Linking Assignment: 1-3
Link 1 Steph: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540scarr/2021/10/03/task-4-potato-printing/
I wanted to do this task, but my schedule that week had other ideas, so I was really interested in seeing how my classmates approached and carried out the potato printing. I looked at several posts, but found that Steph’s reflection and photos intrigued me the most. At first glance I thought she had chosen an unnecessarily difficult word: WORDS. To me, the O, R, D, and S were so curvy that I probably would have stayed away from them if possible, assuming they would be the most difficult to carve into the potato. However, I thought she brought an interesting perspective to the task since she spoke of her job as a Kindergarten teacher swaying her choices. She says that Kindergarten children actually learn capitalized letters before lowercase, which leads me to believe that there must be some educational research that has led this to be a normal thing in Kindergarten classes. Sure enough, even a quick Google search reveals that many Occupational Therapists recommend learning capital letters first. Those that believe this is the better method for young children to learn printing point out that while their fine motor skills are still developing, therefore capitals provide more straight lines than lowercase letters. Capital letters also have easy to distinguish start and stop points on a line, whereas lowercase letters often stop in ‘random’ places; this of course has to do with writing on lined paper by hand. If I had done the potato printing task, I might have chosen to create one capital and then the rest lowercase. I would never had known that starting with all capitals would make the most sense, as I was a ‘new’ potato printer. Steph brought this inherent knowledge with her to this task even if she didn’t know all of the research behind it, and I found that fascinating.
References
Sowdon, L. (2019, March 21). Why OT’s tell you to learn capital letters first – Five senses literature lessons. Five Senses Literature Lessons – A Complete Homeschool Curriculum. https://www.5sensesll.com/index.php/2019/03/28/why-ots-tell-you-to-learn-capital-letters-first/
Link 2 Kirn Bhela: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540bhela/2021/10/12/task-6-an-emoji-story/
I looked at several of my peer’s emoji stories and noticed that it was nearly impossible for me to understand which movies were being represented through emojis unless the movie title was conveyed in an instantly recognizable emoji-word translation. Kirn’s emoji story was the exception; I did not instantly recognize the title, yet I was able to follow the emoji plot very easily. Kirn herself notes that someone “might not know which movie it is but they will [still] understand that it is a love story . . . [because] love is recognized in some form in almost any society” (Bhela, 2021).
I think it was interesting – and smart – that she intentionally chose a movie with a universal theme, knowing that it would transcend culture, borders, and language, and still be readable in emojis. Although Bolter (2001) posits that “[s]ince its invention, printing has placed the word effectively in control of the image”, I think this emoji story demonstrates a reversal of that control (p. 48). In Kirn’s emoji story, the visual images are in control of the words that appear in the reader’s head, and in some cases the words may morph into different words as new images appear. For example, the opening image deposited the word “book” into my head; when I reached the image of the canoe, though, I realized the opening image actually represented the word “notebook”, the title of the movie.
References
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110
Link 3 Robyn Oliver: https://blogs.ubc.ca/reoliver/2021/10/05/task-5-twine-hypertext/
I really enjoyed Robyn’s Twine game/story about pottery. I loved how drastically different to mine it was, which really showed me how narrow my view of the task was to begin with. When I approached this task, I only considered creating a traditional story that progresses from the beginning to end. Robyn, however, was so creative in her interpretation of the task! Rather than a traditional linear story, she provided a learning experience for her audience to participate in. Taking a seed of inspiration from the movie Ghost, she extrapolated on the central activity and connected it to her educational passion: pottery.
It was evident while reading her reflection that she faced a similar creative process to me, filled with moments of progress punctuated by setbacks and deviations to the original plan. Where I hit a wall regarding image insertion, she excelled in this aspect. I appreciated how honest she was in this reflection, which allowed readers such as myself a peak behind the scenes. I also appreciated that she incorporated various visual media into her Twine, which was a literacy missing from my own. I think her visual images were engaging to the audience, and I was pleasantly surprised to be taken from the Twine page to her YouTube videos for the pottery lessons. I think the added media elements really elevated her experience and showed the areas that mine was lacking in.