Overall, I am happy about the progress I am making. I know I still have a lot to learn about CMDA, but considering that my background in actual research is a bit weak, I am happy that I am making progress. Of course, I know that I read and interpret a lot of research as an instructional designer, but that doesn’t make me an expert on conducting and writing about research. I watch a big… umm… “discussion” on Twitter concerning what the research says about online teaching in general. Someone was trying to make a point that actually teaching a course online can radically change your view about online teaching, and another person swore it didn’t matter that they had not taught online because they could read the research. I think research is the same way – reading a lot about it doesn’t mean you know what it means to actually do it. I was able to do some general qualitative coding on the cyberbullying article that was recently published. But CMDA obviously takes coding to a much deeper level. So, all that to say I am happy with my progress but know that I have a lot more to go.

What I am struggling with right now is creating names for the codes. Part of that is just a slight OCD thing I have with Excel spreadsheet columns being too wide. I just hate to see all of the wasted screen space with a long column header for a column that just has a 1 or 0 in it. So that is leading me to shorten my codes a bit too much to the point that they aren’t as descriptive. So I just have to get over that one and do it the right way. This would all be more of a problem with the method and not qualitative methods overall. In general I lean towards qualitative, so I think these codes tell us a whole lot more about the actual substance of the data more than a quantitative number of “4” on a somewhat generic scale of 0-5 or what ever might.

The other hard part, of course, is coming to agreement with my group. Seems like we currently have more than one radically different idea of what CMDA coding means. I think some of the the other group members have confused emic with etic, or maybe they have skipped ahead to creating categories and theories out of the data itself before doing the actual coding. I’m not really sure. I think that will work itself out as we go along, but it does mean I am still hoping to see a productive group meeting that doesn’t turn out to be a long discussion about what counts as CMDA and what doesn’t.