There shall be no string theory in this concatenation! These characters, also MET students, may be a snowball, but which one of us is snow, and which ball? Cold articulation of the scenario with some juggling may judge. What is offered is more a chain-link fence than nicely designed set of media-rich connections.
Task 03: Voice to Text — Ben |Dierdre D.
I was drawn to the visual aspect of Deirdre’s assignment before the argument when I saw the annotations on the image of the text, simply because I was inclined to mark up my own text using former editing skills (though I did not); however, Deirdre offers an interesting comparison of text-to-speech options, first with an iPhone and again with Microsoft Surface. Because she took that deeper level of interest in the mechanical comparison, I became interested. I merely used the recommended Speechnotes application because I had not tried it before.
Both the iPhone and Surface seem to offer a larger range of colloquialisms compared to Speechnotes, and fared no better or worse with spelling. Interestingly, all three technologies generated text options in a stream of consciousness format with very little punctuation and where most mechanical errors were equally poor. Dierdre mentions that she thinks this is due to the nature of spontaneous speech and to errors in speech-to-text technology. I tend to agree with this, and remarked on my stammering or mumbling and the technology’s need to make sense of it.
Task 04: Manual Scripts — Ben | Allison J.
Allison makes the link for no special reason other than she likes a “good old Bic pen” for taking notes. Nostalgia is sufficient reason for me to linger. An important difference between our reflections is that I did not connect my thoughts to the documents for the week, for no particular reason other than I preferred to enjoy a reflection of Wittgentein’s paradox of following a rule in his Philosophical Investigations while actually reflecting on a reading of Ian Bogost’s book Play Anything.
Connecting Harris’ (2017) illustrative example of preparing a podcast and how mistakes may be rectified, Allison’s connection to her own writing about what constitutes an error and how such failings were not permitted in monk-copied biblical manuscripts was a nice distraction from the mechanical preparation of content creation and publishing. There are some comical images in the marginalia from some of the less orthodox scriveners. Had Allison, a teacher, reflecting on the affect of covid-related changes to education and family life, mentioned anything about connections to Aristophanic or Manandrian Old and Middle Greek comedy and how bible copyists would sometimes draw obscene scenes from comic plays in marginalia, I think there would have been a stronger connection worth reflecting on; however, her reflections about “how to type efficiently and properly on a ‘QWERTY’ keyboard” can make dissemination faster as opposed to the Bic pen were succinct. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a deeper look at why QWERTY is a “proper” approach?
Task 06: An Emoji Story — Ben |Kirsten M.
I cheated! I do not watch much TV these days and would never have guessed The Queen’s Gambit without clues. I am grateful for the hint, and I am sympathetic to Kirsten’s concern that we are restricted to a non-text format. I did not quite capture an idea tied to the readings as well as Kirsten did when she writes about “Kress’ (2005) notion of collaboration between maker, receiver and/or remaker. The co-creation of communication is far more compelling (and realistic) than trying to control the message and its meaning as it is received.” Bolter offered a similar argument that icons, in our case emojis, are not designed to fix authorial intent. To affix a standard structure and meaning is what gives us comfort in plain language speech and writing, but the lack of flexibility makes more boring poetry and suppresses the evolution of language.
More interesting to me was the way Kirsten redefines the steps in her approach at the end of her assignment:
- recalling a memorable moment
- recalling its emotional experience
- conjuring words associated with the emotional experience
- using those words to find symbols to tell the story
Those four steps are rather similar to the foundations of the oral tradition that we read, watched, and listened to in module three.
Task 09: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data — Ben |Melissa D.
Melissa’s analysis was not similar to my own production. I enjoyed the discovery of filters and their uses, but moved on rather quickly to the limitations of the data set. While I thought that there could be some random connections between the methods for selection among the members of the group that were tied more closely, knowing that the starting point of the process was indeed random I moved away from seeking meaning in the connections and merely observed what and how the groupings were formed.
Where I stopped, Melissa started. She not only proved that she learned how to use Palladio by showing how she used the tool to parse the data, she then read the observations and selection processes from the peers in her group to determine whether there were any significant qualitative connections or quantitative. Knowing that a 6/10 match was derived from an apparent interest in joyful music is interesting, but the argument for anything deeper gets weaker thereafter. What’s interesting here is that Melissa completed the quantitative analysis even after recognizing the limited value. Had we both been working with the complete data set in Palladio including the orphaned songs, I think that we would present very different research questions and conclusions. Melissa’s data set would include the qualitative data set form the blog posts, which could be coded in a manner that might be added to the selections in Palladio creating what would appear to be a richer connection. Without an established set of metrics for selection, I undervalued the viability of that qualitative data for my interpretation and might continue with that type of analysis.
Task 10: Attention Economy — Ben |Nathan B.
Nathan’s reflection on the User Inyerface UI experiment was methodical to the screen. Our analyses were conducted differently, but the results were similar. I looked at the html page source to find the offending culprits that were preventing my progress through the site, and Nathan reflected on how his experience matched many of the dark patterns described in the readings for the week. The site design had clear purpose, to prevent users from progressing, suggesting there is a darker purpose to obstruct a user from leaving the site. I will agree with Nathan that it is interesting to see many of the dark practices active in one place to show the obfuscation that occurs with technology and digital services. We could both have offered additional attention to Tufecki’s Ted Talk and the implications on society, security, buying and buy-in patterns. In short reflections like these two where the analysis is on the site itself, it is difficult to assess how deeply the authors connected with the course materials to aid in their responses.
Task 11: Algorithms of Predictive Text — Ben | Lori J.
B: Education is not about the problem of being able to remember facts about how an elearning system works best with your computer skills or similar systems that can crunch your time using software development technology, but it’s important to understand how you work and create
L: Education is not about the risk of being able to make the necessary money for a non governmental organization.
Ok, so where’s the connection? Lori’s prediction simply reminded me that I work with a for-profit education company, and I wondered what that perspective about risk from the user perspective could mean in my own professional context. I immediately and hopefully imagined a college or university instructor musing about how great publisher-provided (at a cost) content is for supporting teaching and learning and how if they do not offer praise for it’s value or connect their colleagues to the publisher in a value-driven manner that the content co-creation well will dry up and students will ultimately suffer from poorly vetted, low-quality materials that will eventually fade with the current technology they are using to suffer through their exams. But that thought departs from Lori’s purpose.
Comparing predictive text from her iPhone, used for professional purposes, and Gmail, used for personal conversations, she discovered an interesting difference between the systems. The iPhone offered a more professional representation of words and idea, properly reflective of her growing vocabulary data base of workplace conversations. Gmail was trained to express informally in alignment with communications among friends and family. I think Lori’s experiential connection to O’Neil’s notion of a context-oriented world grappled with the weekly reading at a deeper level than my analysis did, and I appreciate the second thought about contextual weapons of math destruction that O’Neil raises.
Broken link:
Overall, I found the thoughts and presentations and comparatist approach an interesting way to spend some time with peers. I did not particularly excel in my mainly text-based responses to meet the pedagogical underpinnings of this course where media-based stimulations would be more welcome. Packaging, even for chain-link fences, can be important selling tools.