Hi, and welcome to this virtual lecture. My name is Lars Johannessen and I'm a post-doc at Oslo Metropolitan University.
Apologies for my accent.
It's the best advice version of Scandinavian and American English, but I hope you'll grow used to it over the course of this lecture.
I'm here to talk about qualitative methods and our value for understanding competing perspectives on technological innovations.
Or, as I've phrased it, and the main title of this lecture, why anyone would hesitate to help kids with cancer.
Now, the title is, of course, a bit tabloid, and some might even find it a bit offensive,
but it's meant to point out how a technological innovation may look completely different,
depending on one's perspective and how all this can have severe consequences for those seeking to implement the technology in a real life context.
To illustrate this point, I'll be giving you an example from my case study of the classroom robot a the
one which is made for children with cancer or other health related problems,
keeping them home from school for a long period of time. So to give you a quick outline of the lecture,
I thought I'd start by giving you a brief introduction to everyone itself and then move on to a
theoretical discussion of perspectives and why they're important for understanding innovations.
This is followed by a section on qualitative methods and their relevance for exploring different perspectives.
Before I close by applying all this to my case study of a one.
So beginning with the case, for the last three years, I've been working on a qualitative case study of the classroom robot, maybe one.
This robot is designed to help so-called homebound students who are unable to attend school because of symptoms, treatments or recovery from illness.
Being homebound means being removed from a social context that constitutes four to eight hours of a kid's daily life,
and this can have severe educational and social costs, with students being likely to fall behind in extra instruction.
Feel isolated from their peers and experience loneliness and even depression.
Now, for a long time, these students were reliant on schools reaching out to them to provide home tuition.
But recently, advances in communication technology have created new opportunities for students to attend school remotely
through technologies like any one which is currently used in schools by about 1500 students across Europe,
mostly in Norway, but also in countries such as the U.
K. Now, to give you a sense of how the robot functions in finance, show you one of the films by its producer, no isolation.
A child with long term, a child with long term illness faces many physical and psychological challenges.
One of the toughest is being away from school, often for months at a time, unable to enjoy daily interaction with friends.
A child can feel lonely and detached.
That's why no isolation developed AV1, a first of its kind robot that creates a unique remote connexion between a sick child and her classmates.
With the latest audio visual 4G and Wi-Fi technology integrated, AV1 serves as the youth's eyes and ears in the classroom,
allowing her to learn alongside her friends while everyone is in the classroom.
The child can be an app on her phone or tablet.
When the app is connected, AV1 wakes up and the child can see and talk with her classmates through AV1.
She can also raise her hand, turn around or signal that she doesn't want to be disturbed.
AV1 also includes a whispering option, allowing the child to whisper through AV1 to a classmate.
The continuous connexion provided by AV1 ensures a much easier transition when the child is ready to return to school.
For children with a long term illness, AV1 is the next best thing to being there.
Okay, so this video gives you some sense of how the robot is framed by the producers.
Is meant for children who are homebound because of illnesses such as cancer or chronic fatigue syndrome.
It's supposed to be placed on the sex child's desk.
And it's meant to act as a sort of webcam transferring sound and video from the classroom and to an app on the kid's phone or tablet.
Now, the video doesn't put too much emphasis on this,
but we should also note that everyone offers some form of asymmetrical interaction between the child and the classroom.
Because he's only had a sick child who receives both audio and video from the classroom.
The class only receives audio from the child, which is a point I'll also return to later.
Now, everyone is developed by the Norwegian Start-Up Company, no isolation, which has offices both in Oslo and London.
Having followed no isolation for the last three years, I can attest that this is a rather idealistic company.
Quite far removed from the world of Big Tech and its search for world dominance.
Everyone is a very specialised tool and designed for a relatively small market share as far as technologies go,
and everyone is also based on quite thorough user testing, at least in light of what a Start-Up can afford in its early stages.
In fact, the CEO reached out to user experience researchers as soon as they had a concept ready,
and they did several months of piloting on real world users with various health conditions from cancer to cerebral palsy and chronic fatigue syndrome.
And then he also made substantial changes along the way to the hardware and software as they got new experiences.
So while it might fall short by the standards of hardcore asked research, maybe one is a lot more evidence based than most Start-Up Tech,
which has often been criticised for being based on rather rash assumptions about its users.
According to the homebound students in my study,
no isolation addresses a real demand and fills a large gap in the services for those who are homebound.
While home tourism might keep their learning on track, many feel lonely and isolated from their friends in school,
so most of the students I talked to were highly positive about the robot's prospects for reconnecting them with their peers.
And in my studies, I do find that the robot can live up to the user's expectations under the right circumstances.
Those who get everyone up and running emphasise that the robot reduces their feeling of loneliness,
as well as their feeling of missing out and their fear that their friends might forget them.
Many also see great economic benefit in using the robot as it keeps them up to speed with their classes.
So the robot is well intentioned. It has undergone substantial user testing, and it generally seems to have great potential for homebound children.
But although everyone has a lot going for it, not everyone is raving about the technology.
In fact, to the disappointment of users, the robot has been met with a lot of hesitance and scepticism by teachers and other school workers.
Several schools have refused to use the robots, and some have only accepted a restricted form of use.
For instance, on a fixed position in a classroom exclusively facing the blackboard,
some teachers have also made their concerns public in the form of offence in Norwegian newspapers and the like.
And all this greatly upsets the users I've talked to who express feelings of frustration, distrust and even betrayal.
And this leads me back to the initial question of this lecture.
Why anyone would hesitate to help kids with cancer or, of course, any other illness keeping them away from school for an extended period of time.
To answer this question, I suggest that we need to take a closer look at perspectives.
In social or scientific terms perspective, as a point of view or an angle on reality,
it consists of a set of assumptions and values and beliefs that organise how we interpret and act in the world.
And these sets of assumptions, values and beliefs,
they aren't necessarily selective because a perspective sensitised as individuals to emphasise some aspects of reality.
While desensitises them to other aspects. Now, as you might expect, there is a close relationship between perspectives and a term bias.
This is captured in the concept of the Rashomon effect derived from the film Rashomon by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
This film depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the perspectives
of four witnesses who all provide subjective and contradictory versions of the incidents.
The term Rashomon effect then refers to the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses who,
because of their subjective interests and biases, might produce highly conflicting accounts of the same event.
Accordingly, the term implies that we should be wary of subjective witnesses and instead opt for
more objective methods that can help us certain the truth of what really happened.
This emphasis on bias and unreliable subjectivity is a common way of thinking about perspectives.
But it's not very productive. If you want to understand how people work.
Following hermeneutics and other past positivist schools associated with interpretive turn and the social sciences,
we all rely on perspectives in our understandings of the world.
There's no magical view from nowhere from which we can view the full, objective, truthful things.
And while striving to reduce subjectivity may be perfectly fine for many situations, such as when trying someone for murder, for instance.
It's crucial to understand the difference between qualitative research and a murder investigation.
Instead of finding one absolute truth,
we more typically want to learn about what people subjectively believed to be the true or moral to be true or moral or the way things work,
because these subjective believes guide their behaviour.
Asked the sociologist W.I Thomas famously claimed if men define situations as real, they are real and there are consequences.
So in other words, are subjective interpretations have consequences for how we act.
Our interpretations might be wrong by conventional standards, but the point still stands.
If someone believes something is real and they act based on this belief, then the belief becomes real and its consequences.
And this is why we need to take perspectives and subjectivity seriously.
If you want to understand how people do the things they do and why people do the things they do.
Now, to foreshadow a crucial point, I'll elaborate later, perspectives do not vary randomly.
There's a close correlation between the social roles we inhabit and how we come to see the world.
This means that the more social boundaries and the innovation process, the greater the potential for conflicting perspectives and interpretation.
This is a key point across a lot of social theories of technology such as stakeholder theory and so on,
the social construction of technology approach. I won't go into them, but I thought I mentioned them and this issue would.
Conflicting interpretations was exactly the case with everyone.
The robot looked like a great idea from the perspective of the producers and the homebound children, but not so much from the perspective of teachers.
And I'm going to elaborate this in the fourth and final section of this lecture.
First, I want to tell you a bit more about data and methods and the relevance for unearthing competing perspectives on innovation.
OK. So when researching competing perspectives,
we need to recognise that we too have perspectives on reality and that these might blind us to the way other people see the world.
And this is where the German concept of firsthand comes in.
Frustration can be traced back to the sociologist Max Raber, who proposed for Spain as an important principle when studying human subjects.
For staying roughly means putting yourself in the shoes of others to see things from their perspective.
And when guided by firsthand research,
seeks to understand the meaning of an action from the actors point of view so you can share in their local understanding of their situation.
This can help us unpack the situated logic of the people under study to understand
why people do what they do given their local situation and to do this,
we have to work to free ourselves from our own assumptions, values,
beliefs and so on so that we can truly appreciate the viewpoints of those under study.
Hassan based research is almost exclusively linked to qualitative methods.
There are several reasons for this, but two primary ones is their qualitative methods allow for open-ended and in depth investigations.
Starting with open ended, and that's a crucial aspect of first day, and then research is to understand a situation from the actors point of view.
This means that we have to be open to the understandings that they bring to the situation rather than imposing our own understandings,
as is typical of a lot of quantitative research where beliefs and actions have to be
fitted into the standardised categories of surveys or similar data collection tools.
Closely related qualitative research,
also a characteristically allows for more in-depth investigations of how people understand their actions and environments.
It may not be as generalisable as standardised large scale surveys, for instance,
but it allows for much deeper probing into the subjective world of those under study.
The deal here is engaged in what Clifford Gertz called fake description and think description refers to.
Understanding actions in light of the multiple contexts that they are embedded in.
In other words, in light of the vast amount of historical baggage, economic structures, political structures,
family structures, religious structures and of many other structural pressures that exert themselves on the actors we study.
So think description and for staying are two concepts for more or less, the same thing for putting yourself in the actor's place,
walking a mile in their shoes and understanding all the expectations, concerns and pressures that influences them in their everyday life.
Now, conventionally, the gold standard approach for achieving for stay in or description is ethnography.
Ethnography involves the first hand study of people as they go about their everyday lives.
It means you're able to observe firsthand what people say and what people do,
rather than relying purely on people's own verbal accounts of their sayings and doings.
And this is a crucial advantage if you want to see things from the actors perspective,
because then you're able to situate their accounts and actions in the context of what they
do from day to day when all the constraints of the ordinary social situation are operative.
Now, moving on to my own methods and data, I did not opt for ethnography in my study of one.
This is mainly because ethnographic studies are incredibly time consuming and typically allow for the study of only one or maybe two field sites.
In my case, as most schools have no more than one robot in use, if any at all, I would have had to recruit a bunch of schools,
which would have been extremely time consuming in terms of negotiating access, gaining informed consent from all the involved parties and so on.
So instead, I relied mainly on interviews to collect data about everyone.
While interviews rarely offer the same insight into local context as ethnography does, the method allows for recruiting a larger number of cases,
which might sensitise the researcher to multiple contexts and their relevance for the technology under study.
In my case, this involved recruiting 37 users of the robots, as well as multiple other stakeholders, which had a say in its use.
Now, I should add that I went even further away from the gold standard by conducting most my interviews by phone in methodological textbooks,
telephone interviews are often described as unsuited for in-depth interviewing.
And for that reason, I had initially planned to do only short introductory introduced by phone just to
get in touch with the interviewees and gather some basic background information.
But as the interviewees responded surprisingly well to this method, I decided and decided to expand on its use.
Now, of course, telephone interviews inevitably entail the loss of certain data, such as the interview, his body language.
But I found that these limitations were more than made up for by the methods and manages.
Most importantly, telephone Andrews gave the interview with great flexibility in when and where to conduct the interview,
and this made it easier to get in touch with and recruit people from all across Norway,
rather than just those in the vicinity of Oslo or other airport cities,
which I would have been tempted to prioritise if I were to conduct all the interviews face to face.
And while the telephone is not conducive to certain techniques of face to face interviewing,
such as being silent, to encourage interviews, to elaborate and so on.
I found that well-timed, probing and well-prepared follow up questions could facilitate surprisingly extensive answers to my questions.
So while I'm not saying that the telephone is the best interviewing tool for for all contexts, it definitely is not.
I am saying that it has and this certainly bad reputation and that it can be a surprisingly good research tool given the right circumstances.
So just to give you a quick impression of my data before we move on.
I conducted a total of 162 semi-structured interviews between the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2021.
With users, the producers of the robot, school workers, health care workers and other stakeholders of the robot in Norway.
I also supplemented my interviews with two short ethnographic sessions and two schools where I observed everyone in use in the classroom.
So that's the empirical basis for what I'm now about to tell you about.
So with all this in mind, let's return to our initial puzzle and see how everyone looks.
I looked from the teachers perspective. First, short sip of water.
Okay, so in the following,
I'm going to focus on the findings from the interviews I did with forty five teachers and other school workers across 27 primary,
secondary and upper secondary schools in Norway.
And as I mentioned earlier, a key finding in these interviews was that many teachers met the robot with hesitancy and scepticism,
at times even refusing its use in their classroom. To understand this reluctance towards the technology,
I tried to put myself in the shoes of teachers and figure out how the robot looks from their perspective.
And while the interviews revealed several courses of concern,
I want to focus on the one they emphasise the most and the one they emphasise most strongly,
namely that the robot could serve as a potential tool for surveillance in the classroom.
This issue was expressed quite clearly by one teacher I interviewed who said when the robot enters the picture,
the classroom is extended to include the students home and then we lose control, who is watching or who is part of what goes on in class.
So in this understanding, the robot is understood to reduce teachers control over the classroom by opening it up to outside viewers.
And this gives us some initial sense of the teacher's perspective and a key reason for the scepticism.
But if you want to learn more, we need to dive deeper.
And to do that, I suggest we ask what the teacher's fair by him being observed and who they fear is serving them.
Having done this, I found that the teachers pictured too detrimental scenarios where a robot could
be used to spy on the user's classmates or to monitor the teachers themselves.
I'll go on to elaborate this in a minute. But first, it should be mentioned that the producers have to some extent anticipated the teacher's concerns,
and they had also taken several measures to prevent misuse of the robot.
For instance, they made sure that the robots can only live stream and not record content from the classroom.
Can only be linked to a single external device, requires the user to enter a personal password every time they gone and so on and so forth.
And for all these reasons, the producers believed that it was highly unlikely that anyone would misuse the robot.
And they also claim that there should be no practical difference between having a student or having a robot in class.
The teachers, on the other hand, well, they beg to differ.
So let's move on then to see why they did so.
Starting with the first scenario, the teachers pictured that the users could use a v one to spy on other students in class.
And this scenario had two key variations. Firstly, some described how everyone could serve as a peephole into the classroom.
This could involve the students simply taking voyeuristic pleasure in being in unobserved observer.
But some also emphasised how the user could be pressured to show the video stream to friends or to siblings.
Secondly, some also spoke of everyone using metaphors of surveillance cameras and recording devices.
These stories emphasised the added possibility that students might use the robots to record what goes on in class and importantly,
to share this material online. It's important to emphasise that none of the teachers I talked to had experienced this type of misuse with one.
Instead, they are right at this interpretation by relating everyone to a broader context of social relations in school with a particular
emphasis on how our contemporary camera society entails that students every action might be recorded and shared on social media.
As one teacher claimed, we're living in a society where people have a realistic fear of being recorded without knowing.
And as evidence for this larger narrative about our camera society, teachers often cited several smaller stories of inappropriate camera use.
For instance, the following account was offered by a teacher in Upper Secondary School.
He said. About a month ago, there was a student who had a panic attack in class.
She laid down scratch. That approach took over the floor, hyperventilated and stuff like that.
And then instead of helping the student, there's of course, some students who had opportunity to make snap and share this across social media.
In the end, this and other schools in the city know that there's been a panic attack by this particular student.
So it's clear that these kind of things are uncomfortable and unnecessary.
And it's maybe situations like these that, well, that might happen with this maybe one robot as well.
If you have a camera rolling all the time.
So this teacher offered this story as an example of how things might spiral out of control if everyone is introduced in class again,
it's worth emphasising how the teacher is engaging in analogical reasoning where the misuse of a b one is deduced from
how perceivable a similar technologies such as smartphones and Snapchat have been used in the classroom previously.
So the teachers using ideas about familiar objects and practises to make sense of a new and unknown technology.
And we could, of course,
challenge this interpretation and ask whether I think an isolated student would be likely to act in this moment in this manner.
But that's not the point.
The point is that this is how everyone looks from this teacher's perspective, and this is why he is hesitant to allow everyone into his classroom.
OK. So moving on to the second scenario.
This involved the teachers picturing that someone else than the home, but home bound child might be observing them through the robot.
Specifically, the teachers believed that parents could use the robot to monitor and criticise their teaching activities.
Their idea was that when a robot enters the classroom,
parents may through ill will or happenstance come to observe something they do not like through maybe one.
This then, might lead them to stir up trouble for a teacher,
either through informal slander or through formal complaints or some combination of the two.
While potentially a risk weighed all parents,
this problem was said to be especially grave with a particular type of student describe a particular type of parent
described as disapproving or someone who is against the school and who might seek to make the teacher's life more difficult.
When people when teachers picture themselves through the eyes of this disapproving parent,
they often started questioning what the classroom would look like to such a critical observer.
Many feared being judged according to unrealistic pedagogical ideals,
far removed from the everyday realities of school and the teachers particularly feared being judged based on
their unfortunate moments by parents who take exceptions to be the rule and blow them out of proportion.
Some teachers also added that the robots technical features might contribute to exacerbate the problem.
Maybe one is a camera with a particular viewpoint and might capture only the teacher's
reactions and miss the initial actions that provoke teachers in the first place.
Adding to this, Amy, one also lacks a screen, according to teachers.
And this was claimed to increase their uncertainty as they had no way of telling who are actually observing them through the robot.
And all this put teachers on their toes, as one teacher explained, When we're in the classroom with students, we never think about being observed.
But as soon as others get the opportunity to observe you, you start thinking, Well, now I have to do things correctly all of the time.
So accounts like these show how teachers actually believe that everyone could turn the classroom into a so-called panopticon,
as made famous by myself or call the panopticon is a prison design that allows a single security guard to observe all prisoners
and institutions and institutions are without the prisoners being able to tell whether they're being watched or not.
And this, in turn, motivates the prisoners to act as if they're being watched at all times.
In school, it has traditionally been the teacher who holds the most Panopto position of being able to observe all students at all times or nearly so.
But with everyone, the situation is sort of reversed as everyone allows an outsider to observe the
teacher without the teacher being able to tell whether they're being watched or not.
And this fundamentally shifts the power dynamic of the classroom, with the teacher now occupying a more precarious position.
As we just saw, some teachers told that this could have a disciplining effect, and some also spoke of this as being emotionally challenging.
Describing the situation as uncomfortable or scary or even creepy.
Part of the features on ice might seem to stem from the fact that everyone provides
access to a space that has historically been almost completely closed off to outsiders.
This was evident in how teachers talked about the classroom as a backstage area reserved for insiders such as the teacher and their students,
who all share a certain understanding of what typically goes on in school.
So by allowing for outside observation, everyone is seen as challenging the social order of the classroom,
which in turn is seen as threatening both the authority of the teacher and the integrity of the other students in class athletes,
at least as these teachers saw it. OK.
So this lecture started with a tabloid question why anyone would hesitate to help kids with cancer or any other illness,
keeping them home from school for a prolonged period of time.
As should now be clear, this way of asking reflects the perspective of users and producers of the robot
who see everyone as a benign tool for virtually including homebound students.
But as we've seen the teachers interpret the robot from a radically different perspective,
putting greater stress on how everyone might threaten the integrity of those within the classroom.
In a teacher's view, they have to protect the interests of all students in class, not just the homebound student.
And they also fear that the robot might threaten their own position and authority.
So in other words, we have a conflict of both interests and values with the users and the producers stressing the need
for inclusion and the teachers emphasising the risk of surveillance and unintended consequences.
And this difference is to a large extent, related to the structural position of the teachers and as the head of the class.
Teachers have other interests and role obligations which motivate them to think more critically about the robot.
So as the teachers and the users and the producers occupy different social worlds, so to speak, they also come to see the robot quite differently.
But with that being said, I should add a final crucial point, namely that not all teachers considered everyone to be a tool of surveillance.
In fact, several interviewees amongst the teachers explicitly dismissed this interpretation.
Insisting instead, things, sexual acts, the robot being harmless or that they're teaching should be able to withstand outside scrutiny,
or that everyone posed no more threat than the surveillance they were already under by the 20 other students in class.
So this shows that we must be careful not to talk about the teacher's perspective in singular form.
In fact, we should actually expect to find several conflicting perspectives we're in and then single group.
One reason for this is that most people have multiple group memberships.
Teachers aren't just teachers. They might also be parents or Christians or football coaches or whatever.
All of which have consequences for what they assume, believe and value that is for their perspectives.
So while there is a close link between people's roles and their perspectives,
we cannot assume that a single role determines how a person who comes to see the world.
And this is why we have to do actual empirical studies of people's perspectives rather than
automatically introducing how they see the world from an analysis of their structural position.
Now, when I focussed almost exclusively on the perspective of the critical teachers in this lecture,
this is because it's this perspective that's most relevant to answer my research question,
namely why someone could be sceptical to use such a seemingly well intentioned technology.
So in other words, this perspective is what's most relevant for my analytical purposes.
So what I'm trying to drive home with this slide is more of a theoretical point,
namely to remind you the complexity in how people interpret and act in the world.
Having said that, it's time to finish this lecture by doing a quick summary of some key points.
OK, so I've talked about the importance of perspectives and especially competing
perspectives for the implementation of technological innovations in real life settings.
I've also talked about the value of qualitative methods for exploring these
different perspectives based on principles of first hand and thick description.
And I illustrated all this with my case study of the classroom about a month.
Focussing on how the robot looked completely different from the perspectives of teachers and users producers.
In short, whereas the users said producers saw the robot as a tool for virtually including homebound students.
The teachers emphasised it's more risky and threatening aspects for those in the classroom and all this
complicated implementation of the robot to the great frustration of both the users and the producers.
So that's it for now. Thank you for listening so far.
If you want to get in touch, you can reach me on email or Twitter or through my web page or, of course, in the upcoming live discussion.
Until then, thanks and goodbye.