Category Archives: Tasks

The Misfortunate Daruma

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the script below is unrehearsed and unedited and nearly entirely nonsensical, so be warned:

alright 5 minutes on the clock right now so let start telling the story and I’m going to tell you about the time I went to cut someone’s you for the first time because well that was a wild ride so it was during the previous summer I think and that’s why she’s at Temple not in my city but just one city out a little bit a little bit on the way to Osaka and I went there originally with my friend because she had been before and I’ve seen her pictures from and she spoke very highly of it and I also wanted to get some photos so so we headed out and I brought my camera and we decided to to go visit the temple again and the temple does have more buses running on the weekends cuz it’s kind of more of a tourist visa but there are few people that go there regularly to pray or to upkeep the temple but but for the most part the most people there are tourist and so I had been taking a few days off after that I think it was I think I took a few days off in the following week just cuz I had to use up the rest of my paid leave and I’m going to have no other work to do this was this was in between Masters courses and it’s really cut so like to win and then Oji like King Temple so it’s the winning King Temple and when I originally went there there was so many that amount that is more like the other good luck to say good luck but they’re kind of like motivational dolls in in Japanese culture is you they they have spiritual energy inside of them they have a little God inside of them and then you’re supposed to write your wish on the back of them and then like a more general wish on the underside and you take it with you and you keep it and then one year after year wishes fulfilled your supposed to bring it back to the temple where it is normally burned but cuts of OG does not burn the old dolls they keep them so all around the temple grounds and mind you this place is huge like they have forest and stuff as well everywhere around the temple grounds you can just find tiny and big that are everywhere like hidden inside tree branches and sitting together on benches it’s it’s really cute and really funny so I went there and it was it was really good time it’s a very accessible Temple there’s ramps everywhere and and I think there’s also like the walking path for people who can’t see very well and yeah it’s five stars 100% when you come to Japan but anyway these. There are the kind that you take home that you buy you take home and then there are the kind where they’re smaller they cost less they have like a wish inside of them like a good luck thing and you just buy them and then you take the wish out and you take the wish home and you’re supposed to leave the small that are my somewhere in the temple grounds now I was not aware that it should be left somewhere on the temple grounds and I bought one and I thought it was a good wish but I didn’t realize that we had to leave without a mother so I took it with me and that’s when everything started going haywire first on our way back my my charge card for a transportation ran out of money as we were like running up to the train so I couldn’t get past the turnstile to get on the train so cool find whatever will grab the next one I go to top it up the machine is broken we finally managed to get it to work and there’s an accident on the tracks and trains are not running trains are delayed and we had to go find another way to get somewhere and after that we were going into Osaka we were going to do a little bit of shopping so we ended up in was I think we ended up at the station closest to universal studios and on the way there there was no trouble but as soon as we got there it started raining and at this point I think my friend has realized that that something is going wrong but at some point along the way we have been cursed and I don’t know what’s happening I got the good luck charm and I pulled up to that you are supposed to leave that there we do need to get rid of that and so this bad luck that in my I didn’t get rid of it it’s still with me it has brought me much misfortune since I had it and I now use it at work it’s it’s on my desk and it does occasionally bring you misfortune on my desk but I’ve also told my co-workers about the story and now whenever we have an argument or we disagree at work I take the small misfortunate that amount and I passive aggressive leave it on their desk for the day which works to either you ease the tension a little bit or or even just get a laugh out of them and we can we can talk again more naturally so the bad luck that a lot has has brought me misfortune but it is stubborn and I am stubborn and we’re making it work now that my masters is almost finished I’ll be bringing him back to the temple soon along with the one that I wrote my wish on the bigger one and I’ll be placing them somewhere in the temple grounds hopefully somewhere where the little one is happy because I don’t want it to Chris me for the road and that’s the story of the misfortunate that

Evidently, Google is not adept at recognizing sudden non-English words in the middle of speaking. “cut someone’s” is supposed to be Katsuōji, many of the “that”s should be daruma. Aside from the transliteration mistakes, this exercise also highlighted a few speaking ticks that I hadn’t realized I had or hadn’t realized I was using to this extent. One such habit is the use of “and” to link ideas together. Instead of only being used as a conjunction or at the beginning of occasional sentences (a practice I actively avoid in writing), I use it when speaking as a filler word, an utterance to show that I’m thinking and not finished speaking….a bit too much. This, coupled with the habit of adding unnecessary additional information as exposition, shows that I was speaking without a clear structure in mind. “and” highlights parts where I was thinking about what to say next or how to progress the story, and usually didn’t indicate information that naturally connected to what I had been just saying (in other words, it was a series of disconnected events). Meanwhile, the additional information showed that I didn’t have a clear idea of the purpose or conclusion of the story. Information was added because it was unclear to me if it may or may not be relevant later.

As a general commentary, I think this exercise reflects how we may speak when telling an old story to a new person, but it would be incorrect to say this is shows trends in how we always speak. I’ve noticed it particularly with my coworkers. The native English speakers vary the pace of their words less and use the same intonation patterns for most sentences when speaking to students or EFL teachers. Extraneous details are also omitted. Likewise, teachers conversing with native English speakers in Japanese use simpler sentence structures, less slang and idioms, translate words they think the listener would not understand, and speak more clearly (generally). While this can aid communication, in a language learning setting, it is “artificially natural” communication, in the sense that the accent and topics are ‘authentic’, but it is curated for the perceived level of the listener. Between scripted language-test-style dialogues and uninhibited conversation between two close friends, it can be considered at about the 75% point. Consequently, it’s a good scaffold toward listening comprehension, but should eventually evolve into natural speech with the development of the listener’s abilities. The layers that influence our speaking are multitudinous, including who our audience is, our relation to them, the content we are speaking about, the purpose of the conversation, the place we are conversing in (I wouldn’t tell a lengthy story while working, but I would on a train ride to fill the time), the perceived language ability of the audience, as well as our own language ability.

Speculative Fiction 2 – Almost fictitious (prose)

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This is supposed to be fiction, right. Here we go.

 

Look what our sense of humour has devolved to. I laughed at a anthropomorphic rabbit kicking an anthropomorphic egg towards the camera today. I couldn’t stop giggling. Every time I watched the looping video, it was tracked. Every time I paused and hovered over content, my pause was logged, analyzed, sold to paying companies.

Everything is decontextualized, re-contextualized, remixed, and repurposed for a new narrative. Isn’t it great? Isn’t this media literacy? We’re finally reading ‘into’ everything, treating everything as a text, a statement, an opinion, and a deliberate choice. By letting ‘virtual’ reality become such a large part of analogue reality, we’ve questioned the notion of reality itself. Everything is recorded and reused. People are still trying to make sense of every individual comment, smile, characteristic, and silence. Copyrights are ignored, the line between personal and professional has been eliminated, and yet we are forced to continue engaging in the virtual by economic and socio-cultural demands.

Texts are not just read into, they’re being reused. Peace sign in a photo? You risk having your fingerprint stolen. Selfie with window catch-lights? You risk tipping off a stalker to your location. Have a built-in camera and microphone on your device? You risk having someone turn it on, watch you, and listen. Have an A.I. personal assistant? Your conversations are always being recorded, anyway. Be in too many photos and you risk having your identity stolen. Speak too much and you risk having words literally put in your mouth. Share your preferences, hobbies, routines, and they will be recorded, commodified, and used by strangers for their own gain.

 

Oh, right. This was supposed to be fiction.

 

the-curtains-were-blue-early-2000s-meme

A meme from the early 2000s that circulated on social media. The image is a commentary on how English teachers in the West extract symbolism from minute details in texts and expect students to do the same. This meme suggests that the extracted symbolism only has value if it consciously included by the author.

 

Speculative Fiction 1 – EXPCard

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Emi Wu finished typing the last of his translation of Death, Grieving, and Cognitive Measures of Sadness, confirmed that everything was up-to-code, and stretched back in his chair. Most of his recent work involved translating MOOC contents into Mongolian for psychology professors. It was easy for him, and left him plenty of time to work on personal projects and built up his EXPerience. His coffee was nearly empty but still warm enough to enjoy a moment’s serenity. Wu’s eyes idly flitted about the room and landed on a dusty, heavy, leather file case. It had belonged to his parents, stuffed full with family documents and a little attached tag, “Биднийг санаарай”. Remember us. He’d looked through it before; it included his mother’s and father’s résumés, non-standardized antique precursors to the EXPCard, that could be faked, needed supplemental proof, and could be destroyed like all flimsy paper. Wu chuckled every time he thought about how such a rudimentary system had survived so long. Skills had to be recognized by the individual and connected to experiences. People had to actually search for work, and apply to employers by delivering documents by hand or email. What if the company had no registered location because it was online? Did they just cast it into the wind?

The folder also held proof of their education. In the old days, people had to keep copies—again, on unreliable paper—of transcripts of the courses they completed, with arbitrary letter grades and percentiles to denote their performance in comparison to others enrolled in the same course. One in four people went to university and came out with mountains of debt, forgotten facts, and more flimsy papers. Now, Wu had only to pick what he wanted to learn online, make sure the EXPTracker on his account was switched on, and begin exploring, learning, and creating. Every accomplishment, every project, and every collaboration would automatically be added to his EXPCard, relevant skills extrapolated and added to bolster his skill set. He tracked his competence not with grades and degrees, but by the number of people who had searched the ledger, came upon his education and experience (read: data), wanted his combination of skills, and contacted him with contracts. No one needed to sell themselves to employers—EXPCard categorized, advertised, and linked everyone for them.

Snapping back to reality, Wu crouched back over his computer and opened up a message to the psychology professor:

Mongolian translation is done. If there are any problems 
or further needed translations in the future, I hope you 
will consider me for the task again.

Thanks again,

Emi Wu

Have I earned some EXPosure? Send it here: wu_emi623.exp.com/exposure

 

EXPosure; the other key currency of EXPCards. Built upon old-fashioned review systems and improved with the blockchain ‘trust economy’, EXPosure was a way for satisfied employers to vouch for your skills and service. They didn’t complain; complaints went directly to the EXPCard organization, and A.I. could follow a trail of in-app correspondences and identify extortion before it even reached the support centre. EXPosure bolstered skills differently than EXPerience; the former made service and social skills decay slower, while the latter slowed down decay of technical skills. The EXPCard creators built the system to make sure people didn’t just learn or just work, but kept doing both, and it worked. Sure, less than one in one hundred people now went to accredited universities (casually called ‘purebre(a)d chicken pens’ on social networks now), but more people were “generally proficient” with diverse skill sets. After the EXPCard boom, it turned out that being able to vary the work they do and use most of their skills gave people the fulfillment needed to pull a lot of people out of socially-developed mental illnesses.

He wished it had worked for his parents, too.

 

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Premise: “EXPCard”, a blockchain organization built on tracking informal education, takes off in the connected world. University enrolment plummets. People track their learning in EXPerience (personal accomplishments and projects) and EXPosure (others vouch for your service and accomplishments for them). Both of these incrementally lose value over time, to encourage “lifelong learning”. Resultingly, more people are “generally proficient” with a diverse skill set. They can pay to read other users’ educational history (read: data), to run searches for specific experience and skill set combinations, and to contact users through a secure communication platform for work.

Predictive microcommentary on the state of our future

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These kinds of activities always make me wonder how much we influence the A.I. databases being sent back to whatever company programmed our keyboards (in my case, Google). They definitely get a lot of cursing and not-English from me.

The grammatical errors drove me crazy.

125 characters. I found myself wanting to say something specific, but the three options predictive text gave me did not allow me to go in the direction I wanted, so I had to make do with what it did offer. Less as an English teacher and more as a result of social and linguistic upbringing, I tend to place great importance on clear communication, which manifests in my written communication as correct grammar. I use a lot of punctuation, and often send follow up messages (or go back and edit messages) to correct auto-correct or punctuation mistakes. Since the predictive text feature doesn’t suggest punctuation, I can’t really say it is reflective of how I would normally express myself. You can see in the video that I got stuck at one point where there was no viable, grammatically-correct option, and I had to grit my teeth and try to ignore it.

The lack of contractions and admittance of not knowing reminded me of the kind of discussions I sometimes see in MET courses or academic opinion blogs. In reflection on the use of algorithms in public writing, I would like to reference The Allusionist’s podcast episode #102, “New Rules”.  The full stop has [perhaps not replaced yet per se, but] been fighting the period and commas for sentence-ending hegemony in the last decade. I know people who get annoyed by ten notifications, all a continuation of the same sentence or train of thought, divided by full stops, and I know people incensed at getting a message with the whole idea contained in one ‘wall of text’ with proper punctuation. What’s stranger is that we seem to never talk about it directly; I’ve only expressed my membership to the former to close friends in passing, by complaining about getting countless continuation messages from other acquaintances. I also think that this evolution in sentence-ending punctuation is what influenced algorithmic predictive text to not suggest punctuation, even though it suggests capitalized and lowercase variations side-by-side.

That’s it for my mini-reflection. The one note I do want to close on, is that, though it may not be often used by most people or it may even be used for entertainment as above, predictive text can be a godsend for people who struggle to swipe or type. Not everyone who uses phones is a digital native, or has full motor control or good eyes. Having the option to click on a full word from time to time instead of having to click every letter on a tiny keyboard when your hands are shaking is just one small accommodation that can reduce strain for the oft-overlooked demographics, and keep us all connected.

-B

Task 9 – A Reflection on Grouping

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Based on the music that we chose for the previous task, the members who chose tracks similar to me included Stephanie and Saniya. All of us focused on conveying as much information as possible and acknowledged the importance of a diverse track list; though we went about it in different ways.

While we may have been grouped as “like-minded” along these parameters, a closer look at all of our websites reveals how different we are. I can tell from Saniya’s Task 4 writing that she is right-handed; I am left-handed. Not being able to make mistakes intimidates her; I’ve embraced mistakes as something to be proud of, proof of my consideration and possibilities to grow. Her story in Task 3 and even the colour palette of her website prove how different we are (if I ever voluntarily told a cutesy story about a bunny, it’s safe to assume I’ve been replaced with a clone). Even less likely would I pick a white background as Stephanie did – I avoid white digital backgrounds and themes as much as possible, and dim my phone to the lowest setting, to keep from aggravating my eyes. However, on the whole I think Stephanie and I are quite similar. The contents of her bag, the way she analyzes texts and tasks is similar to mine.

I don’t believe the things we have negated will ever be reflected in analytical data, however, I would like to comment that we do not necessarily have control over how much of us is analyzed. Consider that we, as school staff, cannot take or share any photos that identify students, for the sake of their privacy. However, the press is not bound by these rules, and freely take candid photos of students at events and ceremonies and publish them in the paper and online, identifying students and teachers in the caption. I’ve seen my own photo come up when searching the name of the school online; I don’t even know who took it or when. Facebook and Google’s auto-tagging of faces is another example. The information about ourselves that ends up online, or that can be analyzed, is not always within our control, which can lead to a skewed perception of (and potentially dangerous) situation for us.

Audio Decathalon

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Of the 27 pieces riginally on the Golden Record, I believe the following 10 serve the most purpose in being kept:

The following music was included on the Voyager record.

  • Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
  • Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
  • Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
  • “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
  • Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
  • Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
  • Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
  • Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
  • India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
  • “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15

I removed all classical and lyricless music. I think as much information should be conveyed as possible in each track. Another species may interpret a message from music that we unintentionally sent because we do not treat music as a concrete information-carrying medium, it is best we stick to messages we share intentionally. We also do not need excessive European influence on there, nor the whale songs. If other species can indeed interpret those messages, I would be wary of what they may be saying.

-B

????????????❤️⁉️

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????????, ????‍❤️‍????❤️????‍????????&????????????. ????❤️????‍????????????????️????. ????????➡️????????????????…????????. ????❤️????????↘️????????????!????????????????☺️????. ????????????????????‍????????????????, ☺️.

????????, ????????➡️????????&????‍????????????????, ????????.

(If the above emojis don’t show up, here’s what is supposed to look like)

Task 4 – Manually

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Put your heart into it.

I believe traditional classroom teachers are in a unique position that mixes handwritten and typed text more or less equally. The materials I make are predominantly typed; worksheets, PowerPoint slideshows, rubrics, note pages, and so on. However, students seldom type, and even when they do, we still ask them to print their work to hand it in, with adequate space to mark, correct, and comment on it. Furthermore, the notes I give to my coworkers and the reminders I write myself are all handwritten, usually on decorative sticky-notes. My desk is covered in sticky-notes: lists of tasks to complete and their deadlines, motivational notes to keep me focused, thank-you notes and little jokes from my coworkers, and heartfelt messages from students, that remind me why I’m here, why I come in every morning and stay into the early night.

When I made a mistake, I scratched it out or simply wrote over the mistake. Tidiness means little when I’m the only one reading it (if it did mean something, I wouldn’t have used cursive either!). However, in writing a note to others or a résumé (as they are written out by hand here), I would absolutely start the text anew if I made a mistake. Understandably, writing such texts takes much longer, and if I can type it, I will.

There is something to be said for kinesthetic learning as well. Studies have shown time and again that students who make their own handwritten notes instead of reading and just highlighting retain information better (provided that they are not simply copying directly from a board or slide). However, note-taking is a learned skill. Writing out these ideas myself, it was no more difficult than typing a diary entry, albeit a bit more time consuming. That extra time also meant more thought went into the phrasing, and organizing what I wanted to say. However, when recording thoughts or working through ideas linearly, I still prefer to type, simply because I can get my ideas down faster, then go back through, edit, cut, comment, and correct them until a coherent conclusion emerges. For those of us with a weak memory, writing is good, but time is of the essence, and the medium that can record those thoughts the fastest and present them back to us is the victor.

-Basia.