What I learned about coding today. I think I am learning how to make my coding better. I’m still not completely sure that I am choosing the right things to code (or maybe I am just not labeling them right). But I see that as I try more, I like what I am coding more. I also notice that I get at least one repeated code per attempt at coding, so I need to make sure and pay more attention to existing codes as I go through them.

I also noticed that the group coding exercise was difficult because none of us were sure exactly what to do. I think that means it would be important to know what you are doing before you jump in to this for real.

It would also appear that the source conversations that you code can make a difference. For example, coding the chat window was pretty strange in that it was often scattered and unfocused. The example coding that we looked at in class last week was obviously more focused since it was from a research study. I can imagine that the coding gets very complex and hard to follow once you start looking at things like email exchanges and discussion board postings that could cover hundreds of lines and hundreds of topics.

I liked how the etic coding made me focus more on specific ideas from the chat rather than coding everything. There is value in both,, but I think I got a better picture of a specific theme from etic, while with emic I got a broader picture that would have been helpful if I had no idea what I was looking for. Of course, those facets were covered in class, but seeing it work out that way as I worked on it really helped to solidify how those two facets are different from each other.

Back to the group work, I noticed that we all had very different ideas of what the codes meant, so I think the coding guide becomes very important when that is the case. Which, of course, it will probably always be the case. I would probably like to see an example of a group that knows what they are doing going through their codes. I’m still just not sure that we were going about our small group work the right way. Or maybe we were getting there and just ran out of time.