Narrative 1: Freedom Sight

In the early 20th century, ads were everywhere and it only seemed like they would become increasingly invasive in people’s lives. There was no way to turn them off in public spaces — Facebook, Instagram, billboards that one must cross — and spaces where they can be turned off came at a cost (click here for the article, Attention Dictatorship in the Early 20th Century). It took another 60 years for people to raise the question, is it ethical that the freedom of vision is not guaranteed when so many other personal freedoms were? It was an absurd period in history where the freedom to bear arms in the former United States of America (click here for the article, The Dissolution of the United States) was so fought for, along with the freedom of speech, including hate speech, while people’s attention economy was at the complete mercy of big companies. Multiple studies revealed that ads were shaping decisions, behaviours, and values in profound ways (click here for the article, Are Your Thoughts Yours? and Why Flat Earth Believers Surged in 2028). Arguably, the most publicized UN Supreme Court case, Martin vs. Instagram, pushed public demand for governments to instate freedom of vision (click here for the article, Why Judge Corseau ruled that Martin’s Heart Attack was Instagram’s Doing). What followed this historic case was the #righttovision movement on social media (click here for the article, Why Sally Gauged her Eyes Out). And yet, governments failed to make any changes to regulate ads. And why should they when they were being lobbied excessively by companies who were making money off of ads, who were simultaneously targeting favourable ads to government officials? The final straw was when textile giant, Fabricate, began selling time on their infits to companies, after 25 years of giving its users 100% control over the content on their clothes (click here for the article, The Unraveling of Fabricate). For our younger readers, there was a time when clothes were static. Such items were called ‘outfits’ (click here for the article, Top 10 Infit Downloads). It came at no one’s surprise when companies like Freedom Sight and Vision Void began to crop up all over the world, offering services to eliminate ads in ways that AdBlock on browsers never could. Freedom Sight and Vision Void, the two giants in the industry competed until 91% of the world’s population had one of their implants. A Red Queen dynamic quickly ensued between companies developing new technology and new methods of ad delivery (click here for the article, IR and UV Ads) and Freedom Sight and Vision Void developing better recognition and blocking technology in their implants. And now, we arrive at the world’s current predicament. What is to be done about the thought disparity between those who can and those who cannot afford to block ads? (click here for articles, Children Without FV/VV Implants Are Less Creative, Should Politicians Without FV/VV Implants Be Elected To Office, Blindness On the Rise from Black Market FV/VV Implants, and Should Babies Receive FV/VV Implants?).

Jane Foley received her implant from Freedom Vision when she was 30 when she sold her great-great grandparents’ antique, non-self driving car, for $50 000 to a collector, and could afford a tier 3 implant. Until then, she lived her life immersed in the ad world. Only 5% of individuals receive their implants after the age of 15. Thus, Jane has a unique ability to reflect and understand the experiences of implanted and non-implanted people. She has been with Pacific Review for 9 years as a reoccurring guest journalist. 

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Narrative 2:

Utopia
From Songs from Ustralia, 2061

It began with the rise of the mighty
The rise of the tiny
The rise of the mighty
One small bite and you get a nasty
It really is ghastly
It really is nasty

Tick tock, tick tock
Small bite, impact of a Glock
And you wonder why you ever left your block
To go into the woods, tick tock, tick tock

What used to smell so wonderful
Now warns of something so harmful
What used to cause the mouth to water
Now you double over and falter

Just one taste, it’s ok, you will survive!
Just one bite, it’s ok you will revive!
No such thing, covered in hives
No such thing, the new age arrives

It began with the rise of the mighty
The rise of the tiny
The rise of the mighty
One small bite and you get a nasty
It really is ghastly
It really is nasty

An idea! Problem solved!
Us humans will be evolved!
Convert the compound into aerosol!
It just may save the planet, and us all!

And so in secret, the compound was bred
And so in secret, the compound was spread
Into the water, into the wind
It landed in the eyes and on the skin

Just one taste, surely you’ll survive!
Just one bite, surely you’ll revive!
No such thing, covered in hives
No such thing, the new age arrives

And so ranches became branches
And pens became cleanses
Steaks became dates
And chops became crops

Goodbye polluting farming
Goodbye global warming
Hello healthy living
Hello arteries clearing

That smell that was so wonderful
What was it, we are forgetful
That red that made our bellies full
What was it, we are forgetful

It was built on the backs of the mighty
With the strength of the tiny
The secrets from the mighty
One exposure and you get a nasty
Is it really ghastly?
Is it really nasty?
This Utopia?

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Reflection: I began this narrative by contemplating this thought in Dunne & Raby (2013), that problems that seem unsolvable can only be approached by changing our values, attitudes, and behaviour. I can think of no bigger problem than climate change and how unsuccessful one solution is — eat less meat. By eating less meat, we would produce less greenhouse gases and use less land in the raising of livestock. Although veganism is trending and a significant number of people know about this solution, little is done. This is because it is difficult to change our attitudes and values around diet. I mean, meat just tastes so good; I made roast for dinner. We are a consumer society and “it is through buying goods that reality takes shape” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 37). Because the demand for meat is always present, abolishing the livestock industry is a “rejected reality”.

So how do we move the immovable object that is our cravings? Well, instead of focusing on how to change attitudes and values, what if we just eliminate the attitude and value altogether? What if we could design a way to make people get physically sick upon ingesting meat? Surely, the demand for meat would decrease. This technology, would fall under the “possible” cone in Dunne & Raby’s (2013) potential future diagram. Such technology may not be plausible due to the hurdles in ethics (is it ethical to force people to dislike something?), it may not be “probable”, and it certainly is not “preferable” by the individual who would like to continue to enjoy their steaks and bacon. Technology does not always have to be “good” to start, but perhaps it could be good in the long run if the results are overwhelmingly beneficial to humankind. I envision a world with this dark design whereby the most effective ways of change — protests, boycotts, and critical consumerism — are forced (Dunne & Raby, 2013). If an ideal society is a sustainable one, then our current reality where meat is not only consumed, but overconsumed, is an absolute failure.

My poem was inspired by the news article, “Red Meat Allergies Caused by Tick Bites are on the Rise” and a CBC video. The ticks are referenced in the poem as “the mighty” and “the tiny” as such a small creature can cause huge behaviour changes in a person. They are also referenced in the line “tick tock” which alludes to the time between a tick bite and the onset of symptoms, and the time between a bite of meat and the onset of an allergic reaction. At the end of the poem, “the mighty” refers to the scientists who made the decision to use the compounds in a tick bite to change the human population. They must have endured a heavy ethical burden. I imagine that this speculative event took place after global warming became even more pronounced than it is now. The scientists enacted their solution to the problem in Australia where the compound’s spread could be limited to just one continent. Initially met with anger, citizens quickly realized that the outcome was pretty beneficial for the environment and their health. The solution was eventually embraced and red meat was forgotten. Australia became Ustralia as people began to put themselves at the front and center of solving the climate crisis. It also signifies the removal of cattle ranches because beef is graded with the letter, A.

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References

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

My initial response to this week’s task of data analysis is an overwhelming sense of frustration and confusion. The only things included in the data are the song names, how many times a song was selected, and the name of the person who selected it. Other than seeing the popularity of the song by looking at how many times it was selected in the class, nothing else can really be said. I find it absurd that with just this small bit of data, we have to try to make profound conclusions about the political standing of our peers, what generation everyone belongs to, the personalities or preferences of the participants, or what similar traits ties us together. To do any of these deep analyses, data on demographics need to be included – each person’s age, cultural background, gender, sex, profession, etc. Almost nothing can be gleaned from a person’s name only, other than maybe their sex. Even then, it is tricky because some names are unisex, and others come from cultures that I know very little about. To do just a little bit of analysis, I would have to go to everyone’s blog to try and pull all this personal information from.

Even the idea of how popular a song is by virtue of how many times it was selected, is misleading. What does it mean to be popular? I am certain that everyone in the class selected their songs using a different criterion. A song that was selected multiple times, was it its tune that was appealing, its diversity in instruments, or something else entirely? Track 7 Johnny B. Goode was selected 19 times. Was it selected because it is a catchy, upbeat song, or was it selected because it sounds so different than all the other songs, being the closest thing to pop music on the Golden Record? The 19 people, including myself, who selected it, are we all of a younger generation when compared with the rest of the class? It is impossible to know why Track 7 is so popular with just this limited data set.

I suppose this is why data mining is so huge on the web and why social media companies, like Facebook, are in the business of selling personal information. All the data collected from clicks, mouse hovering, purchases, mean very little compared to what could be concluded if personal information behind each click was gathered.

In thinking about this week’s content on search engines, the only conclusion I can make here is that if a search engine was built using this data, then Track 7 would be the first search result to appear if someone looked up the Golden Record. Track 7 would seem to be the most relevant result to this search engine because it was selected the greatest number of times by the class, therefore seeming to be the most important in the topic of the Golden Record. Tracks 8, 4, and 27 would appear last. Only three people chose these songs, so they have less value.

In my final attempt to make any conclusion at all from the data, I organized all the students in an outer ring and put all the songs in the middle. Because the only person I know in the data set is myself, I started to group the data to my own traits. I put people with Asian surnames near me and all other surnames on the opposite side. This was futile, of course, because just because a surname is Asian, doesn’t mean that that person grew up immersed in Asian culture. The person could have married an Asian person or could have been raised in the West since birth. I put my own song selection near my own name and all the songs that I didn’t choose on the opposite end as well.

The tracks that I chose and the total number of people who chose them are as follows:

• Track 7: 19
• Track 14: 16
• Track 12: 14
• Track 19: 11
• Track 6: 11
• Track 3: 11
• Track 11: 11
• Track 21: 7
• Track 1: 6
• Track 16: 5

Out of 23 students, a majority vote would be 12 students, or a song is selected 12 times. Out of my 10 tracks, I was in the majority three times (tracks 7, 14, 12) and in the minority seven times, which means that more people selected not to include the remaining 7 songs that I chose than people who did. This is not so bad considering that only 6 songs landed in the majority yes vote (tracks 7, 25, 14, 12, 11, 15), and I selected 3 out of those. So, what conclusions can be made here? I suppose this just says that I am average!

In looking at who had the greatest number of song selections in common with me, I anticipate that no one would have more than 5 songs in common with me. Musical taste is so personal and we were not restricted by any specific criterion to select the songs with that it is hard to imagine that any two people would share any more than 50% of their list. To my surprise, Megan Cleaveley and I chose 8/10 the same!

What does this say about the two of us? Nothing, because there is a lack of personal data to make conclusions from! Other than that we are both female, no other similarities between us can be gleaned from the data. If I selected my songs to be as diverse and different from each other as possible, perhaps she did something similar. Other classmates with 8/10 in common exist too, to my surprise, but only one other pair, Deirdre Dagar and James Seaton. The least number of songs in common between any pair of students is 2. I suppose the lesson here is that people will always share some similar ways in thinking, no matter how different they are. I realize, however, that the 23 of us are actually not that different if we all selected to take this course. This exercise, in finding commonalities between people, makes me wonder if this is how dating apps work. Is Megan my academic soulmate?

Would an extraterrestrial being care about humans and the Earth? Plenty of people would care about extraterrestrials, but just because we care, is it correct to assume that an extraterristrial species would too? Is this an egocentric idea, that we must matter to beings elsewhere? It is interesting to think that contact with another species would benefit us. Perhaps we would learn from them if they are more scientifically advanced, but it is just as easy to imagine a scenario where the extraterrestrials are aggressive or selfish. After all, if one human race tried their best to annihilate another human race upon landing on the shores of North America, is it unreasonable to expect the same to occur between two entirely different species?

I read one of the best science fiction trilogies last year, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, where the human race finally realizes the truth of the universe, a truth that most advanced civilizations understand and live by. To let other extraterrestrial civilizations know that we exist is suicide. When communication is difficult (as it ought to be when two civilizations are light years apart, having developed in completely different environments), when we do not understand how the other thinks or what they value, and in a situation where the other civilization may have enough technology to devastate our civilization, it is much safer to open fire and destroy the other before they have a chance to destroy you. This truth is based on two axioms. The first is that the goal of any civilization is ultimately survival. The second is that civilizations grow, but resources in the universe are finite. Thus,

[t]he universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them (Liu, 2015)

before they have the opportunity to eliminate you. So this Golden Record project, which can be sampled and dated for age, and given its velocity, trajectory, and the celestial objects that it has likely passed by, can be traced back to Earth. This project might have been our civilization’s greatest folly!

The project’s purpose seems to be to serve as evidence that we existed. It is not so much a communiqué as it is a glorified tombstone. This record of information is about preservation. The construction materials chosen were specifically selected to endure for millions of years. If the goal was to establish communication with another being, then more attention would be paid to the message and the modes of communication. Instead, the record attempts to depict diversity as best as it can. If this is the goal, then the criteria to select just 10 songs to be on the album is simply that the songs be as different as possible. There should be instrumental songs with as many different instruments as possible and vocal songs. The tempos, pitches, rhythms, and moods (I find it silly that we chose “joyful” music when we do not even know if extraterrestrials know what joy is or represent it the same way that we do) should also be different in each. The complexity of the notes, that is, the progression and pattern of notes should range from simple to the very complex. The range of the songs should vary from small to multiple octaves.

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1. Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia

• Male voice, multiple layers of harmony, mild tempo

2. Tchenhoukoumen, percussion Senegal

• Instrumental, percussion, rhythmic, quick tempo

3. Bach, Brandenburg no 2, part 1

• Instrumental, strings, wind, complex note progression that is very mathematical

4. El Cascabel-Lorenzo Barcelata&the Mari

• Strings, wind, male voice, very fast tempo

5. Fairie Round – cond David Munroe

• Wind only, medium tempo

6. Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria

• Horn, wind, female voice, slow tempo, not a lot of different notes – small range

7. Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry

• Piano, strings, percussion, male voice, upbeat

8. Melancholy Blues-L Armstrong&HisHotSeven

• Percussion, wind, horn, strings, mild tempo

9. Sacrificial dance-comp&cond Stravinsky

• Strings, wind, percussion, jarring mood

10. Mozart – Queen of the night- Eda Moser

• Female opera voice, strings, medium tempo

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In thinking about the question posed by Dr. Smith Rumsey, “What can we afford to lose” (Brown University, 2017), I cannot come up with an answer. According to her, the value of a piece of information cannot be determined at present, but only in the future in retrospect (Brown University, 2017). Is any of the information on the Golden Record of value to extraterrestrials millions of years from now? Perhaps what would be of value is the information about resources and habitable environments if we are to believe the axiom that all civilizations strive to survive. I do, however, note what we have conveniently left out of the record, and that is anything perceived as negative or dangerous about us. There is no mention of our violent nature or our war rich history. Was this wise? From our perspective, this may have been the most valuable piece of information to send if we are to believe the Dark Forest theory. Perhaps it is better to appear dangerous so that we warn other civilizations to stay away, that we are capable of defending ourselves if attacked.

Brown University. (2017). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”

Liu, C., & Martinsen, J. (2015). The dark forest. First edition. New York: Tor.

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.

Rocket, my 7 month old Australian Shepherd and Piper, and my dad’s dog, Piper, who really pushed me to overcome my germophobic tendencies. Recently, I allowed Rocket on my bed. I do not even recognize myself anymore.

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What’s the story of how I overcame my germophobic tendencies. I started to want a dog. I think it began was just watching Instagram feeds of these awesome. Imagine what my life would be like I have one. I can find him that I had a lot of down time and what I’m in the house alone I typically i’m on the couch being a total potato and on my phone. And cost constantly on my phone to make me feel like a slob I needed something more in my life. Probably where I start thinking about adding something to my family and a dog was a natural choice because I am by far nowhere near close to being ready to have a human child. How to serve a plants and when I got tired of plans as weren’t cousins of being a dog. Funny ways the greatest barrier to me being a dog owner was my dream about tendencies. For as long as you remember I’ve always been a very clean person and my mother I think is why I’m like this. Joey’s kept her house extremely clean there was no. Pink slime anywhere in her bathrooms and so I’ve come used to this lifestyle with everything was super clean. So my friends laugh at me when I said I want to get a dog because they knew that there was no way to handle all the germs and fur that comes with being a dog owner. So I started working on on these on my habit or getting rid of it by just hanging out with more dogs. Friends and one of my friends Ainsley she’s got two very large.. First exposure I had to do was when I visited her house. Small basement suite and she didn’t exactly keep it clean. What I mean by that is a simulator house I was until I was wholeheartedly whole body uncomfort. The entire house was just covered with hair. When I went in she saw how uncomfortable I was and she offered me to borrow some of her clothes so I wouldn’t have to get Michael Turnbull sitting on her furniture. I kept at it though and I start to play with her dog and it’s funny thing because once you start getting to know an animal you start to love. You such a grown up and from that I think you start to overcome your fears are and uncomfortableness around them. I start to pet them and when I pet them I mean when I ask after I pet them I actually was very proud of myself when I didn’t wash my hands immediately. So I went from pending one and having to wash my hands immediately to petting one and letting it go for an hour or two. I was so proud of bread about it too. From there I transition to letting a dog and not washing my hands immediately after. It was a day when her dog and I continued on my work day for entire day without washing it off and I was really proud of myself. So spring break hand and my parents here after hearing that I was going to get a dog. She call me before I did which is really annoying. So we got this little tiny dog cavachon is a white fluffy little thing so cute. We actually took it to her house my husband and I for a week because my parents or my dad’s if we just didn’t know how to raise a puppy and he freaked out and convinced us to take the puppy for the first week of his life. So we did potty training. And here’s the moment when I knew I could be a dog owner. Piper that’s what we that’s why I decided to name my dog, piper was going to potty training and she’s a very small things will become very difficult to see whether or not she is Party Up.. So we would take her outside every hour every two hours to make her learn or make her so seat potty without door. And her squat or so. Very difficult to figure out whether she can or not and it was during the rainy season 2 so it we couldn’t just use the ground figure out whether she had on her business. So one day I took her to the backyard and she didn’t Minnie Squat and to check whether or not she had peed I literally been, rub my hand on the grass, and then proceeded to bring my hand to my face and smell it. And that’s what I knew I had what it takes to be a dog owner. Fast forward a couple of months I now have my very own puppy. His name is rocket and he is 7 months old. He is an Australian shepherd and I love him so much that I actually touched him and going to bed without showering. I have also allowed him to go into my bed which is huge for me because the bed I’ve always thought as My Sanctuary where everything was as clean as possible. So I guess the big lesson here whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable whatever it is that you shy away from anything that you’re afraid, I guess love truly conquer. When I love rocket as much as I do I really don’t mind if you eat out of my hand or snuggle up to me in my face. I do think that there is one line I cannot cross. I have seen.. Food with their dog let their dog lick their ice cream cone, nana, eat the banana as a man. I think that’s what that is just too gross but who knows maybe a year to Five Years on the road maybe I would cook it to that point as well.

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Voice-to-text programs are unappealing to me because they’re not “smart”. As listeners, we are equipped with deciphering tools to help us make sense of a fumbled word. When someone fumbles a word in their speech, overall meaning remains intact because we can infer, by using the rest of the speech, what the fumbled word must have been. As seen in the transcript, I was not particularly careful in enunciating my words. The voice-to-text program was unable to select the correct word many times throughout my story, starting with the very first words, which were, “This is the”, which the program transcribed as “What’s the”. The mistranscription of the first few words in a sentence occurs numerous times, which tells me that I am really not good at initiating speech! It is actually a problem that I am aware of and I often make a point of settling my mind and making an effort to enunciate and slow down when I start speaking to someone.

Reading the transcript, I get the gist of my own story, but there are some confusing parts because numerous words were transcribed incorrectly. An oral story is more forgiving. Writing is concrete and feels authoritative because somebody took the time to put their thoughts into text. It is easier to accept that someone misspoke than it is to accept that a word in text is incorrect. Fumbling a word in speech takes a fraction of a second when compared to the amount of time it takes to put a word down on paper. Print feels more deliberate. Hearing someone say a wrong word, I would immediately think, “Oh, they must have meant ___.” Reading an incorrect word, I would question, “Is this correct? Should it be this word instead? Maybe it is this word and I am just not understanding.”

Punctuation is all over the place. I was so absorbed in speaking my story that it took a lot of effort just to focus on typing a period at the end of each of my thoughts. I knew I was making comma splices, but I just could not be bothered to pause and type punctuation. Commas, exclamation marks, question marks, and periods are communicated by tone, inflections, volume, and pauses. To type punctuation while dictating into the voice-to-text program would feel redundant and like a meaningless task. I naturally was unmotivated to do it, even though I knew that the resulting transcript would be annoying to read. I am convinced, after this exercise, that punctuation was invented much later than writing. It would certainly be weird to read a story where the inflections, pauses, and tone changes as marked by punctuation were described in full. It would be so distracting and in the way of the story, so symbols must have been invented to represent these aspects instead.

Speaking a story, the focus is on content. My attention was on making the story make sense chronologically and having the story progress logically; punctuation and grammar went straight out the window. Thoughts are thoughts and they sometimes have a mind of their own. They might occur unchronologically and illogically and so, the cognitive load, which I think of as the brain’s RAM, is dedicated to the task of organizing these thoughts. Thoughts occur rapidly, too rapidly to occur in complete sentences. Are thoughts even in words? We have an inner voice that we use to guide our emotions and problem solving, but the rest of the time, do thoughts occur divorced from words? Although I was not telling my story to a person, the idea that my speech was being recorded was enough to give me a sense of urgency because silence is awkward and uncomfortable. The time it would take for me to get all my sentences grammatically correct would result in my story being twice as long to finish. The listener would lose interest and I would lose my patience! It would sound like a Youtube video that was lagging.

These mistakes in grammar (incomplete, run-on sentences everywhere) and punctuation cannot really be called mistakes if there was no written transcript of my story. It is acceptable to speak in run-on sentences and fragments because that is how our thought patterns are in order to think and understand quickly. These mistakes only occur when stories are transcribed because there is a common set of rules that we all have agreed upon when we write. There are so many rules because the difference between oral and written communication is that when a spoken idea is unclear, the speaker can be prompted for clarification. When a sentence in writing is unclear, the author is often unavailable for questioning; they are either far away or dead.

Reflecting on my experience here, I understand why oral language preceded written language. Writing was invented, which means that it took thought to accomplish. Transitioning from thought to speech feels like a smaller step than transitioning from thought to writing. In our own development, we learn to speak first before we learn to write. There are more grammatical rules in writing than in speaking so it takes more cognitive power to write. Our own slow physical development prevents us from learning writing first as well; we simply do not have the fine motor skills to accomplish the task. I think about what it takes for any innovation to occur: constructive processes and collaborative efforts. Writing could not have been invented by one individual, rather, it must have taken multiple individuals in discussion to agree upon a common set of symbols with which to communicate. If my story of how I overcame my germophobic tendencies was scripted, it would be more concise and use less conjunctions. There would be a better rhythm and progression as I would have paid attention to sentence structure for style.

The bag I carry most frequently is my work bag, an absolute essential at a school where teachers are always on the move. Since teachers do not have their own classroom, they have to carry all their supplies from classroom to classroom. This is my bag after work with my laptop and course folders left at school.

Pictured on the right is me on Festive Sweater Day at school back in 2017. I am wearing a crewneck with a Christmas tree that is composed using the periodic table of elements — a Chemis-tree if you will — that satisfyingly includes the four most recent additions, Nh, Mc, Ts, and Og which were discovered in 2016.

Without my photo in this post, it would be very difficult to guess my profession, which is a significant part of my identify, from my bag. Nothing in here at first glance suggests that I am a chemistry teacher. It is feasible to conclude that I am a teacher, what with the planner and the whiteboard markers and the multitude of oral hygiene items, but nothing here says chemistry. The calculator suggests a profession in STEM perhaps, but that is about it. The only other object in this bag that is used in chemistry is the inconspicuous Sharpie, a tool that is used by pretty much anyone. It takes a chemist to know that the Sharpie is the tool of choice in the lab, better than the masking tape and the dreadful wax pencil when it comes to labelling our glassware.

Untold by my photo, I am a very organized and meticulous person with perfectionist tendencies. Things out of place and out of alignment irk me. My bag mirrors this as its contents say that I am someone who is always prepared and carry redundancies in case of any “worst case scenarios”. Any files I need from a computer can be retrieved from my phone. I have multiple writing instruments. I carry disinfecting wipes, mouth wash, and floss. I carry a planner that is detailed, colour coded, and filled in with only the neatest handwriting.

15 years ago, my student bag was very similar. I have always been an organized person and carried with me everything that I need. The only thing I did not carry 15 years ago is the kazoo. My personal bag on outing was very different. As an adult, my career is very integral to my identity, but as a teenager, my social group was everything. I remember carrying a mini notebook filled with sticker photos of my friends and I. I would carry this to the mall with my friends and add to it each time we visited the sticker photo booths.

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[The calculator] I had initially thought of text as any collection of symbols that carry meaning. In addition to words, I would have included in my definition pictures. After all, some languages have evolved from pictures. In this sense, I would consider a string of emojis as text, a meme as text, and math as text as well. The difference between a picture, symbol, and a word is unclear to me as all three serve the same purpose, to represent and communicate ideas. Words are made of letters, which are symbols, which are drawn like pictures. What is the difference between writing and drawing? What is the difference between reading a sentence that describes the dimensions of a square, its perimeter, and area, and reading a line of numbers that calculate the three parameters? The calculator is an instrument that allows users to input text and generates text in return. It is a tool that aids in creation, in the sense that to text is to create. If text is a linguistic construction, then surely mathematics qualifies as text. Software, transportation, machinery, are all encoded by numbers, which are the instructions. Numbers are the constructs to programs as strings are the constructs to tapestries. The calculator is also authoritative if the meaning of text in the Latin period is considered. A calculator simply cannot be wrong (oh but it can)!

[Lip balm, throat lozenges, mints, floss, mouth wash, vitamin mix, travel mug, mirror] It is shocking how many items I carry in my bag that are for the mouth and throat, but wonderfully delicious now that I have learned that to text is to create and that the word has an oral history! All these items provide self-care, to soothe and to freshen breath. I use the mirror to check if my teeth are clean after lunch. Teaching is such an oral profession, not just in the way that we profess, but also in the way that we socialize and build rapport with our students. I spend at least half a class speaking, and so if these items sustain prolonged speech, which is created or constructed, somethings given with authority, and taken as authoritative by students, then each of these items can be considered as text technologies.

[Kazoo] A hit with my students, I play the kazoo on my students’ birthdays. An instrument for the mouth, it is an oral representation of heartfelt feelings and celebration. If to text is to create, I can think of no stronger activity to embody creation than music. There is something oddly authoritative about music as well, in the way that it commands attention and respect. Students may not listen quietly to a lesson, but they listen to the kazoo in utter silence. This is perhaps my favourite text technology in my bag. It represents my playful nature, my sense of humour, and my overall demeanor in my classroom. An archeologist who finds my kazoo might at least think that the owner of this bag was quirky.

[Whiteboard markers, pencil, pen, Surface Pro stylus, Sharpie, pencil case full of more of these things] So much of teaching and learning are reading and writing. Tools to do this with are the staple text technologies in a classroom. If I had to choose just one tool to bring into a classroom to learn or teach with, I would probably choose a computer, but a writing instrument would be a very close second! We think about learning not just as hearing ideas, but as constructing ideas. Since our mental capacity is limited such that we can only hold so many ideas in our imagination at once before things start slipping away, and we would like to free up some of our “mental RAM” to do complex mental processes, we have to write things down to lessen our cognitive load. The whiteboard markers and pencil suggest that I engage in collaborative, constructivist activities and the Surface Pro stylus suggests that I am proficient with computers.

[Sanitary pads] I thought these items would no way have anything to do with text technologies, but the Greek roots of text surround childbirth, which is where the idea that to text is to create comes from. Sanitary pads might be the antithesis then, in that they mark a failure to bring forth a child. What do we call an anti text technology?

[Eyeglass cloth] I imagine that in the far future, no one will be wearing glasses anymore as corrective eye surgery become more mainstream and affordable. This item would be telling of the period that I live in to any archeologist that finds it. Though not a text technology itself, eyeglasses are essential to reading text.

[Facial oil absorbing sheets, hand cream, wallet]  These items, other than containing text on their packaging or contents, have little to do with text technologies.

[iPhone] And here we arrive at the very modern definition of to text. I must send countless text messages each month! Even in the modern definition, texting is still a very creative process as we now not only send words, but gifs, memes, and cryptic emojis. Smartphones are used for photography and videography too, making it an artistic tool as well. Anyone with an iPhone can be assumed to be literate as all the menus and navigation are text based. A cruise through the browser history might also reveal a person’s level of media literacy. Does the person browse credible websites or do they frequent websites pushing conspiracies and anti-scientific views? What privacy settings have they chosen to use on their device? I currently have both Whatsapp and Signal installed. What does this say about me?