Which is the mode I chose for this project . . . and which I’m trying hard to make a life mode, but so far, with rather less success . . .

The first thing I did was google the term, mode bending, which I totally love as an expression. I may begin saying, “wow, that was mode bending,” or perhaps, “that was a mode bending moment” (I love alliterations) . . .

Turns out, there are real mode benders. I took a screen capture:

The third one from the left, called an instrument bender, is one I recognize. I used it when, in a moment of madness, I spent a year training as a fitter-welder. This tool is a pipe-bender/fitter used wherever you see pipes (of any size) bending and curving their way through the world. A tube-bender likely used this tool or one like it to bend that pipe where it needed to go.

But, the real task. I was in a class last term where we played with a wide range of software to alter modalities from text to image to sound. It is a fascinating thing to do, and I did it for another class this term. This is the image I produced of a First Peoples lesson plan and discussion about multi-literacy, knowledge construction and self-reflection:

On the site, voyant.com, the image can actually move, etc., but I simply copy-pasted the graphic at a point where I liked the image, rather in the same way I often read and re-read the same passages or pages in order to enjoy the experience over and over again.

So the exercise is to use the original handbag assignment, and I’ll get to it, but I cannot resist playing (which is why I try not to go to these sites too often . . . they eat up hours of time) . . . but this is the result when I put my lesson plan on reflection, indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing and knowledge into Cirrus, a tool in voyant.com:

I worked many years ago with early software that did textual analyses using the above principles, but returning a list of frequencies (of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, etc.) to give an emotional level to the text. It looked more like the return you get in ms-word when you check word count, something like this:

It’s so easy now to see how the first visualization can support and alter ways of seeing and knowing. Using Cirrus, students can easily check and see what words and ideas are being put forward by the author and even re-write the material to change the slant to something they want to see. I’ve not used this tool yet in teaching, but I intend to use it with students to show them just how much their words matter and why it’s important they have the skills to critically analyse the words they see around them every day. Even with my own critical reading skills, I am always taken aback at how much the Cirrus visual helps me to ‘see’ what influence the words are working on me.

My purple handbag

I could not resist playing a bit, so I put the handbag assignment into some of the voyant tools, just for fun. Here are some links to the results:

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=b7b48a47fe3e80f3a5c81a7c2aaf70b6&view=Knots

Some renditions were less appealing, as this one, using wordtree:

Still, the central discussion about the bag is clear in this depiction, as is the color, purple. How the word, gym, gained such prominence I do not know. It’s also curious how much the visual representation reflects the way the bag can be carried. If the words, purple, the, and gym, are viewed as shoulder straps, they hold the word, bag, in place. This particular bag has shoulder straps and the bag can be carried on your back . . . .

One of the appeals of these types of visual representations is that I think they can readily accommodate differentiated learners and allow them to discuss text equally with their peers. I took the poem, The Shark, and played with it to see how it might work to show meaning in different ways that might make understanding easier for students, all of whom struggle with ideas about metaphor, simile, etc., and that this poem illustrates well. I tried Cirrus, first, as it is one visualization I find useful:

I love it! It even looks tubular and fish-like! I think these kinds of visualizations might really engage students.

YIKES! Once again, playing has caused me to be late for another class . .  .!

Later, same day . . . (I passed) . . .

What I particularly like about this site is that you can put your text (poetry, novel, news report) into the application and have it changed into an alternate mode. This can help alert students to how different ways of representing communication can influence how that information is received, interpreted, and understood; that is, MacLuhan’s point how the medium is the message.

As the New London Group (NLG) also argues, it is imperative, as multi-literacies become widespread, that students are taught how to use them and to ‘read’ them and that teachers are also capable of using them, reading them and teaching them (NLG, np). I agree with the NLG’s position that in order for 21st century citizens to fully and actively participate in their societies they must be literate in the literacies this century will foreground. Just as the last century foregrounded the print-bound text, this century may utilize other modes–visual, aural–to communicate.

NLG describe that learning to accommodate the new literacies requires them to be juxtaposed and integrated, to open students to the meta-languages they can now take advantage of and, most important, produce; it’s not just about the authority of the text as it lives in a print-bound page: “In an economy of productive diversity, in civic spaces that value pluralism, and in the flourishing of interrelated, multilayered, complementary yet increasingly divergent lifeworlds, workers, citizens, and community members are ideally creative and responsible makers of meaning” (NLG, np).

As Cope & Kalantzis (2009) note, the single standard of “grammar, the literary canon, standard national forms of the language” (p. 5) have given way to reading and writing in “multimodal texts integrated with other modes with language” (p. 5). As teachers and practitioners the need to become literate in technologies has perhaps never been greater. Thus, the letter of complaint signed by 103 students in the B.Ed. program regarding their incompetence with the simple platform Canvas should raise a massive red flag of warning.[1] Who will teach these new intersections and road crossings?

But, I digress. How to shift handbag to new mode? which mode? I finally settled on a free application, Natural Reader. Of course, I had some fun with it, too, slowing down and using various accents. I finally used it to produce this new material. I chose an accent from India because about 1 in 4 people come from India, and it emphasized to me how multi-lingualism (even if she is speaking in English) is an important component of multi-literacy.

So, I’ve told the story of Jack, really, and it occurred to me as I tried to justify why this story was a mode of the original that juxtapositions are part of multi-literacies and that a single authoritative story, in print, and bound in a book, doesn’t have to limit me any more. And the story of Jack tells also a story about the bag, my purple bag, that is different, yet part of, the photo I took of Jack and the bag, that suy day in Vancouver.

To play the story, click and the ms-word document will open up. Select “audio notes” from the upper left portion of the ms-word menu. Press play on the upper right. Adjust audio as needed. About 5 minutes listening.

It could use a new ending, or maybe there’s no ending. Add one, if you like.

Jack_and the handbag

 

[1] 103 B.Ed. teacher-students—many, Net-gens—recently submitted a petition to UBC complaining that they were not dealt a fair hand when, in an effort to save the 2020 Winter/Spring/Summer terms for as many students as possible, the university moved courses online for as many programs as possible (personal correspondence). It was a near-seamless transition and stupendous feat. UBC uses a single, simple platform to serve 65,000 students worldwide, but the Education students in Vancouver complained it was too hard for them, asking that administrators see their plight as analogous to the struggles of the children they practice-taught. UBC will graduate some 700 elementary and secondary school teachers in a few months with a number of them so confused by technology they compared their feelings of incompetence to the school children they are charged to teach.

Task 1: A little about … my teaching bag

I was fascinated by what Heidi had in her bag; it was clearly so different from me, and it was such an astonishing collection of stuff. I wish I could have seen the bag!

Batteries! And deodorant; toothbrush but no gum; coffee but no quick snack . . . hmmm . . . socks but no shoes . . . perhaps in her car?

An “uncomplicated and timeless” bag Heidi says. For me, enough stuff for a weekend in Vegas . . . who carries 12 pens, but no computer: I puzzled. Maybe a phone could be inferred from the headset?

I am having trouble reading these visual image-signs and reconciling them with the slippery metaphors to describe them: “essential . . . essentials . . . prepared . . . prepared” and me, sneaking, like Gollum, sniffing at the pack, wondering what’s in it for me. Not a snack, clearly.

An organized person by some logic I cannot fathom, my own ‘bag’ (re)manufactured and purposed so that I had something to show . . . only its color deliberate . . . a deep, rich purple . . .

Hers, I guess, is teacher. I’m a teacher, too, but I have no color.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/aaronko/2020/05/29/etec-540-task-3-voice-to-text-task/?unapproved=37&moderation-hash=633d32dc636f7bdbda1b6d32a4bbd949#comment-37

I find the various mediums of production, from oral to written to mass-produced, fascinating, and the observations people make about their conscious experiences of the medium, insightful. That’s why I chose this post for linking #5.

Aaron comments on a number of things that happen to him in orality: he gets nervous, talks too fast, mumbles, loses track of thought and so on. But is this an experience of orality? Or something else? Aaron’s experiences occur within the context, arguably, of performance. That is, he was performing for at least his recorder, and this brought on the physical manifestations. We do not hear Aaron complaining that these things occur every time he speaks, only within this particular context. To compare experiences, then, I wonder if Aaron needed to create a testing environment in which to write, one that creates the same pressure, to see how he would respond. Then, I think, the experiences are comparable.

I also had the same thoughts that Aaron did regarding punctuation. For me, it reminded me how some of our punctuation, such as the comma, comes from music. It also made me realize how much we use silence in orality to punctuate (pun intended) our word-sounds. Text, of course, that two-dimensional shadow, gives a feeble direction. Odd, though, as Aaron notes, that we do follow the ‘rules’ of the page, that unrelenting task master, in order to create (or to follow or to re-interpret) what those squiggly lines are trying to mean.

I found Aaron’s lack of confidence in oral recall curious, “when someone tells a story there is no perfect record or recollection of what was just said” and his seeming confidence in the written stories that have “a document that can be referenced” disconcerting. Perhaps memory is one way of knowing that story, and text, another, but both are fragments . . . of what, I am not entirely sure . . . the story? We are, in the end, nothing but the sum of all our stories, yes? And what about the memory of my heart? Are the words the only things that matter? It’s an odd thing that, in oral exchange, the story comes to us not only from the words, but also from the context, facial expressions, environment and our own emotional response in the moment. We move to the text and wrestle with the unreliability of language to re-infuse badly chosen words with the same meaning my bodily presence conveys so unerringly. Yet, when done rightly, I linger over those words, feeling their pulse and depth impress on my heart, and soul, and mind.

And perhaps that includes our dreams. My own have been strange mixtures of exterior sounds, the work I’m doing (including this one) and day dreams because I’ve been sick over the past 10 days. My sleep is disrupted, so I find myself nodding off, oddly, like just now, and passing into a strange Alice-world where I am doing my reading/research/writing with a large clock ticking behind me or an advertising agent calling on me to Buy this now! before a shorted snort (my dog’s, not mine!) wakes me to say, “Tick tock! ‘Tis past 9 o’clock, and another class beckons on the horizon. Set aside this silly reverie and move along.” . . . and so I shall.

Task #4-Potato Printing

I chose this site as my #6 link for my linking project. Frankly, I chose it because Tyler’s conundrums (but not his outcomes) were the same as my own. And his clear shock at his realizations were so stark and raw they made me laugh out loud . . . so did my own. Carving the letters out and realizing what a time-consuming process this was and just how tough it would be to do in school; realizing that you’re using a massive knife for the task (although I’m a bit of a knife snob and did use a 2-man Henckel while noting Tyler’s PC version) and so another reason it’s not going to happen in the classroom; his 4-letter word problem . . . I thought the entire experience was hilarious, and his closing lines had me in hysterics: “I feel that the mechanization of writing has improved the human race so much, thankfully we don’t write by stamping anymore.  I couldn’t imagine the old printing press where they had to create letters and print newspapers.” I could feel the relief in his voice. I also loved how the word he’d created–snowy–was on a strip in wix.com and could be scrolled over his prairie summer backdrop . . . you could smell the sunshine and fresh cut hay, but hints of winter are almost always present in that landscape and his juxtaposition of snowy over that shot reminded me of bitter winters in Winnipeg . . . that began in August and were still hinting in June . . .

My own experience was also challenging, but my conclusion is not the same as Tyler’s. For me, I didn’t care that the job was not very good or that it took a long time. I loved the smell of the raw potato as I cut (mixed with the blood on my fingers as I cut them too) and I loved holding the cloth–it was so white and fresh–and I loved pressing my very badly cut out words on to the surface of the cloth and lifting it off to see . . . an illegible word with the “l” upside down . . . lol . . . which left me in hysterics over the whole thing. For several days I had the stain of food coloring on my fingers. That reminded me of when I was much younger and took my notes by hand. I had ink-stained fingers most of the time, but it reminded me of the labor it can take to produce the written word, and how much more words, books, and written artifacts may have meant at some point, because of the human labor required of the task.

I am a trained artisan viennoisserie baker, although I do not bake any longer. But I charged a lot of money for my products when I did that work. And it was for several reasons–I used local ingredients (right down to the flour) and unsalted butter, I let my doughs rise for 2 days before baking the product, I used all real ingredients including my own vanilla extract–and the labor. One bread I made at Christmas, Panettone, took 30 days to prepare the yeast I used in the bread and 1 week to prepare the grand marnier-soaked lemons and oranges. That bread was sublime, and I could never tire of its tall beauty and complex flavor notes. That kind of skill and perfection is hard to find now, but I found the print-task and my former bread-making along those same lines of what human labor can produce that mass production simply cannot emulate. Perhaps that’s why I decry those television shows where competitors throw foods together as fast as they can . . . food has such beauty and grandeur . . . why rush its pleasure?

“I once got into a dispute with an Englishwoman over the pronunciation of a word and offered to look it up in the dictionary. The Englishwoman said firmly, “What for? I am English. I was born and brought up in England. The way I speak is English.””

So, yet another assignment that assumes I’m a PC-user or Mac Sierra user and mobile owner . . .

I checked out a number of emoji translators. I became interested in emojis briefly about 5 years ago when I learned of a business that had hired an emoji translator. I thought that was interesting; I mean, emojis are pictures. Why the need for translation?

But translation is also something that fascinates me; as Kress, 2005, asks, I’ve also wondered what might have happened had visual communication–photography, television, arguably computer screens–jumped first as mass mediums of production, would text be as dominant as it is today? Would we even need translators? (I guess so . . . ).

Kress and Bolter are both writing in the early 2000s and reading them is like reading ancient history, even though it’s not even one generation ago. Both are pre-cellphone, which has radically altered culture and both just precede massive online ‘communities’ such as Facebook, Nickelodeon, and so on that have so dramatically re-drawn lines of culture, community, and country. So their comments seem wide-eyed and naive. Bolter’s discussion of MUDS and MOOS as well as his translation of the emoticons is, well, pretty cute . . . I wonder how he would view emojis . . . (p. 74).

So here’s the capture I made of several attempts to download emojis, emoji boards and install emoji ‘alphabets’ all of them failures . . .so I put this into an emoji translator, instead. See if you can guess what it is.

I’ve put the original text below.

But back to the issue of translation. I’ve tried my hand at it, and tend to pay a lot of attention to films produced in other languages as they translate the dialogue on the bottom of the screen. Since the eye can capture and interpret the action and intonation, movement and other components allow for substantial understanding of a foreign film, it’s always curious how few words seem to be translated for the viewers. I have wondered if it was because the translators were not paid well? Then, I thought, well, really, it’s because so many other cues and clues fill in that just a few words can anchor the action.

The same is true for emojis, it seems to me. No translation is perfect; The first emoji translator was hired by a business firm in 2016 . . . and now there are emoji translators online . . . but I always find it curious that we think we can translate anything at all, really. Language is so ensconced in cultural signs that just do not translate. The word, Kalsarikannit, in Finnish, roughly translates into sitting at home in my underwear, alone, getting drunk . . . who knew? and look how many words that took to explain in English.

A friend and I argued recently about the growing dominance of emojis. I disagreed. I see them as yesterday’s culture, along with expressions like “peeps.” But emojis are also always comical. It’s hard to take a round yellow head and not think, smiley faces, or even earlier, to “Koolaid, Koolaid, tastes great” commercials, or Walmart’s price breakers.

I translated W. H. Auden’s “Stop The Clocks” poem to see what happened. It loses all its intended weight, of course . . . which makes one wonder about the potato printing assignment. It took so much work and energy and cost; little wonder not much was set down in print, or that, if you were going to spend so many hours creating one page, why not make it worth it, and embellish it?

I had a friend chastise me thoroughly once as I tore pages from a book, marked its margins up, circled, underlined, exclaimed and profaned my way through it. For him, it was sacred copy; for me it was both a tool for me to use and a space and place of exploration. Thus, I had to notate it, orient myself in it and through it, move pages around to get a fuller picture of that character that just appeared on occasional pages or that particular phrasing I could see iterating as I turned the page back and forward and could understand if I put them together . . .

For all Kress’s criticism about the valorization and control of the author on the page, I love the slip and slide of metaphor and metonomy, those “empty entities” he decries; but I love visuals, too, and wept the first time I saw the Mona Lisa.

The reader is forced to accept the author’s direction, read sequentially, in chaptered chunks (Kress, p. 13). So what? The simultaneity of an image can quite physically affect a person, at least, it can this viewer. But almost never on the computer screen, for me, with some exceptions: JR’s works underwhelm on the screen, but you can feel their powerful intent; the BBC series, Flowers, on the other hand, sickens the viewer it is so richly visual . . . it reminds me of the film, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover where the lush/rottingness of the film made you feel faint throughout. But, I have recently read Forrest Gander’s poem, BECKONED, in his collection, Be With, and lost my breath because of the drop kick his words hit me with; I still can only read his words when I have prepared myself for them, to receive them . . . words and images do that to you.

Kress’s final appeal that we “establish authority . . . even knowledge for ourselves” (p. 21) is a prophetic conclusion to what the next 15 years have brought to us, the ability to see and read in ways unimaginable just a few short years ago . . . Google still astonishes me that I can virtually walk down the street of a destination city and know it without ever being there, and when I do arrive, I can walk around like someone who has lived there for years . . .

W.H. Auden, Stop the clocks

This is the original piece, translated for this assignment. I only did part of the story. I wanted to try to Kalsarikannit . . .

Text translated

Modern Family: Did the chicken cross the road?

This show opens with Cam upset that he’s forgotten the words to a childhood song. He decides to buy a chicken to help him remember his roots.

Alex has applied for a job that requires a family interview. As usual, Phil and Claire are up to their antics and begin arguing. Luke, studying psychology at college, offers his advice on how Alex can put forward her best self.

Alex’s interview continues with Claire and Phil making their usual silly comments and trying to compete with Alex and impress the interviewer. Alex, of course, is embarrassed and tries to end the interview as quickly as possible. Alex is furious about the behaviour of her parents.

Cam’s chicken experiment does not go well, and he wants to return the bird. He is also out of chicken feed, and he asks Mitch to get more feed. We learn that Mitch enjoys the chicken. He returns home to find he has left the chicken coop open and Hennifer has disappeared.

 

So, you say potato . . .

So, that was hilarious. I simply did not have any of the write (yes, pun intended) tools . . . so my knife was too big and dull, I used water colors not paint (which could work, though, I think) and I needed a template. Drawing freehand just wasn’t a good idea. I also tend to leave things out when I do them without a plan to follow. One course I took in Adult Education had me build a map of Canada and I forgot to put Quebec in . . . hahahahahaha . . . Freud would have loved it . . .

It only took me about one hour to create the stamps–if I leave out having to run to the store for more potatoes. I went to that Thieves Hide-a-way, Save On Foods just off campus–paid more than $1/potato . . . so it was gonna take one potato or nothin’ at that price. I also had to buy some rough cloth. I do have some linen, but I want to get it right first before stamping it.

The thing about doing things by hand is, if you have the time, why not? Now that I don’t go to classes physically, I spend a lot of time walking . . .  I mean, if you don’t have the time, you want the automation, but if you do, well, what better way to spend it?

I loved doing it. If the potatoes had been cheaper, I’d have done a few iterations, but I admit, beyond the price, I hated wasting the food.

I think I am going to try this in a class. I’m not too sure why, except that it does create awareness of words and that they are an act of creation and made of, by and as a result of decisions by people. And nobody said the letters had to be in the same direction . . . 

• Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

Generally, I use a computer, especially for assignments. I simply type much more quickly than I write, although perhaps less so as my computer keys begin to dim and wear and indiscriminately miss a bat (bat) (beat!) (at last) now and then . . . somewhat like me . . . lol

I love to write, though, and when I do, tend to infuse flourishes into my letters . . . sometimes creating print text that is sharp and edgy, now creating print text that swirls and curls . . . I spend rather a great deal of time on my shopping lists, imagining—after I’ve lost them enroute, as I always do—that someone will pick them up and wonder who has done this letter writing . . . and make a found poem of it all . . .

I would find it tedious to write papers by hand; I haven’t done that since high school . . . and a far-sighted undergraduate professor made all his students switch to computers to submit papers so I have been using that mode for 30-odd years. I don’t find it difficult to write, at all, and I use it to take notes for things I find important and want to be able to remember. I have always noticed that when I take physical notes, I recall more, and in more detail.

• What did you do when you made a mistake or wanted to change your writing? How did you edit your work?

It’s also still necessary to take notes by hand in some venues—such as a movie theatre, play or other live production, which I often do, so note-taking is something I enjoy, not dread . . . depending on the error, I may leave it, or draw a line through it. I rarely completely obliterate something I’ve hand written, and I tell my computer-loving students the same thing. Keep your iterations; save a new version. Things about the old version may be needed later and you’ll be glad to have kept them for reference.

I used to edit my handwritten work by cutting it out and placing it where I wanted it with gaps to fill in new material, if I needed it.

• Did your choice of media play a part in how you edited your work?

I almost always use my computer, but have used audio notes, at times, so I suppose the medium has played a role in the editing process.

• What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?

Speed. Writing by hand slows thinking; it allows significant mental editing—requires it, really—before setting words on the page. It also slows energy; by that, I mean, when you are typing quickly at, say, 100 words/minute, twice or thrice the speed of writing, your thoughts can almost overwhelm you and your emotions can become caught up to the same frenetic pace as your typing.

Hand writing is an evolving process that slows the reification and immobilizing of mechanization, even as it imposes limits, order, priority on what can be written; it’s the nearest thing to presence (to point to Heidegger) when “being” is absent; hand writing to some degree captures the presence of the writer; typeset does not. This objectifies print, eventually gives it more authority and a sense of the ubiquity of any ‘truth’ the immobilized lettering might contain and certitude and credibility over handwritten materials that must always remain associated with one individual and person.

The whole idea of signification and the emptying of the signifier with the increased distance of the being from the production of significance is what an experiment with handwriting and increasingly distant forms of print illustrate. The issue of the eyes (“gaze”) that co-creates the handwriting is also a distinguishing factor from mechanized writing where the only eye that watches the production is, arguably, the eye of the machine.

This experiment reminds me of where ‘writing’ and language originate: outside the signifier. Yet, we often take writing and language as what signifies, which isn’t true. The “being” that philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, and so many others speak of, is the origin of speech, and what is fully authentic. As we move away from the being—in the manner of metaphor and metonomy—we create a gap or space that causes a loss of the presence of being and so authenticity.

Pimental calls it a “disturbance” and even a “contamination.”

It’s a fantastic thought about beingness, which is pure only in Speech, and so historically, speech was elevated over writing; a man’s word or handshake. Writing’s predominance over word is relatively new, and each removing iteration from speech to handwriting to typesetting to mechanization removes legitimacy from Speech to the written word. Finally, mechanized words have and hold truth, independent of speech . . . the debate between Heidegger and Derrida.

I’ve gone rather far astray, but notions of speech, Being and handwriting (mechanization of speech) tend to enrapture me. Concepts like meaning slipping between/among words, the ‘truth’ that writing can generate (can it?) all keep me wondering about what it means to enter this dance with technology.

Pimentel, Dror. (2019). Heidegger with Derrida: Being Written. Translated. Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1007 /978-3-030-05692-6