Final Post

From these six themes, I learned a lot about knowledge and research. The themes are well progressive, each theme has a very clear purpose and the lectures are really good. It’s unfortunate that some theme’s lecture or seminar missed, but not influence too much for me to learn more from this course. The structure of the course is special, we don’t have an exam, but we have to post our pre-reading of articles and reflection every week, as well we have to comment for other student’s posting, this push me a lot, for catching the deadline, I wouldn’t be lazy, I would say it’s actually the most efficient method for me to gain knowledge ever. At the same time, this method also improves my reading and summarise skills.

The course starts from the very abstract topic in the first theme, which is Plato's Theaetetus and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I think reading and reflect in these two articles is really good for the philosophy beginners like me. I don’t know what is philosophy before, and I’m very realistic I think, this makes see and think in a very narrow way. This theme’s task leads me to an extended view, and I get more knowing on knowledge, things we know via eyes and ears can not be defined as knowledge, it’s just we get to know. The transcendental condition of knowledge is Forms of intuition: Space and Time. And I learned “perception without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty” from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

For the second theme, is Critical media studies, I think it’s a nice step forward since the theme let me consider the philosophy staff combining with history and culture environment, and the things concept of philosophy is much clearer in my mind. From this theme I know the difference between nominalism and realism, nominalism is more specific, realism is more general. And substructure vs superstructure is also the kernel topic in this theme. The hottest topic in the theme is “Auro”, and I got to know, print the "Auro" art will destroy the "Auro" of the original work of art. But via the media way, for example, we can print it, then everybody can have their own "Auro" work of art, we can spread the work of art. In this way, Media maybe the good thing.

From the third theme, we start to jump to research, and I start to realise this may be a preparation for the final thesis. These last four themes are talked about what is research, how to start a research, what should we do before doing research and how to design research, of course, the difference between quantitative research and qualitative research could be one of the kernel topics in these themes. It’s also a very progressive way. Start from knowing what is theory and what theory is not. Try to understand the categories of the theory that the article gives, and by finding the related research paper, get more deeply understand these categories. Then went to Quantitative research, we read an very interesting article, which contains a fun drums experiment, this article helps me conclude what is quantitative research, and by the way, this theme raises up the question about difference between quantitative and qualitative research, which bring me to understand choosing a type of research depends on what’s your research purpose, and my browsing for the qualitative research also lay a solid foundation for the further theme. As I learnt from the themes, Hypnosis could be one of the differences between quantitative and qualitative research. Qualitative data includes information about user behaviours, needs, desires, routines, use cases, and a variety of other information that is essential in designing a product that will actually fit into a user’s life. While Quantitative research includes, hypotheses, predictions, observation, experiment, test of predictions, conclude etc. A questionnaire usually used in Quantitative research, and it’s good to know the questionnaire should be tested before post, to test if the question understandable, if the answer is short enough so that people willing to answer and so on. It is important in a quantitative research which I don’t know before, I think it’s very good to know this since it can prevent some error, or save us from some trouble, also maybe saved some time. And in the seminar we conclude the quantitive research is more scientific than qualitative research during group talk, and actually qualitative research is more close to our life, quantitive research is used when we want to explore some unknown part or prove some hypotheses, but qualitative research are more often used in developing.

In the design research theme, the most important part I learnt is an approach to design research with six different steps, how to come up with an idea, how to solve a problem, how to filter ideas, how to validate an idea, how to evaluate an idea, how to communicate your idea. And also know the important of prototype design, empirical data often used in a prototype designed research paper.

Case study and qualitative research are kernel topics in the last theme, and this previously mentioned in the fourth theme, and in this theme we don’t have lecture, only attend the seminar, so the topic is  mostly focused on case study, this is the first time to start the seminar without any pre-knowledge, this is also a way that push us into unknown area to learn to discovery by ourselves. From the group discussion, we released that case study is commonly used in qualitative research. And in the seminar conclusion, a case study formulates the whole thing into science, fight against the things you think or you know. It is more about investigating new knowledge, explore the staff you don't know before. And the case is individual, organisation, event, or action, existing in a specific time and place. And I surprisedly know case study make the observed information into science, and a case study could link to another one, and make a firmly link circle to support the concept in the research.

As a conclude, I have to say, I improved a lot and gain a lot from this course, I think the philosophy way will be well used both in my study and life in the future.