The items in my bag tell a story of who I am, but they also paint a picture of a typical day for me. I decided to have fun with this and remaster Task 1 as a rap song. After all, what better way to tell a story than through an oral route?

The original task in its visual form was the ultimate transparency to nature. If someone wanted to see what was in my bag, they would look. Having all the items laid out hides nothing. In this remastering, I thought to do the complete opposite and remove the unquestionable authority that is associated with the original image by removing all visuals. I had considered making a music video to accompany the rap, but that would force listeners to see things my way. The lure of novels and oral stories is that they are much less authoritative than they seem. The plot is laid out, sure, but readers have the freedom to imagine each character and environment as they see fit because stories do not go into detail about how every being or object looks. The beauty of stories is that “even in the most minutely descriptive [one] there must be infinitely many visual details that are never provided” (Bolter, 2001, p. 57), allowing readers to engage deeply. The engagement is personal because images conjured in the mind are shaped by lived experiences. Meaning is co-constructed; there is an unspoken relationship between the author and the reader. I expect listeners to imagine their own school hallways and classrooms, which will undoubtedly look nothing like mine, and to select their own chapstick flavour, as a few examples.

I had considered making a rap with the objects only, like the PokéRap in the anime, Pokémon, which is only made up of the names of various Pokémon. But, in thinking of oral traditions, the most enduring stories are the ones that people connect with. People connect with shared interests and experiences that are assisted by objects, not the objects themselves. Because many students in this course are teachers, what better way for a story to be remembered than to present common frustrations in the workday? Nothing unites like common problems and enemies! The most enduring oral pieces are also easy to remember. The PokéRap actually does not rhyme, but I remember it because of its catchy beat. By adding rhyme, rhythm, and an iconic “Slim Shady” track by Eminem that has a high “cultural capital” (The New London Group, 1996), I increase the longevity of my story.

The final rap is the result of multiple rounds of redesign. In the numerous iterations, I wrote and rewrote the backstories for each object, each time renegotiating my identity (The New London Group, 1996). Some of the stories are true while others are made-up to paint a more vivid image of the teacher in the song. A certain persona was also born as a direct result of the background track I selected. This persona is slightly angry. I am not an angry person, but being angry does increase my cultural capital. Anger sells.

Other than rhyme and rhythm, I also included nominalizations, phrases that contain a large amount of information, in my linguistic design (The New London Group, 1996). My favourite example is found at the beginning of the song. I reworked the beginning few lines multiple times until I settled for, “I forgot my calculator”. I think every STEM teacher knows exactly the kind of conversation that follows when a student, on test day, says that line! Even hearing that line from a student next door evokes an immediate emotional response. Having this line early in the rap sets the tone for the rest of it.

I made two final additions to my rap before completing this task. The first was to include a visual  design element in an otherwise visually lacking medium. I added just one word to shape the listener’s mental imagery: pink. This is not authoritative; I am certain the shade of pink in every listener’s mind is different! I did this because the task is focused on the bag, and in some ways, the story is not so much about the teacher-rapper, but about the bag and its journey throughout the day. How many times is it picked up, set down, and rummaged through? The second was to include an auditory design element other than the background track and my voice. I recorded three sound effects, a kazoo, a gulp of water, and the sound of my bag’s zipper. The line where I whip out my kazoo to celebrate a student’s birthday is followed by two kazoo chirps. The line describes me as “coocoo”, which I leave open for interpretation to the listener (is it coocoo as in “crazy” or coocoo as in “cool cool”?), and the chirps reinforce this idea. The gulp is a fun way to communicate that I have a travel mug in my bag, and teachers are always dehydrated so I hoped that the sound would give a strong impact. The zipper communicates that the items mentioned in the rap are coming from my bag. No where in the song do I explicitly state that the objects are coming from my bag; I thought that the zipper sound effect was a more fun approach. It also sounds like a disc scratch, which may make the rap more coo…

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

The New London Group.  (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.)  Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

Hint: It is a movie and a show.

In reading Bolter (2001), I struggled to accept the proposed hierarchy of communication modes between visual, oral, and written. Bolter states that, “If alphabetic writing is regarded as secondary writing, in the sense that it refers the reader to another system (spoken language), picture writing seems to be primary” (Bolter, 2001). What is missing is context. The nature of the message defines which mode is supreme. Our task here is to encode a visual experience with symbolic text and so the visual is primary and the text is secondary. If the task was to describe an emotion or a line of thinking, then perhaps text becomes primary because we often think in words. Whichever mode of communication is more true to nature, or more transparent to the true nature (Bolter, 2001), depends on what the nature is. Then there is the problem of bias. There are slight differences in how each person receives and interprets oral, visual, and written language due to differences in lived experience. Kress (2005) describes reading as an act to fill symbols with meaning, and what that meaning is depends on the reader. To truly preserve the nature of a message, a preservation that will never actually reach 100% I might add, all three communication modes need to be employed to build in redundancies. If the receiver interprets a sound incorrectly, there is a backup subtitle and visual. If we think about it, all experiences are multisensory. It is inherently impossible to capture the true nature by only speaking to one sense, be it a visual, auditory, or written text.

To describe the plot of my chosen show, I relied on words and ideas. A glance of the available symbols revealed that there were not enough symbols to cover all of the syllabic sounds in the English language, which meant that this system alone would be insufficient in communicating the plot. If I were to use syllables at one place and then ideas/words in another, how would the reader know when to read in syllables and when to read in ideas? I would have to set up explicit methods and instructions for the reader so that there is no ambiguity in where to use each decoding method. There is a great advantage in not using emojis as syllables at all, and that is that by doing so, the emoji language becomes more global; readers in languages other than English will have a better chance of understanding. Of course, some symbols may still be interpreted incorrectly due to, again, differences in lived experience, and in particular, cultural differences. For example, if I had to code for “person in mourning” for a Western audience, I’d choose people symbols in black attire. However, if I had to code for the same thing for a Chinese audience, I’d choose people symbols in white attire.

There is a lot of remediation (Bolter, 2001) in my emoji story. My emojis are arranged from left to right as Western text is, and is to be read from top to bottom. I decided on this feature so that reading these emojis bear some sense of familiarity to reading text. As reading and writing is so dominant in our culture, I expect readers to fall into this subconscious behaviour automatically. My audience is fellow ETEC 540 students, who are studying writing and are reading papers every night from left to right. When reading anything, be it visual or textual, we hunt for a starting point. We understand and learn things in chronological order because we experience things embedded in time. This was clear to me as I tried, unsuccessfully, to read the visual by Shahash’king in Bolter (2001). By laying my emojis left to right, top to bottom, I answer the proverbial question, “And then what happened?” and mimic the authoritative book, which is the epitome of organized thought (Kress, 2005). I immediately identified another problem in communicating my plot. If there are no periods, how does the reader know where one idea begins and ends? How will the reader know to which emoji noun an emoji adjective is applied? To address this, I broke my ideas into separate lines because to go from one line to the next, the reader must go through a cognitive pause. I realize that my concerns and fixation over “emoji grammar” stem from my refusal to go 100% visual and symbolic, and 0% text. I am so fixated on reading and writing text that I am convinced that others will be too. I do note that I struggled to maintain the left-to-right read by the time I got to the last three lines of my plot. Due to a lack of prepositions, I had to resort to using a more visual method to communicate the place where certain events took place. Stepping back, I think I borrowed syntax from math, where a line of operations in parentheses are taken to be grouped together (3+4+5).

I started with the title because it was the simplest thing to transcribe into emojis, and the title convinced me that my chosen show was a viable option for this task. This task would be near impossible if the chosen show was predominantly focused on abstract themes. What would be an appropriate emoji for concepts like dignity, pride, personal growth, as an example? How would I transcribe “Pride and Prejudice”? The more concrete the plot, the easier it is to transcribe into emojis because there are not universal symbols for complex feelings, but there are for concrete objects and simple themes.

After completing my emoji transcription, I thought about how rigid my creation was. This task was to be posted on a digital space, not on a page of a book. I started to envision a design for emoji grammar. Every noun can be a hyperlinked emoji, which upon clicking or hovering, reveals an adjective emoji. A verb emoji can be coded for movement to emphasize the action. Gif emojis would be perfect for this task. Upon further thought, is the rigidity of my emoji story such a bad thing? The goal is to successfully communicate a show to others, so an authoritative approach, where I control how the reader experiences this task, seems appropriate. If too much freedom is given to the reader to explore, chronological order becomes fuzzy and the plot might be lost. And so, moving forward, I might look at a publication’s topography to understand its purpose. Is it to convince, to pass knowledge, to teach, or is it to allow for personal development and entertainment?

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learningLinks to an external site.. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.

Bunsen Burner

Click above to download the .zip file.

I am a terrible storyteller, so I decided to make an educational game, a simulation to prepare students to use the Bunsen burner safely. I added visuals and sounds to make the experience as real as possible and tried to be funny to make the game enjoyable. As the simulation is intended to mimic the lab, I set most of my links to be decisions. I created good decisions and poor decisions so that students can experience both success and failure. The simulation gives students a safe place to fail and opportunities to remake erroneous decisions.

At the start of designing the game, the process was relatively straight forward. There is definitely a starting point to setting up the Bunsen burner – connecting the rubber tube to the gas outlet – so I created a list of decisions around that. Hierarchies and sequential steps are a large part of learning science and so beginning my Twine design in this same way felt natural. Having decisions be the links set the expectation that the linked page will be about the resulting consequence of an action. To reinforce that page B is the result of what was decided on page A, I set a welcome message on page B to remind students of their decision that led to the result (Bolter, 2001).

I had expected that the remaining steps in setting up a Bunsen burner be sequential as well, but to my surprise, they were not. I realized that the following steps, adjusting the oxygen and gas valves on the burner, can be done in any order. In fact, when I set up the burner myself, I am just as likely to adjust the oxygen valve first as I am to adjust the gas valve. And so, my Twine game narrative was no longer linear, but had parallel pages, and this, to my surprise, also reflected my focus and thinking process. In this fork of my narrative, I started to have rapid fire thoughts about both valves and the decisions for each simultaneously. At the same time, in the middle of my coding, I decided to incorporate sounds and images. I would frequently interrupt my own coding to run into the lab to take a picture or to record a sound. My mind indeed operated by association at this point; as soon as one thought occurred, my mind snapped instantly to another that is associated with the first thought (Bush, 1945).

Upon further reflection, is connecting the rubber tube actually the first step in setting up the Bunsen burner? One could just as easily check the valves first. The cognitive structures in my brain are a web of trails (Bush, 2001) that are made linear when memories are accessed. However, the linearity is different each time. One day, I may check the oxygen valve first, then the gas, then connect the tube. On another day, I may do the complete reverse of these steps. At this point, I deleted all the arrows in my Twine, and reconnected the pages so that connecting the tube to the gas outlet was no longer the mandatory first step.

So if our thoughts are webs, why are we so obsessed with teaching sequentially? Why are our subjects organized into units and our notes labeled with numbers and indexed? I think there is a difference in how information goes into the brain and how information is stored and accessed in the brain. If information is stored linearly, like if our brain was a big scroll, it would take much longer for us to find and recall information. It is much more efficient for ideas to be stored as a web, with each idea hyperlinked to many others. But, in learning new ideas, linearity may reign supreme. Learning is already a difficult task. I cannot imagine learning history from multiple points in the timeline simultaneously or learning chemistry by jumping around from atomic theory to the mole. Information must be presented in an organized way so that students can first understand the topics, and then hyperlink them to their own existing web. Only they can make sense of new information within their own contexts. Each student arrives to class with their own internal memex; only they have access to the levers and buttons.

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1) (Links to an external site.), 101-108.

In the modern age, the question, Do you normally write by hand or type?, doesn’t make sense because the answer is it depends on what the purpose of the writing is and who it is for. Whether I choose to hand write type is determined by how much time I want to spend communicating my ideas and whether I want to also convey sentiment. If the goal is to communicate ideas, then writing by hand does not make any sense in the modern world. Why would I want to communicate at 13 words per min when I can do so at 55 words per min? Why would I want to shackle myself to the permanence of ink on paper when I can choose a medium that allows for infinite revisions while producing a polished product? (Looking at my diary entry, I already wish I had typed it first. I wanted to also mention how career excellence is impossible with a child. How am I supposed to be efficient and prep high quality lessons when I have to go home right after work for childcare? Women who place career over their children are also ostracized by society). Writing by hand, because it takes so long and requires so much planning to produce polished work, is reserved for the most special recipients, those who are truly worth our time, and occasions; it is only done on heartfelt messages like love letters and thank you notes.

I have perfectionist tendencies so when I make mistakes when writing, I use whiteout tape, which is superior to liquid whiteout because it is ready to write on right after its application and it provides clean, straight lines for the correction. Of course, I only use this corrective method on white paper. On coloured paper, as I learned from my grandfather when I was a child, it is much better to wet an eraser and rub the top layer of the paper off, much like how the monks used a knife to scratch off some parchment to correct their errors (Harris, 2018). Crossing something out looks messy and draws attention, and it leaves evidence of the specific blunder, which may say something about my intellect! On pieces of great importance, I may decide to start over.

Much like how early scientists reveled at how a paper can be revised and reprinted when new discoveries are made and old mistakes fixed (Harris, 2018), thoughts can be revised multiple times until their permanent placement on paper. The early scientists experienced revisions on a time scale of months and years, made possible by the printing press (Harris, 2018), and we experience it now in real time when we write with a computer. This is the most significant benefit of mechanized writing, more significant than time savings and professional appearance, because the main purpose of writing is to communicate; the ability to revise serves to better that purpose. I prefer to type over to write. When I choose to write because the message is personal, I actually type it first, so that my piece of writing has that final, professional and clean look.

We may be on the precipice of another communication remediation, one that perhaps cycles back to an oral medium. With instant communication devices causing future generations to become less patient and to always want instant gratification, 55 words per minute is beginning to feel too slow as well. Voice-to-text programs will only become more sophisticated over time and may replace typing with 150 spoken words per minute. Indeed while I was writing this diary entry, I was constantly annoyed that my hand couldn’t catch up to my thoughts, and then my hand started cramping so my letters became sloppy. When one medium is replaced with a superior one, remnants of the old medium remain (Bolter, 2001). The oral medium did not have punctuation as these were communicated with tone, volume, and rhythm. The written medium invented punctuation to retain these oral features. And now, in voice-to-text programs, we have to say “period” and “comma” to retain punctuation in writing. What a 360 we have done!

References

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2^nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, Brad. “The Printed Book: Opening the Floodgates to Knowledge.” How it Began: A History of the Modern World. 15 Feb. 2018. https://howitbegan.com/episodes/

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I thought I would give this activity a go just for fun because I love arts and crafts. Each potato took me 11 min to carve. The most challenging thing to carve was the hole in the “a” as I only had a flat paring knife. The first stamp did not have enough paint on it, so for the second, I used more and moved the potato around to really smear the paint into it. I chose “haiku” because I like writing them. They are so much fun! Sometimes, I answer students’ emails with a haiku for a laugh.

In hindsight, it would be a lot easier to carve out the letters as a negative space because you can then just dig with any tool. The hole floor does not have to be even, it just has to be lower than the rest of the potato. The printing press obviously did not do this though as this sort of printing would not be ink efficient. In any case, because the letters in the printing press were created by filling molds with metal, the molds themselves were created in just this way, digging out a hole for the letter, but the hole bottom would have had to be perfectly smooth so that the finished letter would receive a uniform layer of ink.

Letters have a distinct proportion, as we all learned in grade school when our papers had three lines to guide our printing: a solid, a dashed line in the middle, and a solid line at the bottom. I appreciated the memory as these three lines were the first that I carved into the potato. I suppose letters all follow this proportion because visually, this makes them easier to recognize and analyze.