- Theme 1: Theory of Knowledge and Theory of Science
Hej :) You did a great job trying to explain both Kant's and Plato's perspective in your first blogpost, although you said that you didn't got everything they said at first. Seems like you put a lot of effort in comparing the two views, which I think helps a lot understanding them both. I also agree with you, that Kant's view of the world is more suitable when compared to nowadays way of thinking. Plato's explanation of great minds is in my opinion a very abstract way of trying to find a solution to the cornerstone of knowledge and truth. As you have written in your after post discussing whether there exist such a thing as a true world, I think that this is maybe the most difficult thought about the two concepts of Kant and Plato. For me I really had to try hard to not get on the wrong track by focusing to much on the definition of truth, knowledge and the true world. It is important to always keep in mind how the author of the text lived that days and how his perspective on the world was influenced by history and the time he lived in. The lecture for theme 2 helped me a lot by understanding how important it is to know something about the author and its history and standpoint.
Hej :) As you said in your post I don't think you can understand everything Kant and Plato meant when writing their texts. One of the reasons for that is that we don't live in the same time they lived and we are not influenced by the same history, political situation and perspective on knowledge. That is one of the most important things I have learned in the last weeks. I think the main goal of our blog is to figure out how we deal with philosophy but also to learn how important it is to investigate every part of a text (even its history, the situation of the author and of course the at that time way of thinking) to really understand what it tells us. I can see the progress you made from reading and trying to understand the text to actually understand at least most of what they tried to say in the text. In my opinion everybody deals with the same problem from not knowing if you got the text right in the beginning to finally understanding what you read a week before and what the text says.
Hej :) Although you wrote that you have never read a text like that before, I think you got the most important things in the first post. Of course figuring out what is important and actually understanding it are two very different things. Your last sentence says that you feel like you have more questions after finally understanding what the texts are about is probably the goal of the lecture. Without getting the main conclusion of the texts you would not even be able to form new questions about the topic. In my opinion the most important fact of philosophy is that the feeling that you need to ask more questions afterwards is the result of dealing with a text instead of feeling completely confident about a topic. You need to always remember that for example Kant and Plato described only one way of thinking about a special topic. They wrote what they thought in their perspective is the most accurate way of dealing with a problem. By keeping that in mind having questions after finally understanding a text might prevent you from feeling totally insecure about everything and let you feel a bit more confident about your work.
Hej :) I like your last paragraph about how lots of people are stuck in their own perspective. It pretty much sums up what I think theme 1 should told us. Changing the perspective leads to very impressive thoughts and big discovery of how the world works. That's what we have to keep in mind during our studies! What helped me with the understanding of the difference between a priori and posteriori knowledge was that Kant sees a priori knowledge as given. I struggled a lot when I tried to understand that, but then I realized that you can also see something as given, which made the process of getting the difference between those two concepts for me a lot easier. Writing down important parts of the text might be a good way to not only get the meaning of the text, but also to sum up what the main points are.
Hej :) I really like your writing about how you learned to deal with philosophical texts. The mixture of challenging and feeling that nothing makes sense at all and finally getting what the texts are about is in my opinion the perfect way to learn the most about a topic. The "not understanding" part leads to the "finally understanding" part which makes you rethink your way how you got trough the topic and with that you really learn a lot and keep most of it in your mind. You wrote that you had to read some paragraphs about ten times to get what they are about. That is probably the way most of us handled the reading, because of its at that time used wording. What helped me the most while reading the text was to find other sources which pointed out the most important points of the text. That helped me putting the difficult wording into something that makes sense. Knowing what it is about makes it easier to understand it better. Maybe when you try to read it again after all the hard work you put into it it might get a lot easier to understand every single word.
Hej :) It feels like you really made a good progress during the week of theme 1. I really like the metaphor with the playground, which describes pretty much everything about empiricism. With that example I think the understanding of Kant's faculty of understanding (the framework of necessary forms and categories) and its final practical use gets a lot clearer when you compare it to your example with the playground. It is very interesting how everybody has different examples, which help them to understand the very demanding topic. That shows us once again how important it is to explain the concepts with todays examples, where we can put ourselves in their position a lot better.
Hej :) I like how you compare Kant's way of thinking to your experience with empiricism in school. Actually finding an absolute truth might take more time than one person has to spend on it. But I think thats what Kant wanted to point out in his text. By changing the perspective you can reach high goals and learn something completely new about the world. Socrates way of thinking might not lead to empiricism, which in my opinion makes a lot of things difficult, because we need to describe our world in some way. By saying that everybody perceives things in their own way, nobody would ever feel the same about one particular thing. As you wrote in your text understanding the "schoolbook version of Kant" points out how difficult it actually is to really understand what he meant with his full version. The comparison to the schoolbook version made me understand how complex the topic is.
Hej :) You did a great job explaining how assuming that every object is the way we see it keeps us from thinking further than our own horizon prevents us to. I also got that the same way that focusing on finding true knowledge might mislead us in our way of thinking. Your reflection on the theme shows how you made a good progress in understanding what Kant meant with a priori and a posteriori. I spend a lot of time on thinking about objective knowledge and how it is possible or not and I found it very interesting how the perspective of Kant differs to the way Plato feels about objectivity. You analyzed that very well in your reflection and it feels like you really got the difference between the two perspectives.
Hej :) I really like your structure of your pre-post because you focused on the most important facts and explained them in a very good way. Your reflection shows how you the seminar helped you with the more unclear things in the text. To deal with the God's point of view it is somehow interesting that we have to pick a point of view, but it also clarifies which basis Kant used to write his text. Thinking about how he thought about the God's point of view made it a lot easier for me to understand what the text really is about.
Hej :) I like how you point out that Kant did focus on the structure of knowledge and not on where it comes from. That was my biggest problem while dealing with the two texts. I always questioned where Kant says that knowledge comes from until I realized that this is not his main goal and he is not really covering the origin of knowledge. At least Kant talks about God's point of view which for me is very hard to get but it helped me to focus on the way he structured knowledge according to space and time and the twelve categories. Your reflection also shows how your understanding of the texts did improve by discussing and questioning it.
- Theme 2: Critical Media Studies
It looks like you spend a lot of time to understand and think about Nominalism and Enlightnment. I can see that you made good progress from reading the text and answering the questions to finally understand what those two terms are about and how they relate to each other. I really like your paragraph about myth. As you said it is very interesting that we still need myth to more or less take the fear from the unknown. In my opinion there will always be the need of creating new myth or even hanging on to existing ones because we will never know all about the world.
I like how most of us have the same issues with fully understanding the texts we have to read in the first place. All the time after the seminar I feel like I finally got everything right, which might be there goal anyway. You did a great job summarizing the main points of the theme in your reflection. I feel like theme 2 was until now the most interesting topic, but also the hardest to understand every detail. You explained the Plato's cave allegory in a good way and for me that was the example I needed to finally understand the difference between Realism and Nominalism.
You did a good job summarizing the main points of the theme in your reflection. I like how you deal with the different views of Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer, because that's what made me understand what the texts tell more or less between the lines. Knowing how they lived at that time and what the historical context was is probably the most important thing I learned during theme 2. Your example with the right to vote is a very good one and describes well how the perspectives of the authors differ because of how they were used to the current situation and how they took it for more or less granted.
As you wrote in your reflection it is so important to put the texts in context with the authors historical situation and to keep in mind under which circumstances they grew up and lived. I like how you relate your knowledge about the theme to "Brave New World" and how you point out the similar perspectives and main points. It is interesting that both Adorno & Horkheimer and Huxley were talking about a "drug" when it comes to entertainment and amusement. For me it is very impressive that they had a quite similar understanding about mass media like we do nowadays, especially when it comes to risks and danger caused by the use of mass media.
It is always a pleasure to read your well structured thoughts about how you worked trough the topic. You summarized pretty much everything we discussed in the seminar and which has not been clear to everybody before. I like how you explain reproduction and the aura of art with the privilege of experiencing. The seminar helped me a lot to understand the difference between Realism and Nominalism and the relation to each other. For me the discussion in the seminar is always very exhausting because in the first place I feel like I got everything totally wrong when it turns out that everyone got a little different meaning of the terms. But afterwards it is such a good feeling when finally everything starts to make sense and all the stuff we discussed in the small group actually helped us to make good progress.
I like how you structure your reflection to the questions we tried to answer when preparing for the theme. It really shows how you improved your knowledge and how many things make more sense to you afterwards. The seminar really helped me to understand the difference between Nominalism and Realism. When I answered the questions I was not sure if I really got why Nominalism is an important concept in the text, but after discussing it in the seminar and also reading your reflection and adjusted answer I think I finally got it right.
I really like your explanation and of the terms superstructure and substructure. By illustrating how editing an existing movie (with zooming, cutting, etc.) you gave a very good example to understand how perception can change things. The link to media technology and it fast changes in the last couple of years made me fully understand what those two terms are about. I found the discussion about aura and how reproduction destroys it during the seminar very interesting. At the one hand reproduction was necessary to give everybody access to art but on the other hand it destroys the uniqueness of an art piece.
I also felt like knowing the historical context in which a text has been written is very important to understand everything in it. The two texts showed how the different situation from the authors affect the way they perceived things and described it in their work. Dealing with Realism I think most of us got the term wrong in the first place and you did a good job to point that out again in your reflection. After the seminar I felt like I finally got what Realism is and how it differs from Nominalism. When it comes to the way Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer thought about the revolutionary potential of things I like how we can see again how important it is to realize in which situation they wrote the text.
You did a got job summarizing the most important points that we discussed in theme 2. I like how you explain the revolutionary potential of media and culture. I discussed that in former lectures but I never put it into a historical context, like we did in this theme. I totally agree with you that Henrik Åhman did a very good job. I liked how he structured the lecture and pointed out the importance of the historical context of the authors.
I like your reflection and which points you chose to discus in it. You did a good job explaining how important the role of good was in the understanding of nature in former times and how finding out how for example gravity works and how we can actually describe the world somehow without God's point of view. The different perspectives on how media and culture have revolutionary potential or not show how important the historical context from the authors is and that we need to understand why and under which circumstances a text was written.
- Theme 3: Research and Theory
You did a good job summarizing last weeks theme. Although I also did not get why we spent so much time on discussing the question "what is man?", but it showed once again how hard it is to find the one definition for some terms. The seminar also helped me understanding the table we used to classify the used theory in our paper. As you mentioned in your post the discussion of if a religion is a theory or a hypothesis was very interesting, although it was sometimes a little bit difficult for me to not loose the track. I like how you pointed out what Ilias said about how we should be careful when using the term truth, because there is no absolute truth.
I like how your post shows how your understanding of theory changed during the last theme. The way Sutton and Saw explained what theory is not also helped me to broaden my horizon about what theory is. I also felt that actually using the knowledge we got from the texts by choosing and analyzing a paper on our own felt good and it showed me once again how critical you have to be when reading someones work. It is always good to keep in mind that papers are also just written by a person who can make mistakes. Seems like you did a good job when catching up about the lecture you missed. I totally agree that talking about theory is easier because it feels as you wrote more tangible than discussing what knowledge is.
I feel very much the same about last weeks topic as you do. The lecture gave good insights on how different theory can be and how hard it is to find an absolute definition for it. In my opinion it is so unsatisfactory to realize that we could probably discuss what theory is for our whole life and even though we would not find the one definition. The seminar reinforced this feeling when we discussed how important it is to put a definition of theory always in context with the subject/discipline/etc. I also liked the metaphor of the puzzle piece, which helps a lot to understand the relation of hypothesis and theory.
You did a great job summarizing what we learned during the last week. The sentence "A theory is therefore always something constructed and not something that exists by itself." clearly shows how important our former work on what knowledge is and how knowledge is created was. If I would have read this sentence a couple of weeks ago I would have seen it in a very different way as I do now after spending so much time on thinking about knowledge and theory. Seems like you put a lot of effort in explaining and summarizing the differences and relations between theory and hypothesis.
You did a good job summarizing what the theme was about and what you learnt in it. I like how you explain what theory is to you and how theory can differ in different subjects. The examples you gave in your reflection show how you have to change your perspective when talking about a theory in different sciences. It is very important to always remember that there is no absolute truth, as you wrote in your post. Thinking about how we probably created everything we know by doing research, finding explanation and proofing that things are as they are does not mean that they are definite.
You did a good job pointing out the most important points of the theme. Although I already know a lot about theory and hypothesis the question of what was first was very interesting and I started thinking about it way more than I thought I could. I liked the discussion in the seminar about religion which showed me that you can not always talk about theory and hypothesis just because something seems very similar. In my opinion your explanation with the "theory-flow" is very useful, because it shows how the process works (at least how I think it works). The term framework is a very good one to describe theory and I also liked the sentence "theory is what practice is not" a lot.
I think the affect of social media on the government and the use of social media for governmental communication is a very interesting topic. In my opinion the affects of social media to our everyday lives are immense and there are a lot of changes going on. You did a good job at summarizing what theory is and how theory and hypothesis differ from each other. I agree with you that this weeks theme was easier to understand than the ones before. As you wrote it was more concrete and we could actually use our gained knowledge to analyze our "own" paper.
As you wrote in your reflection it was (and still is) very hard to describe what a theory is in words. I always feel like I could write many pages about what theory is, but when I need to be concrete it is very hard to find the most suitable words for it. This is what makes me feel unsatisfied about discussing what theory is and what it is not. But I think the discussion of how theory and hypothesis differ but also are in a relation to each other helped me to improve my understanding of it. You did a very good job summarizing and explaining what theory is and how important it is to be careful when it comes to the term truth, which is never absolute. I like your last sentence about how we can just falsify something to find the relative truth about something and how we use that to proof is something is true or not.
It seems that you put a lot of effort in this weeks theme. Your explanation of what a theory is and how it is related to hypothesis is very detailed and includes all the important points about it. I totally agree with you that it would have been more interesting, when we would have discussed our chosen papers. As you said we did not really discuss the types of theory according to which we structured our chosen papers. I also discussed that with my group in the seminar, but a general explanation of it would have been nice.
I agree with you that it would have been more interesting when we would have discussed the same paper. It is very interesting how everybody has a little bit different concept of what a theory is. Therefore the discussion in the seminar was very interesting and I liked how we tried to find examples like the big bang theory. It seems that the seminar helped you with your understanding what a hypothesis is, which can be tricky in the first place. You did a good job summarizing and reflecting the most important points of last weeks theme.
- Theme 4: Quantitative Research
You did a very good job summarizing what last weeks theme was about. I agree with you that this theme was easier to deal with than the ones before and I think that most of us already have some know how in quantitative and qualitative research. While reading your reflection it feels like you discussed the benefits and limitations of different approaches very detailed and I like how you explain the differences between the methods and how they rely to each other. As you have written in your blogpost it feels more scientific to use a quantitative method but only because somebody used a quantitative method does not mean that the work is more valid. You could always make mistakes by choosing your sample or asking questions which influence the people.
Your chosen paper sounds very interesting and it would be even more interesting to know the results of the study. I like how you point out that a mix of both quantitative and qualitative methods is in many cases the best way to get results. In my bachelor I preferred to work with qualitative methods because you get more in-depth information about the participants. But as you said, when there are enough resources available the combination of both would produce more detailed results. I like how you discussed if a non-result study is also relevant. In my opinion there are no studies with no results. As you mentioned in your reflection every outcome of a study tells us something and is therefore important for science.
You did a very good job summarizing what we did in last weeks theme and especially when it comes to your detailed explanation how questionnaires work. As you wrote in your reflection designing a questionnaire is a very difficult and complex process and it is important to rethink every step before starting the study. For me the most important part is to ask if your design intends to meet your objectives and to double check if the questions do not lead in the wrong direction. It is always a pleasure to read your well structured and detailed explanation in your reflection.
I also felt that I did not get much new information about quantitative and qualitative research, but as Ilias pointed out during the seminar you cannot take for granted that all of us know so much about it. That is always a little bit eye-opening for me, because in my opinion everybody needed to write a bachelor thesis and should have used those methods or at least discussed them before. I agree that further research concerning the paper about virtual reality would be very interesting. We've been in the same small group during the seminar and I really enjoyed our discussion about our different bachelor thesis topics and which what methods everyone of us got to their results.
You did a very good job summarizing what is important when creating a questionnaire. Designing the right questions is probably the hardest part of using questionnaires as a research method. I like how you point out the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods. The part where you discuss wicked problems is very interesting, especially because we did not talk about that in our seminar. Having to many variables is a big issue when it comes to designing a research, because then you do not focus on one particular question but on many different ones.
Your bachelor thesis topic sounds very interesting. In my opinion the best way to understand quantitative and qualitative methods is to actually use them when doing research, as we all did in our bachelor. I really enjoyed the discussion we had in our small group about our bachelor thesis because it showed how our former education differs and how different focuses on different content create different designs. I like how you summarize the part where we talked about when to use which type of methods. It is always good to keep in mind that different sciences sometimes use different methods, like qualitative methods used for sociological studies.
You did a good job summarizing the main points we discussed during theme 4. It seems that you already knew something about the concept of quantitative methods but I like how it broadens your horizon when it comes to how careful you need to work with them. I like how you refer to Kant's quote "perception without conception is blind", because I also kept that in mind and thought about it again during last weeks theme. You gave a good example in your reflection how quantitative methods are not always the best way to analyze something. It points out how important it is to know the benefits and limitation of both quantitative and qualitative methods to design a good research.
Your reflection gives a good summary of what we did in last weeks theme. I think most of us already knew a lot about research methods but the part where we discussed how sometimes both quantitative and qualitative methods are needed to design a good study was new to most of us. When we discussed objectivity and subjectivity in those methods we also came up with the phenomena called social desirability which in my opinion is a big problem in many questionnaires. People behave like they think they have to and do not answer the questions honestly. I think this will always be a problem because we cannot see what is going on in other peoples head and most of the people would not admit that they behaved this way. I like how you explain why quantitative and qualitative methods do not differ in their objectivity/subjectivity, because many people might get that wrong and therefore use some methods out of different (or even wrong) reasons.
It seems that you put a lot of effort in understanding this theme and I like how you structure your reflection due to what you have done and what you learnt during the lecture and the seminar. You also show that you linked former themes to this weeks, which is probably the main goal of this course. I think you need to be careful when you say that quantitative research data is generalized and because of that reliable. For me the most important thing why a study can be reliable is because you can repeat the study and still get the same results. Therefore you need to have a good design of your method and preferable a very objective way of dealing with data. I like that you learned so much about quantitative and qualitative methods in this theme even you did not have that much knowledge about all that before.
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You did a good job summarizing the most important points about designing a questionnaire and creating solid questions. I did several questionnaires in my bachelor studies and it was always very hard to figure out all mistakes and weaknesses you had in your questionnaire. It is good to hear that connecting the theoretical approach to a real example helped you understanding the main goals of it.
- Theme 5: Design Research
I agree with you that reading the papers was the most interesting part of last weeks theme. For me the lectures were also a bit confusing and it seemed that both lecturers did not really follow a line in what they said. Although I like how you pointed out that it made you think about how important it is to not only focus on the problem but also on the definition of the problem and the solution. You did a very good job summarizing the last theme and I like how you structured your reflection. I also had the feeling that a seminar would have been helpful to discuss the topic, especially because it is very new to most of us.
You did a very good job in summarizing last weeks theme and as I probably said before I really like how you structure your reflections and add additional information to it. As you wrote in your reflection it is important that not only the idea is great but also that the timing and the market situation is suitable. Great ideas only work when people feel like they need them or at least when you can make them feel like they need something. Tablets are a good example for that. When they were invite many years ago nobody felt like they needed them so it did not really work to sell them. Nowadays Apple & Co. managed to make us feel like we cannot live without tablets and therefore they sell a huge number of them. I like how you point out that the daily use of something is also an important factor of a good. Otherwise it might not get that popular. In the final part of your reflection you did a good summary of what prototypes are and I do not really feel that I could add anything else to your part.
It is very interesting for me that you felt like you learned a lot in last weeks theme, because I do not feel the same way. I think the five criteria from Cisco summarize all the important thoughts you need to work out when designing research. The fourth point where it comes to the question if our work will be good is very important. What I've learned so far about research is that a research can only be good when there is an actual need to do it and when you can use the results to solve further problems. Realizing that design research is a completely different field of research also helped me to understand it better. Thank you for the tip about the Swedish Design Research Journal, I'll definitely have a look at it!
I really enjoyed reading your reflection about last weeks theme. I find it very interesting that you already did a prototype in high school and that you have experience with it. As you wrote having a physical prototype is good because you can use your senses to explore it. Of course there are some problems where you cannot create a physical prototype and others where you need to work with a prototype to find a solution. Using 90% of your time to define the problem is very important and I already realized that in former research projects I did. Without a solid definition of what you want to solve it is very hard to find a good solution. Sometimes it is just about the right words you use in definition but sometimes it is also the perspective from which you look at a specific problem. I like how you also mention that selling the idea is important to finally create a real product and design research is the way you manage to create a product that you can sell.
You did a very good job summarizing the main points about the two lectures from last weeks theme. I like how you shortly explain the five steps from having a vague idea to to selling a finished concept. For me the question about the difference between industry and design research was very interesting and it showed how science differs from practical work in the economy. It is great that you got to know more about empirical data in the lecture of Lundström. I think that the second lecture was not that good structured which made it hard for me to follow.
You did a good job summarizing the main points of last weeks theme. I feel like I have the same conclusions about the lecture like you wrote in your reflection. Especially the part of how important defining a problem is, was very interesting for me. I like how you tried to find a good explanation of prototypes and design research in other sources. Keep up the good work!
It is good to see that the lecture helped you with your understanding of the role of prototypes. As fas as I understood it the proof of concept shows you that your prototype work and that you can start conducting your research with it. When you have a questionnaire you also need to test the questions so that they don't lead into the wrong direction or influence the participants. For me you can compare that to prototypes and the proof if the concept is working.
I like how you point out the difference between industry and design research. As you wrote this was a very new perspective on the whole topic. The question about empirical data once again shows how important it is to fully understand your research and the method you use to get good results.
You did a great job summarizing all the important points of last weeks theme. Reading your reflection reminded me of some things I did not get from the lecture, but now I do. I think it is very important to keep the so called "tunnel vision" always in mind, because this might produce big complications with any research. We could come up with the word objectivity again when it comes to trusting yourself. The best way to do good research is to trust yourself but to trust the method you use even more. I like the part of your reflection from the lecture of Lundström that says that prototypes should provoke discussions, which makes it clear how important the use of them is. For me it was very interesting to see the different perspectives of the lecturers on the topic. As you wrote Li had a more industrial approach and Lundströmtalked more about the theoretical approach of design research and prototypes.
You did a great job summarizing the most important points about last weeks theme. I agree with you that the five points you listed summarize pretty much everything we learnt about solving problems. It is good to hear that you already learnt about this topic in your Bachelor and that you felt like it was a good repetition for you. For me the part about the prototypes was new and it was interesting to see the difference uses for prototype. Of course when it comes to research the main goal is to gain knowledge, but for the industry prototypes are very important to create and develop a good product and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Keep up the good work!
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It is good to hear that most of the time you try to start preparing for the theme a week earlier. Having time to think about what is new for us is in my opinion very important to fully understand a topic. You did a good job summarizing the most important points about last weeks theme. I already forgot about the different tools to filter ideas, but thanks to your reflection I now remember them again. I agree with you that the seminar would have been a good opportunity to discuss our thoughts and approaches and I think it helped most of us to understand the theme better.
- Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research
I agree with you that the missing lecture in this weeks theme made the discussions in the seminar very general and it was a bit hard to talk about the questions from our pre-blog in-depth without that much further knowledge about the topic. You did a good job summarizing what a case study is and what it is not. For me it was also a bit hard in the beginning to fully understand what a case study is. Therefore the seminar helped me a lot to get a better understanding of it. I also liked the end of the seminar with the discussion about Feyerabend and his argument that anything is possible. It is good to read that you feel that the course was very eye-opening for you.
I like your explanation about the number of participants in a study. The example you give with the one person with a very rare disease shows exactly why it is not about the number of participants. I also had problems with the definition of a case study in the beginning so it is good to hear that the seminar helped you too to understand it better. As you wrote a case study is not about the method, it is about the case. A good case for a case study is one where we do not know much about it. So case studies can be used to gain new knowledge about something.
I really enjoyed reading your well structured reflection. It is good to hear that the seminar helped you to get a better understanding about what a case study is. For me the perspective of Feyerabend that anything goes was a very good ending of this course. As you wrote it goes back to our first theme where we talked about reason and how everything we know is more or less limited. Feyerabend points out how important it is to not think to much in a box and broaden your horizon when it comes to solving problems.
You did a good job summarizing the main points of last weeks theme. Although I had problems with defining what a case study is in the beginning and the seminar helped me to understand that better I feel like the cancelled lecture would have provided more in-depth knowledge about both qualitative methods and case studies. It is good to hear that you had already a good understanding about what a case study is. I think that conducting a case study is very interesting because you never know what information you can get out of it and it could lead in very different directions than you expected it to. It would have been nice to get some examples of case studies in our field.
You did a very good job summarizing all important points about last weeks theme and I really enjoyed reading your well structured reflection. I also felt that the cancelled lecture would have made many things clearer and that I because of the missing lecture did not learn that much about this weeks theme compared to the previous ones. The example of internet addiction that you give at the end of the reflection is a great one when you think back at the time where the internet was still not that explored and investigated. It shows how case studies are used to gain knowledge about a specific case where we do not know that much about yet. Although a case study is as you wrote a bit hard to get because they are mostly independent of the method I think it is good to keep in mind that a case study is not defined by any method but you can use any method to gain knowledge from it.
You did a good job summarizing the main points about last weeks theme. I also felt that a lecture would have helped me to understand the topic better, but during the seminar I could clarify most of my questions about the theme. I like how you point out that a case study is not about addressing specific hypothesis but about building new theories. For me this is very important to understand what a case study is about. It is about something new where we know nothing or at least not that much about. The thought that it is not about testing theories could be confusing because this is also a characteristic from qualitative methods. But Ilias cleared that in the group discussion that case studies are not about the method, they are about the case. The example you give in the end of your reflection is a very good one to explain how case studies investigate new phenomena and situations.
I enjoyed reading your well structured reflection. Your thoughts about general conclusions out of case studies are very interesting and we also talked about that in our group during the seminar. I agree with you that it is not possible to draw general conclusions, but you can use the information from a case study to conduct further studies about a specific part of the case study. I like how you point out that there cannot be a concrete result from a case study because the data is related to the very specific case. To answer your question about why you conduct a case study: A case study gives you information about something new that has not been investigated before (or under this circumstances). Therefore a case study is used to explore new situations and to get a deeper knowledge about the specific case. The knowledge from this case study can be used to do more in-depth studies about this situation or similar ones.
I enjoyed reading your reflection about last weeks theme. To start with your example given at the end of your reflection I think that the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods is not the amount of data but the way you get and work with the data. You can analyze tweets in a very numeric way and build statistics out of that or you analyze them more in-depth and structure and interpret the gained data. What I learned in my bachelor is that it is never about the amount of data but the quality of them. Just because someone asked many people about something does not mean that the information is good quality and useful. You did a good job explaining what a case study is. I also remembered the example about the man with the brain tumor. Those are very specific cases which fit perfectly for a case study.
You did a good job summarizing the most important points about last weeks theme. I also had problems finding the difference between a qualitative method and case studies in the first place but the seminar helped me to get a better understanding of what a case study is. You give a good explanation of it in your reflection, but I like to add the fact that choose cases that have not been investigated before and where there is no information about it yet. An example that stuck in my mind was a case study from a terror attack. It might never happen again but you can also try to prevent it from happening again trough the gained knowledge from the case study. As you wrote there is no definite answer for the question if a prototype can be a case study, but I really like the thought about it. It shows that you try to put your knowledge from previous themes in relation to this one. Good job!
I agree with you that the cancelled lecture would have helped to clarify some things in the beginning, but as you wrote during the seminar most of the questions where discussed anyway. It is good to hear that you discussed qualitative methods in the small group, because most of us just focused on case studies. I do not totally agree with you that a case study is a qualitative method. Case study does not define any method at all. You can use both qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct a case study, because it is not about the method but about the case. A case study is done when a very specific situation needs to be investigated and no previous knowledge about it is given.
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