My interpretation of Nathan’s text: “One man’s medicine is another man’s poison”. For this drawing, I used both visuals (person, pills) and symbols (male, death, health).

Inspired by the module on hyperlinked media and text, six students in this course collaborated on a game of Telestrations, a game that combines Pictionary and Broken Telephone. As in Broken Telephone where an original message is passed orally along from person to person, in Telestrations, an original message is passed with alternating visual and text mediums; one person draws, the next person writes a caption, then the next person draws that caption, and so on and so forth. The game nicely illustrates that despite our best efforts, a single medium is not transparent at all to the true nature of something described. Meaning is lost in visual communication as they are open for interpretation. They are open for interpretation because every individual has their own unique way of representing ideas visually, and conversely, their own way of understanding a visual in turn. Text is not infallible either and is less authoritative than it seems, particularly in Telestrations where the text is full of doubt as one player tries to guess another’s ideas. The texts in this game lack context and the six players are strangers; they do not have the luxury of using each other’s backgrounds, experiences, and habits to more accurately guess each visual or text.

In linking six web blogs together, we have designed these web pages to not only “function as ordinary text, but [sic] also as places along a path” (Bolter, 2001, p. 28). The metaphorical path here is the learning that takes place for each of the six participants for the whole course. The reader has the freedom to wander away from the specific pages about Telestrations and explore each web blog in depth. The hyperlinked pages each have an introduction, a welcome, to remind the reader why they have landed there (Bolter, 2001). Browsing through each web blog, the reader gets the sense that digital print is “malleable”, however, the learning that occurs on each occurs in “parallel” (Bolter, 2001). Every web blog is organized differently, but the learning reflected on each progresses in a unified chronological way, as designed by the course.

Below are the links to follow the progress of the game. I impose no hierarchy; you are free to view the list in chronological order starting with Player 1 to view the original message and how it changes through each proceeding player, or in reverse chronological order starting with Player 6 and watch how the message gets closer and closer to the truth. Of course, you are also free to view the list in random order if you so wish!

• Player 1 Deirdre’s original drawing
• Player 2 Sandra’s textual interpretation
• Player 3 Kirsten’s visual interpretation
• Player 4 Nathan’s textual interpretation
• Player 5 Ying’s visual interpretation (me)
• Player 6 Selina’s final textual interpretation

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (Links to an external site.). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 77-98.