Category Archives: Weekly Tasks

Playing the online game Use Inyerface was more challenging than I thought it might be and is an excellent example of how the attention economy works. There were many times while playing where I had to carefully consider what was being asked of me and carefully select what information to pay attention to and which information to ignore. What threw me off most was that on the surface much of the information that needed to be filled in, or clicked on looked as it normally would on a web or social media site, but was just slightly modified, so that you couldn’t follow your intuition solely based on what you are used to, and instead needed to read carefully. 

Interface uses a lot of distraction techniques that would typically be used to lead you in the right direction, but in this context were there to act as distractors, adding precious seconds to your time. These were: 

• Big green buttons (obviously I want to click it!!) 
• Pop up boxes 
• Countdowns 
• Underlined words 
• Words in different colors than the rest of the text 

Other techniques were used to put pressure on the user to make quick decisions, particularly the pop up boxes telling me my time was running out, then making it difficult to understand how to close them. Other things that I would not necessarily classify as distracting, but were certainly frustrating were: 

• Prompts that need to be deleted before filling in your own information 
• Options that are preselected which you must unselect
• Flags for incorrect matches which are in fact correct (i.e. Mrs & Male) 
• Irrelevant/ Non descript questions (number, box) 
• Contradictory questions 
• Misordered months 
• Age year beginning in an era where no internet use would have been born 
• Confusing questions (identify the glasses, bows, circles) 
• Oppositional questions (I do not agree to the terms and conditions) 

Ultimately, this exercise demonstrates what you can do with website design that will ultimately make it more or less successful. Those things that I noted as being distracting as they were able to grab my attention would be those things that might encourage people to sign up for products, or provide information they might otherwise not do on the internet. I thought these things would be particularly useful for scammers, and even had to stop and think whether to use real or fake information because it seemed so much like a red flag to me.  The things that were frustrating on the other hand, might make me stray from the path of signing up for membership on a website I may have previously wanted to. These are things that I would not want to do if I were creating a website of my own. 

In the world of education this exercise is applicable because it makes us realize how susceptible we humans are to these sorts of dark patterns (Brignull, 2011), and how susceptible our students would be as well. These dark patterns present possible dangers to students while they are engaging in online or social media activities. But on the other hand, it also brings to mind how teachers might be able to use these techniques to their advantage in order to direct student attention in the right direction.  

References

Bagaar. (2019). User Inyerface [web game]. 

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.

Instructions: Use the image and description of what is in your bag to re-imagine the context of each item.

Dobson and Wilinsky’s (2009) argument that digital literacy means having the skill set not only to access digital technology but also to evaluate and use digital information in a critical way, led me to think about the output of my first task (what’s in your bag) as a piece of digital information that can be used as a starting point that could evaluated and transformed into new meanings. 

My redesign for the what’s in your bag task is to take the image that has been produced and reimagine the context for each item. This redesign considers The New London Group’s (2006) idea that literacy must recognize multiple forms of communication and expression, allowing the audience of the task to re-interpret the information based on their cultural practices and existing knowledge. 

To begin, I took each item in my glove box and did a word association activity with it. Without context, thinking about what purpose and place each item belongs to in my world. From there, I was able to also add the visual of the re-imagined purpose and place of each item. 

In the first task, I explained my everyday use for these items and what they might say about me. In this redesign, I have put these items into new contexts, opening up these items to say something new or different about me. Other folks could take my image, one containing items they may not own or use in their daily lives, but still be able to contextualize these items  to their own knowledge and cultural contexts. 

From the perspective of an educator, assigning a similar task to my students would demonstrate their digital literacy, in their ability to access and evaluate digital information, and translate that information to their own personal context, evaluating the information for what it means to them. 

I invite you guys to try it out – which context(s) do you associate with the items in my glove box? Let me know in the comments 🙂 

References 

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. The Cambridge handbook of literacy, 286-312.

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

As I watched the lecture by Dr. Borditsky on the power of language to shape the way humans think, the following statements resonated with my own personal experience with constructions of  language, culture and relativism:

Firstly, Dr Boroditsky discusses several times throughout her lecture how language is a “magical” ability that humans possess and that diversity in language is a testament to the diversity and capabilities of the human mind. 

•  [0:35-0:47] “language is one of these magical abilities that humans have, we can plant ideas in each-other’s minds using a finite set of words that we recombine into an infinite set of new meanings” 
• [45:00-45:20]  “The fact that there are so many languages and they differ so much, this linguistic diversity is a real testament to the ingenuity, sophistication and flexibility of the human mind. We are able to invent not one perspective on the world, but 7000 and many more because we are constantly changing, inventing the language and moving in new directions” 

I think that this is something important to consider, that although we are wired through culture and relativism to consider language and resulting perspective as something that is static, we should instead consider how language frames what we see and without these constraints the human brain is actually capable of so much more and that languages can actually promote or impede certain abilities (like differentiating a wider variety of colors or counting exact numbers). As a Social Studies teacher, one of the primary skills that we encourage in students is to consider events and ideas from all sorts of different perspectives. Students often have trouble doing this; they can usually  identify the perspective of the speaker in a given source, and can often also identify the opposing viewpoint, but struggle to identify any other viewpoints that, for example, agree with parts of the perspective, and disagree with others. There are so many different ways of looking at the historical and contemporary world, but our cultures and language constrain us to look at the world primarily in one way because we “don’t think to dig out of the trench and see what other possibilities are” [44:54-44:58]. Dr Boroditsky elaborates on this idea by highlighting that language actually creates limits to our beliefs about the way the world works and the proper way to go about doing things: 

• [44:30-44:50]  “cultures reduce cognitive entropy… we are able to think about the world and conceptualize it in many different ways, but we don’t always do all of those different ways, we just do things in the ways that we are used to doing them.”  

This is an interesting dichotomy, where language proves that the human brain is infinitely dynamic and flexible, yet it also constrains us to a specific cultural worldview. In this way, language is a really strong demonstrator of how culture frames the way that individuals see the world and is a reflection of what different societies prioritize and deem to be important.

• [32:35-32:40]   “Speakers of different languages witness exactly the same event, but come away remembering different things about this event” 

Many Indigenous groups hold traditions that reflect the belief that nature should be regarded with deep respect, and that nature is inseparable from place and belonging. The Yupik language reflects this in that there are 40-50 different words for various forms of snow, a reflection of the importance of snow for Inuit society. Alternatively, Borodistky explains that the English speakers emphasize time, demonstrating the value and emphasis that Western societies put on time.

 After graduating from my undergrad, I moved to Cairo, Egypt to teach at an International School.  Over the two years that I spent in Cairo, immersing myself in the language and way of life, the more I came to see this same idea that language is a reflection of culture and world view. My biggest pet peeve while living in Egypt was what we referred to as “Egyptian time”, a concept that is familiar in many hot climates around the world. As a Westerner who is very time oriented, it drove me up the wall to be told something would be done right away and have it be completed weeks later, or that someone would be around to pick me up at 9:00PM and arrive at 11:00PM. Over time I came to understand how to interpret what was being said differently, based on the cultural environment, where the exact words being said were not the focus, but the culturally contextualized meaning behind the words. Boroditsky refers to this phenomenon by studying how teaching people different metaphors for time impacts how they think and speak about time.

• [18:00-18:30] “When you teach people to talk a new way, you are teaching them to think a new way” 

Language speakers, then learn to prioritize values based on the value of words in their language. By expanding knowledge of different languages then, humans are able to expand their understanding of what is valuable or important. By this interpretation, I would agree with Charlemagne and Charles V, who note that learning more than one language has the capability of giving one person the knowledge and wisdom of many. 

• [8:28-8:35] “To have a second language is to have a second soul” – Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor
• [8:38-8:40] “A man who knows four languages is worth four men” – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 

Dr. Borditsky’s lecture is an excellent means of promoting learning as many languages as possible, as this would be an incredible means of opening up our minds and means of interpreting our surroundings. I grew up in an English speaking family but attended French Immersion schooling from kindergarten to grade 12. The thing that I most noticed about learning French is that I began to associate grammatical gender with objects that I was interacting with. This was actually an interesting experience for me as I never particularly excelled with French grammar or remembering which gender was associated with which object. Even to this day when speaking or writing in French, I need to look at objects and think to myself, “does that chair look more like a girl or a boy?”. This is objectively ridiculous, in that a chair does not have a gender, but miraculously enough, my brain is most often able to search the annals of my primary school mind to find the gender the French language has associated with the chair.  Boroditsky notes that in this way, genders become more meaningful for cultures that place linguistic emphasis on gender. I wonder then how the transition to a more genderless world will be reflected in societies which place so much importance on gender. 

• [23:48- 23:55] “People have done a lot of studies looking at how people perceive and think about objects based on a grammatical gender.”  

Though I don’t often make use of my French anymore, I have found it to be useful in my travels, and have often found myself thinking that it would be a great superpower to be able to speak many languages fluently. Particularly in Egypt, but also while traveling in other parts of the world I have thought about how much easier it would be to get around, complete transitions and make friends if I could somehow be blessed with the gift of language and be able to speak fluently with people all over the world. This lecture has encouraged me to extend that thought to include how knowing many different languages would not only allow me to communicate more broadly, but also to see the world in a more diversified way, to see it from the perspective of people who speak all sorts of different languages and have all sorts of different worldviews. 

• [45:25-45:50] “[Think] about linguistic diversity as an aspiration; [think] about how you can think about things differently, all of the things your mind can do.”

References

SAR School for Advanced Research. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, How the languages we speak shape the ways we think. YouTube. Retrieved January 17, 2023, from https://youtu.be/iGuuHwbuQOg

My Glove Box 

My name is Amy Stiff. I am a High School Social and Legal Studies teacher on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuu’tina, Stoney Nakoda First Nations, and the Metis Nation Region 3 (Calgary, Alberta). 

The bag I have chosen is not a bag, but instead the glove compartment of my SUV. The reason I have decided to explore the contents of my glove box, rather than a bag, is because I very rarely carry a bag. In my glove compartment you will find my wallet, disposable masks, a pen, a reusable straw, a co-op receipt with a car wash code, a pack of gum, lip balm, a portable lint roller, body spray and several packages of condiments. 

The item that stands out most in this array is my wallet, an item that most people would keep in a more secure place that is less susceptible to theft. I have considered the risks of keeping my wallet in my glove box, but have ultimately decided it is the favorable alternative to needing it and realizing it’s been left at home, at work, a restaurant, a friend’s house, wherever I was last… something that has happened to me many times as I can be quite forgetful, particularly when it comes to misplacing items. 

This one component of my identity (being forgetful) however, contrasts with who I feel I am in other aspects of my life. The other items in my globe box are an example of this; included are just the necessities, all with rhyme or reason as to the necessities of day to day life. The masks, gum, lip balm, lint roller, body spray are all the necessities of any busy person on the go, and the ketchup packets are an important part of the sausage breakfast sandwich that I order every so often where ketchup is very rarely included in the bag. While not unlike the glove boxes of many other working women and men in the global north, I feel that these contents are a fair representation of the image that I project. 

Text Technologies  

The payment and membership cards in my wallet could be considered digital technologies. The ability to manage and use these various cards demonstrate a technological literacy, and an ability to communicate with and through 21st century society. These cards may also point to financial literacy. Other items in my glovebox, though not digital themselves, are digitally produced; the print on my disposable masks, the gas station receipt, and all of the labeling on the remaining items such as the chapstick, gum, body spray etc. This demonstrates that I live my life in a world which emphasizes technology and digital print and that to navigate my world, one must likely need technological literacy. 

The print on these items also point clearly to the fact that I live in a bilingual country. The labels on many of these items are both in English and in French. A cultural archeologist might venture a guess that I am also bilingual (English and French), and they would be correct. They may also remark that I live in an area that has been thoroughly globalized, with each of the items in my glove box being sourced from various countries around the world; Canada, China, Cambodia, and the USA. On the note of globalization, the masks in my glove box would also point to the fact that I am alive during a global pandemic, and am scientifically literate enough to understand how the coronavirus can be transmitted. 

Completing this exercise has caused me to reflect about the stories that our belongings tell about us and the worlds in which we situate ourselves. How others might interpret the lifestyle attached to certain belongings and what that says about the individual, their literacies, hobbies and lifestyles.