Theory and Method for Media Technology: The fifth week of TMMT studies

Theoretical issues

During the lecture we learned about wide range of theoretical topics and applied studies. For me the most interesting were the parts about usability analysis and ANOVA analysis of variables (to be discussed below). Usability analysis is now becoming more and more demanded: nowadays it is used not only by designers, but also by engineers. I don't know if I ever will be involved in such a project, but it was interesting to learn how these studies are designed.

This week seminar was devoted to identifying the "research algorythms" in the papers we've read. Anyway I would label this as a theoretical task, because it does not really helped me to develop new skills of research' planning. I've noticed that I was probably only one who draw a diagramm describing the reseach stages as a cicle, not as a process. I used this conceptual frame because I believe that in applied research it is practically impossible to achieve the *final* result, which could not be clarified and improved. With our suggestions to improvement we are coming back to the first stage of research and going through the steps all over again. But probably it is appliacable for exploratory design only.

Practical skills

I already wrote a big entry about how I was fascinated by the functionality of SPSS. Anyway I've just begun to learn about different statistical models and methods. I believe ANOVA model could be really useful for almost any study dealing with quantitative data. Basically ANOVA is described as a "form of statistical hypothesis testing heavily used in the analysis of experimental data" [1]. Unfortunately it is not so easy to learn this method of analysis, but I've found some quite easy tutorials on one-way ANOVA using the SPSS software.