During week 39 the theme was ”Research and Theory”. I read three articles ”What theory is not” by Sutton, ”The nature of Theory in Information System” by Gregor, and “Internet, children and space: Revisiting generational attributes and boundaries” by Nunes de Almeida et al. The last article was my own choice, and was the article I practiced doing a critical examination on. In addition to those articles I participated in both the lecture and the seminar this week.
At the seminar we discussed a lot about what the difference there are between theory and hypotesis and how to separate them. We discussed what Dahlberg showed and talked about on the lecture, when he dropped a pen to the floor. Gravity is the theory of why the pen falls to the ground and hypotesis is our guess that the pen will fall this specific time. Our conclusion is that hypothesis is a guess of how things are related, meanwhile a theory is a model of explanation, which is often build on earlier knowledge and observations and tried on plenty of persons. Theory is what practice is not or as Dahlberg said on the lecture, ”Theory is about observing and practice is about doing”.
Another thing we discussed which I also learned during the seminar is that theories cannot be definitely proven right, they just are until another better theory comes along or until they are proven wrong. When we prove a theory wrong, we cannot build that upon one try. Back to the dropped pen, what happen if next time we release the pen form our grip and the pen flys away. If that happens we cannot just throw away the theory of gravity, we have to allow some error in our experiments.
Hej,
SvaraRaderaThe topic of children and Internet in your chosen paper seems interesting, but I unfortunately found it a bit difficult to follow your summary of the paper.
Nevertheless, your example of the pen maybe flying away the next time is very helpful! We cannot declare a theory to be completely true, but maybe there is no such thing as truth anyways. What I took away from the seminar in relation to this, is that we should avoid using "true" too easily in the scientific (or maybe any) context - maybe that can help you too!
The research article you chose seems very interesting, especially in our age of digitalization. I wonder how the technology has actually changed the behaviour of nowadays children, therefore, I will read through this article for sure.
SvaraRaderaIt is interesting to read about your seminar discussion and that you used the example of the pen to explain the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. I think that a there is no such a thing as a wrong theory, but just a hypothesis that prove out to be wrong. To make sure that it is not just an experimental error like you described, it is probably always advised to compare the hypothesis to practise more than once.
Hi Sanna,
SvaraRaderaGreat reflection and nice explanations! I also believe, after the seminar discussions, that a theory cannot hold the absolute truth of something it tries to describe. In a sense it's true to us in this specific point of time, but the absolute truth can never be revealed since more and more knowledge of the world is continuously generated through research. This days truths might be tomorrows lies (or falsities).
Hi Sanna,
SvaraRaderaI think that you have written a good post with interesting facts from the third theme and that you have brought up the most important keywords. From this week I will remember several things, for example that paradigm shifts can occur when you least expect it and that truth is relative and can be proven wrong at anytime. And I will also remember that theories are based on earlier knowledge and that people with different knowledge and experiences could perceive the same object in totally different ways. Good work with this post!
You well summarize the topic by making the difference between theory and hypothesis, and by enhancing the fact that a theory is considered as granted as soon as something else contradicts it. You should probably give a short answer to the question « What is theory? » to complete perfectly this sum-up. But otherwise, good job!
SvaraRadera