TNDY 4010 Inductive Inquiry / IS366a Qualitative Methods :: Activity :: Just Me | People: | Everyone | Inbox | Just Me |
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I believe the group project was an outstanding learning experience. Many of us have extensive experience with quantitative inquiry, but very little with structured qualitative studies. I kept expecting our efforts to get a goal, and then our group to move toward it in an organized manner - knowing where we were going. The method we used was somewhat uncomfortable, as we just continued to ask questions, and let the answers focus each succeeding iteration. At some point, a light went on for me. The process suddenly seemed productive, and I knew we were getting somewhere. Eventually, it was clearly coming together, and our main effort became to integrate and consolidate our efforts.
It did feel uncomfortable for me. It was one of those experiences that you are glad you had, but you would not readily go through again. I guess I prefer more structured academic projects. However, it is one thing to take a class that discusses qualitative research methods, and quite another to actually invovle oneself in them. The class was full of interesting revelations that came from qualitative inquiry. However, since the artifacts we studied were completed works that had reached some level of conclusion, we did not get the personal, first hand experience of the inductive process. Developing our project remedied this. I believe I actually learned more from going through the process than from completing the study itself.
The one thing I would like to see improved is the wiki. Maybe just use something else. It actually served as much to disintegrate our efforts as to coordinate them. It was difficult to figure out who had written what, and where anything was. Admittedly, we would have needed either more discipline or a dedicated scribe for some of the groups to have any hope of keeping all the blurbs, missives and half baked writing straight. I managed to personally get quite confused when - after writing an opening that was quite unsatisfactory to our professor - I tried to create several draft options for my team to review in order to help me find an acceptable solution. Something like an opening for a large paper or project may be short and fairly uncomplicated, but it is often extremely hard to find the right thing. I ended up almost incommunicado, as none of my team mates could see or read my postings. I eventually muddled through myself, and simply emailed my opening to the whole group. I cannot actually propose anything better than the wiki (unless the school springs for some of the expensive groupware we use at work !! ), but I think the wiki should only be utilized with a clear understanding of its limitations. Additionally, teams should keep their lives simple and use email to circulate a lot of their work.
Overall, the project was a good experience which taught me a great deal about knowledge and inquiry. It allowed me to tie together several concepts from the class. One hope I have is that I can use this more generally at work. I have many times found qualitative assessments to be more useful than quantitative ones in complex IT projects, because the quantitative metrics are too shallow and are very incomplete representations of reality. However, IT groups love quantitative measures, and distrust qualitative ones. To the degree that I can make qualitative inquiry acceptable for work related issues, this project and the whole course will have provided me with great personal value.
I thought that “Blink” was most definitely the most interesting book we had to read all semester. I have enjoyed all the examples in the book about the concept of rapid cognition. The way you perceive people is socially constructed. Intuitive knowledge is a function of observation, personal insight and social interaction. It is an inductive process that occurs at the subconscious level and that emerges as a spontaneous response whenever a person is confronted with particular situations. We make snap judgments based on this factor, some are good and some maybe simplistic stereotypical categorizations of human beings. My favorite example in the book was the story of Amadou Diallo, the West African immigrant who became prey to stereotypical categorization with fatal consequences. It teaches one a valuable lesson about the necessity to blink, to stop and think before trusting our internal process of rapid cognition.
Writing my response to this assignment so late in the semester, I cannot pretend not to know who the CGU scholar that was mentioned in the book is. I might have missed it in the book; but then I was in class when Professor Horan told us who it was; not to mention that I have read all my classmates blog responses. So, it is Stuart Oskamp. As the saying goes, better late than never…well, at least I hope it applies in this case.
Marianne De Laet's lecture was inviting and thought provoking. As an anthropologist, her use of story telling experiences communicate well, the need to be knowledgeable about epistemology as well as criticism. Her deep commitment to research was also obvious in the way she approached this topic. I still however don't understand her sympathetic view towards the industrialization and development of observatories. Why wouldn't the locals want a billion dollar facility in their backyard? Wouldn't it promote business and economy ? Are we going to stop the forward path of science to preserve the ideals of the past? There must be a way to make this work in a cooperative and equally beneficial way? It seems like the study of astronomy is so esoteric that it's hard for me to relate to why one would even want to study it? What value does it have in our society? I was hoping to have some of these answers this evening, but it seems that astronomy is a qualitative study of sorts, because you just collect information and hopefully it leads to some discovery or insight someday or along the way provides opportunity for scientists to have a "patron" so to speak while they study, research, and go for the stars...
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