the paper).
SvaraRadera