Reflection Theme 3: Research and Theory

What I consider has been most rewarding for my personal progress regarding the third theme in the course, is to be able to reflect upon my own judgment about what theory is and not. Or at least what I have thought it was. I believe this subject of matter is fundamental knowledge towards the end of our studies, and something that people frequently get incredibly confused about. By reading other blog posts about my co-students choices of articles and journals I’ve soaked up a lot about what is useful contrary to what is not towards the contribution within researching and different theories in information systems.

The combination of reading the literature for last week’s theme, which consisted of Information system research (Gregor, 2006) and What theory is not (Sutton & Staw, 1995) , was an excellent mixture which made me comprehend a clear distinction in structure and work of a good article. This is what I further on will focus on regarding arrangement of my studies. I believe, that I’m not only the one that have been focusing on articles while doing my research for certain papers I’ve been writing through my studies. I consider it is beneficial to rearrange my structure to review journals with a certain impact factor, and therefore being able to select articles of larger importance targeted to what I in actual fact have use of.

However, I missed the seminars, due the fact that I got sick. I certainly believe that it had been encouraging to interact with my co-students verbally as well, in order to discuss different point of views regarding the different theories and the papers we read and also individually selected. I had a Skype meeting with one in my seminar group to get a greater understanding of what I’ve missed, and after this decided to focus on reading the blog posts to keep my self updated what type of articles have been discussed during the seminars. Although I see a certain pattern in what people chose while selecting journals, my conclusion is that these journals could be compared to a spider web that ties together essential articles in form of nodes of information in an interesting manner that is of great importance for Information research in Media Technology.  

Even though this is just our third theme, and half way through the course, I find the structure helpful of broadening our way of critical thinking, and independently relate to what we have learnt this far. While the beginning consisted of getting a grasp of the philosophical thinking, we have now preceded to a part of independently relate our knowledge to the extent by analyzing articles and assemble our own judgments. And i am looking forward to the second part of the course.