Theme 3 - reflections

This week we did not have a seminar, but we had a lecture and a lab session instead. The lecture was held by Martha Cleveland-Innes who is one of the co-authors of the text we read for this week; The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. I think the lecture was quite interesting.

During the lab session we got to try out the program SPSS. We had like a mini lecture before the lab session where Ester explained the program and how you use it. The instructions for the lab was not that profound, and there were not so specific tasks. I think it would have been better if the lab session was more structured, because now it felt that we just sat there for an hour and clicked around in the program. Ester said that there was not any examination of the lab so it felt a bit pointless to just sit there and try to learn how to use the program. But I think the program is really powerful, if you learn how and when to use it properly. I think it would have been good to have an introduction to this program in the beginning of the bachelor thesis course since most of the people taking that course uses a quantitative survey of some sort. It is good, though, that we got to at least try this program a little bit before our upcoming master theses. I also saw that SPSS is free to download and use for KTH students, that is really good! I have not yet figured out how to export survey data from like Google Docs or Surveymonkey (which are the tools used the most I suppose) to SPSS format. I think this program can be particularly useful since we in our group project for this course focus on “surveys as a method in media technology research” which we later narrowed down to “internet-based questionnaires”.