Task 1: What’s in My Bag

I thought this was a fun way to start the course – sort of like an icebreaker game that might give us a bit of insight into our classmates, and getting us thinking about the meaning of ‘text’ and ‘technology.’ I had a look at most of my classmates pictures and stories, but Anne’s post left quite an impression on me. It wasn’t as if Anne had unusual things in her bag – it was her sharing a narrative around one of the small objects she found in there that left an impact on me. It led me to consider the affordances of the age we live in of more portable text, and how emotion connects to text.

In her bag, Anne found guitar picks bearing the following text – “Tune low, play slow / Brenden Gunn / 1989 – 2019”. If I found these randomly, with no background knowledge, I could make some assumptions. Brenden is typically a male name, ‘tune’ might reference the fact that ‘he’ played guitar, and the years would suggest he lived from 1989-2019. Since I don’t know who this is, it does not evoke any emotion in me. However, seeing the picks, and then reading Anne’s story about her friend, evoked feelings of empathy and sadness. As Anne said ‘It doesn’t simply tell me intellectually that Brenden Gunn lived for only 30 years and passed away in 2019. It dives straight into my heart, pulls up my grief, and helps me process the loss of this man’s soul from our busy world.’ So without the context, I only can deduce that he lived for 30 years and passed away in 2019. If Anne shares her story, I can connect to it and her emotionally.

We live in an age where text is portable. Having on-demand access to a wide range of text provides plentiful opportunities for connection, reflection, and emotional responses. Anne’s story reminded me that I keep a copy of the program from my grandfather’s funeral in my bedside table. When I see it in passing, it stirs up memories of him. He is memorialized in that text, and reading it makes me feel and remember things that others wouldn’t.

Anne’s post was a good reminder for me that two people can read the same words, but the words can elicit very different responses and feelings.

 

Task 3: Voice to Text

I chose to include a post from this task specifically because I honestly HATED going around and reading my classmates transcripts! (and I wanted to reflect on why). Rachel made some good points from this task I had not considered.

I don’t think I realized how difficult it would be to read someone else’s transcript before I started. I re-read my own when I uploaded it to my blog and it still made pretty good sense to me, despite the lack of punctuation. When I started reading my classmates’ posts, I was frustrated as I felt like I couldn’t follow their train of thought and I wanted to give up. Those writing conventions we use (punctuation, capital letters, spaces between words) really do ‘train’ our brains to more easily process and understand text. So why was it easier for me to understand my own? I realized it was because I knew the background of my story, had thought about it before and while speaking it, and had memory and emotion attached to it. I did not have these additional tools available to me when I read my classmates’ transcripts.

I appreciated how Rachel had some discussion around scripted versus impromptu speech, and oral versus written storytelling. Her comment about how ‘scripted speech, depends on the context, normally will be more in-depth, as the writers/speakers have more time to think and compose the speech. On the other hand, impromptu speech can sound more engaging (speakers play a vital role) because it is not rehearsed’ made me think about giving speeches at weddings. I went rogue (impromptu) giving a speech at one of my close friend’s wedding, whereas I carefully wrote and rehearsed what I wanted to say at another. Which was a better speech? Hard to say. But I certainly felt more emotional delivering the impromptu one. I liked her parallel between apprenticeship and Communities of Practice, which I had not heard of before and needed to research a little. While now there are textbooks and manuals to read while learning a profession or trade, oral transmission of knowledge was the only method before books were widely available.

Voice to text is a great tool available – I use it with some of my students who have written output challenges. However, going forward, I will teach them to say ‘period’ at the end of their sentences!

Task 5: Twine

I was immediately hooked into reading Kirsten’s twine task post when I saw her initial image of a head wrapped in rope with the bottom line of text reading ‘tech is hard.’ It was funny, and I laughed out loud. I too found this task a challenge (I had not used Twine before), but I was fascinated to read her breakdown of how she tackled the task and her process for doing so.

We took on this task in very different ways. I watched the intro video in the module, opened the program, and started to play around. I messed up, deleted screens, and started over again. I hit walls trying to add images and sound, got frustrated, walked away, and then decided to proceed without them. I did zero pre-planning. I sat down and started ‘playing.’

Kirsten pre-planned. She started with post-it notes, then moved to a colour-coded word document, which led to a table. Screens were numbered (I liked this idea), and she them moved to the Twine application. She said that once she had used it she ‘lamented not using the technology much earlier.’ Upon reflection, the explanation of her process made me realized I had been pre-planning as well, but I was not using the text methods (post-its, word processing) she was to do it. I was planning in my head as I went. So while I was not recording my planning, it was happening. There was just no text evidence of it.

Kirsten said ‘the Twine process demonstrated the diversity of paths that can lead us to the same place.’ This is true not only literally within the program, by backtracking and taking a different hypertext pathway, but has many analogies in day-to-day life as well. It made me think of using the ‘Map’ app on my iPhone while driving. I plug in the address of the place I want to go, and the program gives me options of different routes and streets to get there. While one path may take longer than another, we still end up at the same destination. Kirsten’s conclusion was spot on to me – ‘it is both a challenge and a relief to see to discover that the path is not linear; our lives are not a simple series of “if…then” statements, as much as we might like to think so. With the illusion of control shattered, we are free to see that no mistake is finite and unrecoverable. There are many ways for us to get to our desired destination. We are unique individuals, and technology needs to provide the flexibility for us to meander our way through our multiple choice-points and preferred ways of being. As I developed my interactive story, I wondered about including options that would be true “dead ends”.  But, as long as we are alive, there are no true dead ends. Everything is possible.’ Like driving, if we hit a ‘dead end’ we can turn around and find a different way. It also led me to think about her comment on flexibility in technology providing for choice, and relating that to multiple assessment means for the students I teach. One size fits all does not work for everyone!

 

Task 7: Mode Bending

While I chose to do a video trailer with music for my mode bending, Deirdre’s mode bending ‘mom pockets’ podcast was a completely different take on this task, and really enjoyable to listen to. I think there is an element of hearing someone’s voice that lets you feel like you know them a little bit better, and her conversation with her friend was relatable as I am also a mother and woman. While I kept the contents of my task 1 ‘what’s in my bag’ post the same for my mode bending task (ie. I felt I needed to do a literal show and tell of what was in my bag), I liked that Deidre chose to use what was in her pockets instead, as she explained in task 1 that in winter, her pockets function as her bag.

Deirdre said that ‘much of my identity is in relationship to others.’ I think this is an excellent point. My identity when I’m with my close friends looks different than it does when I’m with my children, or my partner, or my co-workers. Even the types of language and text I use is different. (I say way more bad words when I’m with my friends and partner!) Deirdre’s quote from Dobson and Willinsky (2009) ‘writing is formal and monologic, whereas speech is informal, interpersonal, and dialogic’ made me consider when/why I chose different methods of text communication for different reasons. If I need to convey something serious to someone where I am at all worried my tone or what I say could be misconstrued, I will always chose conversation over writing. It allows hearing the tone of one’s voice, observation of body language, and opportunities for immediacy in reply.

I liked that Deirdre put her own spin onto this task right from the beginning and chose pockets instead of a bag. It made me wish I had chosen to incorporate my own voice in this task, and it made me wonder what other sorts of ‘What’s in my…’ tasks we could try. What’s in my fridge? What’s in my night stand? What’s in my junk drawer? Each one would tell us something different about different pieces of our identity in different settings in our lives.

Task 8: Golden Record Curation

I love music, so I really enjoyed this task. I enjoy all of Olivia’s posts, and I liked her take on this activity.

I can completely relate to Olivia’s experience of growing up in the 80s and 90s and having most of my digital memories (aside from photographs) inaccessible. I too used floppy discs, VHS tapes, and film cameras. It brought to mind something that happened last year while visiting my parents. They found an old cassette tape with my voice recorded on it. Luckily, my dad still had a ‘ghetto-blaster’ in his garage which played cassettes, so we brought it in and listened. I do not have a tape player in my home so this memory would have been inaccessible to me. I then ‘re-digitized’ it by recording the recording with the voice memo app on my phone. This made me wonder if someone found my voice memo in 35 years, what technology might be available to them to ‘re-digitize’ it?

Where we differed in our opinions was on whether to include tracks with voices in them. She said ‘If it were truly up to me I would not include any music on a communication device meant for alien intelligence. If, however, I had to I would take out all music that does not have human voices.’ In my selections, I tended towards instrumental pieces on purpose. However, this made me realized I was ASSUMING that the alien life that would possibly find the record would be sentient beings with feelings, which of course might not be the case. Listening to music and FEELING go hand-in-hand with me, they are inseparable. But the point of sending the Golden Record into space was not to make alien life feel what it is like to be human, it is to communicate information to them.

I concur with Olivia’s opinion that this was somewhat of a ‘brag’ about how diverse we are as a population and that the idea of sending this Golden Record into space ‘might only be for us.’ It sure is interesting to think about who or what may find it though!

 

Task 9: Network Assignment using the Golden Record Curation Data

I found this to be a cool but frustrating task. The fact that our own input and choices were used made it something it would be easier to be invested in (I thought). Ying’s opening sentence made me nod and keep going – ‘My initial response to this week’s task of data analysis is an overwhelming sense of frustration and confusion.’ That’s exactly how I felt once I finally got the palladio file to actually open, which took 24 hours of trying to figure out. The lack of demographics to go with the data made me initially ask (probably out loud, to my cat) ‘WHAT’S THE POINT OF THIS?’ At the very least, we can tell all these people are graduate students in this program, speak English (it’s a program requirement), and we can maybe predict if they are male or female (but this is not certain either).

I appreciated Ying’s manipulation of the data to try to find patterns, and her explanation of the process. I will admit that without enough context and additional information, I did not explore as much as she did. She attempted to see if there were similarities based on grouping by Asian surname, but as she pointed out, it was ‘futile’ as it is not predictive of cultural background. She had 8/10 song choices in common with one other person. So while it gave her the ‘what’, it didn’t give her the ‘why?’ Like searching for information on the internet, a search will give us the ‘what’ but it won’t explain why those particular links were chosen for us to look at.

This activity was also had some parallel issues to the mode bending task for me, as Deidre’s choice of doing a podcast allowed her to explain the reasoning behind what was in her pockets, which is what was missing from this task. Ying and I came to the same conclusion – we need more information! There will always be similarities and differences between people. However, one or two similar facets in culture, personality, etc cannot be predictive of others. I liked Ying’s closing question about wondering if dating apps work this way. It made me wonder what we could have gleaned from this data if a few additional questions had been asked on the initial quiz (age, gender you identify with, profession, place of birth, etc).