Linking assignment  

My approach to the linking assignment was to read through my classmates’ blog posts and link to posts that challenged or differed from my thoughts or approach to our weekly tasks or made an important point that I hadn’t considered. 

Voice to text 

The purpose of this assignment was to get us thinking about the oral tradition and the literacy of oral storytelling, which language and storytelling originated with. It was only later that we moved to the printed word and the conventions of writing and grammar were established. We take these conventions for granted and consider them to be the correct way to communicate a story, but what happens when we have to tell a story orally rather than by writing?

Reading through the blog posts for this task, it sounded like everyone was challenged with this exercise. We`re conditioned to have a preference for writing stories rather than expressing them verbally. I thought Jennifer made an excellent observation in her blog post. She mentioned that she had no issue with making oral presentations or speaking to an audience, which she often does at work, but she found doing this voice to text exercise in isolation challenging. Without an audience or person listening, she had no one to direct her story to. I think this was a great observation and wasn’t something I had considered. In the tradition of oral story telling you typically have a listener and you perform and adjust your story based on their response. Writing a story is a solitary task, while telling a story orally usually involves an audience.  

Manual Script 

I really enjoyed this exercise. I started with writing by hand and even in university I always did a first draft of a paper by hand and then typed it. I hadn’t written long form by hand for some time and I really enjoyed the process and feel of putting pen to paper again. Because this was my initial way of writing, it felt very natural to me and I was able to express my thoughts and ideas effectively enough that heavy editing was not required afterwards.

Johnny very much had a different reaction and experience than me. His preference is for typing and he really loves the ability to edit and move text around, which makes it easier for him to communicate and express and refine an idea. Without this flexibility, he felt limited and frustrated. What this brought home to me is that one form of writing is not better than the other. I think our preference depends on what is familiar. And challenging what is familiar and comfortable is how we develop new literacies and ways of communicating.  

An emoji story 

In this task we were required to provide a summary of a movie or TV show using only emojis. As my preference is for words, the thought of completing this exercise was a bit daunting. At the same time, I thought this would be a quick and easy exercise. Cut to a few hours later, after I decided to summarize the movie The Shinning, I struggling to find the emojis needed to summarize and represent the plot.  I enjoyed the task as it got me out of my comfort zone, and I was reminded of the early cultures we read about at the start of the course who used images to tell stories and the current shift back towards using images because of our mobile devices. 

I’m not sure if there are emoji movie reviewers, but this could be an effective way of reviewing or building interest for movies. I was impressed and intrigued by Tanya’s summary of the TV show of Orange is the New Black. I have never watched the show, but I immediately recognized the tile and I found Tanya’s emoji summary so hilarious and proactive that I’ve added it to my watch list.  I was listening to a movie podcast recently called The Rewatchables where they were discussing The Shining. And they were speaking about how a lot of younger viewers are first becoming aware of the film through memes and GIFs online. It’s interesting that there are new ways to represent and experience traditional content like films and television and how it might be a meme or emoji summary that leads us to watching. 

Mode-bending 

For the mode-bending exercise we had to change the mode of the week 1 what’s in my bag task and make it an audio experience. I was initially challenged by this exercise because when I looked at the items in my bag, I did not think they were very interesting when thinking about them in terms of audio. I eventually took an approach where I took bits of sounds from my typical work day and edited them together to create a day in my life to compliment task 1.  

I was really impressed by Eva’s creative approach to this assignment. She actually represented all the items in her bag by personifying them and putting them in a radio play. Personifying objects is a great way of expressing cultural assumptions about the items, what they represent, and our personal relationship to the items.  I was inspired by Eva’s audio story and approach and used it in my final assignment where I created a podcast where I personified a hyperlink and book, so they could debate their merits for education and learning.  

Golden record curation 

In the golden record curation assignment, we had to select 10 songs to represent humanity to extraterrestrial life.  I was unsure what to use as my selection criteria, but after reviewing the week’s readings and video content, I decided to try to remove my personal biases and select songs that would represent the varied culture and geography of the earth. The following week I read everyone’s curation post and criteria and it was one for the most enlightening moments of the course for me. All being in the same course, and having prepared for the curation assignment with the weekly readings, I had assumed that most of my classmates would have used the same selection criteria as myself. I found this was very much not the case. It was fascinating to read through everyone’s’ selection criteria and approach to the assignment.  

Kristie made a great observation. While some of us wanted to ensure that various cultures were represented, Kristie thought that human culture may not have any meaning to aliens. Would aliens be able to understand one, if any, of our different languages? For her selections, she decided to focus on the emotion and feeling that the different pieces evoked, regardless if they were instrumental, had vocals, or where they came from.  While I was focused on cultural diversity, Kristie focused on emotion, which all humans, and potentially extraterrestrials, can relate to regardless of culture and that may prove to be universal. 

Network Assignment 

In the network assignment, we saw our selections from the Golden Record Curation task visualized. In these visualizations we could see the songs selected and the relationships between students based on their selections. I found this task challenging, as I often struggle with visualizations.  

Nicky did a did a great job of breaking down and interpreting the visualizations that helped me better understand them and she made some great observations, some which I hadn’t considered. She examined the criteria that we used for selection, some of us making selections based on cultural representation where we tried to remove our personal tastes and bias. This is a sound reasoning to ensure different cultures are represented, but when networked and grouped with others who used this approach it may not lead to people that have much in common or  like-minded communities.  If we are removing our personal tastes from the selections how accurately do our selections represent us as people?