- Tanya Whiting’s bag
The link to her response to “What’s in your bag?” https://metportfoliotanyawhiting.weebly.com/task-1-what-s-in-my-bag.html
The first link for this assignment would be the first task presented by Tanya. I love the look of her bag and the variety of stuff she carried around with her. The kinds of stuff she carries with her are significantly different from mine. Her belongings say that she is a mother, a teacher, an artisan, a pet owner, and a master’s student. On the other hand, my bag says I live in a simplistic way and I’m very dependent on my computer to work and study.
She chose Weebly as her authoring tool while I chose UBC blogs like mine. With Weebly, she may present her assignments in a much more interesting way than UBC blogs since Weebly has built-in features to customize its website layout, themes, background pictures, and so forth. I, on the other hand, believe in simplicity, so I chose the simplest and a safe harbor to save my work – UBC blogs. The simpler, the better. I found diverse pictures distracting. Both of our websites require the same amount of digital or other literacies to navigate since they are very direct and simple to navigate. Tanya’s writing reflects more about herself than mine because the course asked us to introduce our bags, and I don’t like carrying a lot of stuff in my bag. I do like to put lots of stuff in my car’s trunk, but they were not shown. However, both of us talked about how text technologies manifest in our belongings.
- Angela Losch’s manual script
The link to her script: https://metportfolioangelalosch.weebly.com/task-4-manual-scripts
I love the way she wrote her script – calm and peaceful at the beginning, and the handwriting became more cursive and wilder near the end. This told me how important typewriters and computers are. Writing can be difficult and tiresome after a few pages. Same as Tanya, Angela chose Weebly as her authoring tool. This is not a coincidence as they are good friends in life and both of them are artistic (know this because we collaborated in another course two terms ago). So, anything has to do with the different authoring tools between us has been said. In this task, I tried to make a potato stamp and failed miserably. It was much harder than I imagined. I guess we were different in choosing activities. I preferred a hands-on experience, so anything related to making something or outdoor adventures attracts me the most. She chose to write a script based on some unstated reason, but her insight inspired me. For example, writing for a long time both physically and mentally painful, and the script is only copy so she had to be careful. I can absolutely relate to it. The picture of her scripts brings back my memory of being a psychology undergraduate student at SFU. I still remember how painful it was to write quite a few essay questions and long essays in exams. The exams used to ask us to write about 2000-3000 words in three hours. My arms and fingers started to cramp after an hour or so, and the sweat made the pen too slippery to grab. Angela’s scripts inspired me about how text technologies have changed the world.
- Nicky Krastel’s voice-to-text
The link to her transcribed story: https://sites.google.com/learn.sd23.bc.ca/krastel-etec540/home/task-3
I did this task in my native language because it was difficult for me to articulate my story while looking at English words popping up on my screen. A very interesting point she raised is that she suggested her students think about what they want to say and record sentence by sentence, and she didn’t take her own advice! She chose to record in long chunks, and this made some mistakes. I can relate to this very well because even if we make some grammatical or word choice errors in daily storytelling, it’s fine. But when transcribed to words, it started to sound unofficial and unreliable. And when it is recorded and can be played over and over again, it sounds even more so. She mentioned that she would record the story in smaller chunks and make sure all main points are raised if she does it one more time. This is what I thought after completed the task.
The authoring tool she used is yet another one – Google sites. I have never used it, but I bet it is simple to use as other Google services are very simple. This is nice because it doesn’t require any special digital literacies to create materials and view others’ works on it.
- Eva Somogyi’s mode bending.
The link to her verbal story: https://metstudent.wixsite.com/etec540/copy-of-task-6
This task is the most difficult one for me as I couldn’t think of many ideas in turning a description of stuff in my bag into an oral story. But she did a great job of transforming from a description of her bag into a radio broadcast. I’m being honest – the beginning of her broadcast attracted me deeply. It did feel like listening to a story and gave me goosebumps at the start when the guy spoke scarily. Compared to her story, my mode bending blows. Eva used the Wix site as her authoring tool, which is very similar to the Weebly used by Tanya and Angela. Similarly, it doesn’t take extraordinary digital literacy to use the site, but the site does offer a variety of decorations, themes, and organizations of materials.
- Ben’s algorithms of predictive text
The link to his microblog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mmD4TTzHBkZQHbzh86_HObYrx7U6wNWRvGP4fiF5NiE/edit
Ben used Google sites to host his assignments, and for this specific task, he put his responses in his Google Doc. His Google site looks plain yet very straightforward. I have to admit that this is my style – the simpler, the better. This simple design of content delivery minimized the potential distraction caused by unrelated information.
His microblog generated by predictive text is disordered and meaningless, and this is the same case as mine. The difference between us was that he reflected not only on predictive text but also on predictive programs. This can be easily witnessed in daily lives, for example, Amazon, news, Youtube, and so forth. In terms of these predictive programs that employ big data to feed their users information they are interested in, I have the same concerns as he does. In fact, I have observed that Amazon, eBay, and other brands that have online shops keep sending me emails and notifications commodities that I keep an eye on. Although I tend to ignore them, there are people who might be attracted and purchase goods because of the impulse.
- Evan Rodger’s speculative futures.
The link to his envision: https://sites.google.com/view/etec-540rodger/task-1/task-12
Very interesting ideas! Evan envisioned the future based on others’ books rather than speculating the future solely based on personal accounts. She did not mention how education and learning will work in the future, so I’m curious about that. The layout of her infographics is intriguing, although I didn’t understand her imagination of the future lives at first when I saw an angry person with number 1 and a happy person with number 2. The meaning of the drawings became clear when I read the textual explanations at the bottom.
Like Ben and Nicky, Evan hosted her assignment on Google sites. But for this particular task, she made the infographic message using Piktochart. Using Piktochart to create infographic posters requires more digital literacy than simply putting texts, audios, or videos on websites. Infographic posters present more visual information than simple texts, and they are especially helpful in presenting information such as imagining the future. I believe Evan used a very appropriate mode of content delivery to present her ideas.