I chose to look at Shaun’s post for Task 4 as my first linking assignment submission. The first striking feature of Shaun’s blog space is how his posts have been stylized for every task. A different colored header with a bold font type title can be found at the beginning of every post which, is then followed by detail on the digital tool he used to create his content for that particular post.  In the case of Task 4, Shaun used Adobe Spark to collate and present his contribution to the Manual Scripts task. The final part of the post on the blog site gives instructions on how one could access images of his handwritten manuscript along with his thought analysis.

There were several distinct differences between Shaun’s approach and my own in bringing together our thoughts for this task. By including the Adobe Spark presentation, Shaun requires an action from his fellow “academic lurkers” in order to access his thoughts. You need to click on each separate image in order to enlarge it and read his work. In contrast, my own post starts with the title for the task and includes no information on what tools I used to create my post or content for the task. This is followed by two separate images (taken with my mobile phone and posted unedited onto the blog site) that allows the reader to inspect my written artifact from the start. No action is required by the reader to access my handwritten manuscript or thoughts.

Shaun has deliberately crafted his work into a more edited format for the reader to be engaged with the process of viewing his task. In this approach, he has also broken down the task into sections for reflection by posting first a question and then giving his thoughts on that particular question. My post never directly quotes the guiding questions posed in the assignment instructions and follows a more free-flowing approach in the discussion. Neither approach is wrong and I found it refreshing to look at Shaun’s created Adobe presentation for the task. There were some technical hassles involved in the process e.g. having to use the back button to return to the gallery of the post and the fact that one had to click on the top half of an image to open it but these weren’t really a hindrance to me as I went through his presentation.

An interesting question that Shaun posed in his submission was whether one could really qualify his written document as “writing” given that he didn’t use a cursive style to lay down his thoughts. This is curious to me as I wondered why Shaun would hold the perception that only cursive is a valid form of writing. If that were true, then we must be taking the wrong approach in teaching children to read and write as we definitely don’t start off teaching them cursive. Perhaps there is something more to read into this statement and his mention of becoming extremely reliant on word processors and keyboards for his daily writing. Does he maybe avoid writing by hand because he perceives that there are certain prescribed minimum requirements he finds cumbersome or a hindrance to meet? A word processor on the other hand would take away the effort required to meet “specified requirements” in writing and perhaps this has played a role in his preference for this medium of writing. This is all speculation of course but it was an interesting train of thought to follow as I mulled over his statement. As clearly mentioned in my post, I still prefer writing much of my thoughts and work by hand and to me writing by hand is more freeing than what it is for Shaun.