Theme 3: Research and Theory

The assessment for this theme consists of three parts. First I am going to find and write a short description of a journal that is relevant for media technology research. Then I am going to select a research paper, write a short summary of the paper and provide a critical examination of it. Thirdly I'm going to read two articles, "The Nature of Theory in Information Systems" by Shirley Gregor and "What Theory is Not" by Robert I. Sutton. The final part of the assessment consists of answering the following questions based on the literature above:

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.

2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

Journal and paper:

My chosen journal is Computers in Human Behavior. The title insinuates that the journal is focusing on HCI, Human-computer interaction, and its description on Elsevier.com confirms this presumption to a certain extent. The journal discusses the computer as a medium for expression and communication rather than its technical specs. Themes of the journal are such as computer usage in psychiatry as well as psychological impacts of computer usage. The journal has an impact factor of 2.489 which is one of the higher factors of the journals that were suggested on the course web page. 

From this journal I found a paper called "ALAS-KA: A learning analytics extension for better understanding the learning process in the Khan Academy platform" written in 2014. The paper is written by José A. Ruipérez-Valientea (et al.) and it examines an extention tool for the popular learning platform Khan Academy. The tool, called ALAS-KA, was developed by the authors of the paper and is an addition to the already existing Analytics support offered by Khan Academy. The authors present new ways to visualize learning curves and knowledge improvements but one thing that I'm missing is a proper hypothesis or research question. The aim of the paper is to present the add-on tool and I feel that the main concepts are all very well defined which is very important in order to make the reader understand what the paper is presenting.

My thoughts on the questions:

1. In order to explain what theory is, let's start by defining what theory is not. According to Sutton, references, data, diagrams, hypotheses or a list of variables are not examples of theory, despite frequently being used as it by authors. It's not enough to list existing theories by using references, you have to examine them and present their logic. The theory should provide explanations, predictions and prescriptions.

2. According to Gregor theory can be divided into five types of categories depending on how thorough and well-developed they are. In my selected paper the theory is that the existing learning analytics of Khan Academy can be improved with more graphics and improved in-depth analysis. The paper provides explanation of the newly visualisation with the help of a MOOC and predicts that there are benefits with using such an analysis tool. This would go under the fourth type: Explanation and Prediction (EP).

3. Some benefits of using this theory are that the research becomes plausible and more in-depth and the theory opens up for a well-structured paper or essay. However, the research can become too advanced, making it difficult to get any conclution or understanding of the text, thus sometimes the first categories of theory may be more suitable.