**Note: This post will be updated regularly until the April 14th Deadline.**

Prompts:

• How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?
• What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?
• How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authouring and end-user interface?
• What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?
•  What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?
• How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?

1. Chelan H’s “What’s in Your Bag” post.
   Chelan took a brilliant and alternative approach to mine. I presented my bag’s contents as they are – an artifact always in flux and reflecting (as an archaeologist would infer) the time it exists in. Chelan divided her contents into ones that are constant and ones that used to be common but have lost their place due to the pandemic. She chose a google site provided by her employing school district’s license rather than my own choice to use UBC blogs despite similar access to google. I suppose the google site would have been easier and more attractive but I elected not to use it for reasons of keeping work and personal life separate (and yes, I consider my own further education separate from work) and for a distrust of google. While I went with the default site settings and have a simple text-dominant interface, Chelan’s site is more aesthetically pleasing and more intuitive to navigate. Not that I wouldn’t like to have a nice looking site, it just wasn’t a priority for me in this circumstance. In fact, it may communicates different and possibly unflattering perceptions visitors might have of me: a positive light such as seeking to direct my efforts toward the content of my work itself and not try to “dress it up,” or a negative light such as a sign of attempting to complete a Masters degree with minimal effort… At any rate, both sites rely on a degree of 21st C web literacy, navigating the pages and posts by way of clicking hypertext. But Chelan seems to have posts organized on their own pages, while mine are a stream of ideas in chronological order, tagged to facilitate searching as the site grows. Finally, I chose to go through my bag in video form, as well as providing annotations and elaborations for readers. I thought that the arrangements of items, how they fit together, and the process of unpacking might elicit more thought or meaning around the items than the visual of them laid out in tableau. I think that choice also helped my audience to feel more a part of my life with a more immersive and tactile experience than a still photo and text. Since we are thinking of the items we carry as some form of “text” about us, I sought to make the communication of that text richer without just using more words.
2. Katrina’s Potato Printing
   Katrina approached the task in a much different way than I did – scribing all the letters in a single block. I was inspired and challenged myself to follow Gutenberg’s great idea of “movable type” and string together letter blocks. It definitely complicated things – getting equal alignment, inking, pressure… Katrina simplified and made it efficient, but it took skill and artistic ability (and RISK – if she made a critical mistake, the whole block needed to be discarded and start again from scratch). The video was a step up from my photo essay, but I believe our methods were equally accessible and require similar literacies to consume.She discussed how carving the text in negative was challenging which struck me – it didn’t even occur to me but it makes sense. Intuitively, if one were to pick up a potato and start carving letters, one would (I think) carve the letters INTO the block, rather than preserve the letter and cut away the surround. In her conclusion she also touches on a point that completely evaded me – while printing en masse is better for humanity’s education and sharing of knowledge, is it better for the planet? True, the calf skins had a large carbon footprint as well, but the sheer scale of the paper industry beggars belief. Obviously I don’t believe it would have been better to remain illiterate, as paper can be done sustainably, but it highlights that nothing is simple and without consequences. Not even text.
3. Task 5 – Twine (Manize N.)
   I really appreciated Manize’s perspective on this assignment, especially opening with the admission that she is not a gamer. Manize’s idea to have FAQ’s as hypertext and as a means to continue down the player’s own path or to return to the linear plot is truly brilliant. I’m envious. Her use of Bolter’s “verbal units” to guide the divisions in the game design is clever too. Though I went for a sort of “meta” approach making a game about a game, I didn’t back my design up with as much theory as she did. I also liked her perspective of Twine being like storyboarding. I completely agree – I just couldn’t put my finger on it. We agreed that it took longer than anticipated to create the game, for me it was not just the inherent complexity of the game we were creating, but the “analysis paralysis” of having endless possibilities and being frozen, unable to choose one and run with it.
4. Sandra’s Golden Record (Task 9)
   I agree with Sandra’s assessment that with a (short) list of 27 items, I expected to see more commonalities. I also love that she discovered an obvious point that I missed: there was not one single song that everyone in the class chose. Not one. The highest was Johnny B. Goode and while Sandra chose it, I was one of the few dissenters who didn’t. We DID agree on the reasoning though: Sandra says “[…] which leads me to believe that almost everyone in the class found this song was culturally significant enough that it should be preserved through time and space and sent off to unknown aliens in a far away land. I myself had this on my list! But, I don’t actually think the song is that important. It’s just not.”
   The major difference in our assignments is that Sandra explored the reasoning behind her own choices and speculating on her classmates’ choices, while I immediately started asking questions about how one might attempt to find reasons in the data, both in the given dataset and how the assignment could be altered in future to make stronger assumptions.
5. Scott R’s Task 10 – Attention Economy
   Wow. First of all, Scott really committed to the presentation on this one. While both our assignments were in written form with similar accessibility and literacies required to understand, Scott’s was visually more engaging constructed consciously to fit the theme of the week. The visuals – are they great? are they distractions? is that the point???An interesting difference between Scott’s assignment and mine was that I immediately focused on Bolter while Scott didn’t mention him. I commented “I criticised Bolter back in week 6 for having an over-the-top disdain for imagery and graphical elements co-existing with (and pushing out) text, bordering on paranoia. I think he would love this “game.” […] Perhaps Bolter was right to be worried. Reading and writing are artificial – human creations – and evolution wired our brains for visual preeminence.”I really appreciated Scott bringing up Richard Thaler and defaults; how so many free or “freemium” services require an opt-out strategy, which companies bank on people being too busy to do. It’s an odd revenue stream and I chuckle at the thought (unchecked privilege?) of explaining to someone in the Western world 50-100 years ago that people will spend money because they’re too lazy to cancel something that stopped being free.
6. Deirdre D’s Speculative Futures (Task 12)
   I love the idea that 100 years from now, society will have moved to deep and disturbing uses of brain-connected tech, but schools will be only just adopting smart watches. Such a pessimistic but accurate satire. The notion of a Central Data Gathering Authority seems very big brother, very 1984 to me. Similar to my approach, Deirdre wrote a letter as the format of spec. fic. I think it adds a personal touch – a way of quickly connecting to a character in such a short passage. It also presents a challenge, though, in that, realistically, a character in and of their time would never dumb things down to a reader from our present time as their own internal monologue. The true common thread is that technology is not going away. The march of progress beats onward.The idea that a device can monitor grip strength on a pen is brilliant – it adds dimensionality to text and communication technologies we’ve explored in this course. Not only are the words, the language, the medium, the details part of the message, but the mental and emotional state of the author could be encoded in it somehow as well. Such an interesting idea. I think Ong would approve. Bolter would be losing his hair…