Have a listen to my speculative futures to find out why audio books have surpassed text-based books in relevance and how algorithms are being applied to spirituality. 

A bit about my approach to this assignment.  

I wanted to express this assignment as audio and initially I thought of recording a podcast. I then decided that rather than just speaking about my speculative futures that I’d utilize the immersive reader (text to speech) function in Microsoft Word.  I typed my two speculative futures in Word and then had the immersive reader read the text out load. This turned the text-based content into an auditory experience and I really liked the sound of the detached electronic voice forecasting the future, as it gave the utopian promises a dystopian undertone. The next challenge was outputting the audio. There wasn’t a way in Word to export or save an audio file, so I moved the text over to Google docs, as there was an add-in that could be used to create an audio file. My issue with the Google docs add-inn was that I much preferred the sound of the Word electronic voice. In the end, I connected my PC with Word to my Mac Laptop’s line-in with an audio cable and recorded the speech in GarageBand and then outputted an mp4.  

For this task I had to try a couple of different prompts before I could write something that I felt was coherent and reflected my opinion on a topic. This is my final course in the MET program, so what I was trying to communicate was how my ideas about technology and have been enhanced by the program, and learning from fellow students. And that by sharing our knowledge and collaborating we can better apply what we have learned to our work. My post is a bit clunky, but I felt it captured the essence of my feelings. 

 It was pretty fun being limited by the predicative text and trying to fight against it to create a few sentences that represented my ideas. The character limited also presented another challenge. This is the first time I’ve heard of micro blogging and the experience made me think of Twitter where posts are limited to 280 characters.   My concern with Twitter and micro blogging is that 280 characters does not allow for deep exploration of a topic, discussion, or debate. The format is more geared to grabbing the reader’s attention. Beyond Twitter, I have not seen this type of writing in other spaces, but article headlines and summaries are example of short pieces in traditional writing that are similar. So I can see the influence of micro blogging on traditional writing.  I’ll be curious to hear from the class regarding their familiarity with micro blogging, where they are seeing it, and if they have examples of use of predictive text. 

It was interesting to see our choices mapped and networked to show our selections and relationships visualized. I often find visualizations challenging.  My preference is for words, text and explanations, more qualitative rather than quantitative information.  While visualizations are a great at expressing generalities or trends, I am often suspicious of them as I feel they can lack nuance and be biased or positioned to justify a particular point.  

 All this being said, this was a pretty fun exercise.  My first reaction to the maps was one of trying to make sense of them and feeling a bit overwhelmed by “network of curators and works” and “curator communities.” It was with “curator communities 2”, where all the links were removed, that I was able to get a feel of the relationships and could go back to the other images to analyze the links.  The map with just the colored nodes was easier for me and I was curious to see why some people were assigned the same the color or different colors. When I looked at Jennifer’s, who was green like me, post I saw a similar logic to our selection criteria. Then when I went to Johnny’s page who was on the other side of the graph and colored blue, he had completely different reasoning for his selections I hadn’t even considered. I really enjoyed going through everyone’s blog posts and seeing the various arguments and criteria for their selections. I was exposed to ideas I hadn’t considered and found value in. If I had to curate my list again, I’d likely refine my criteria base on some of the arguments of others: emotion, protecting us from harmful aliens, trying to communicate with the aliens, and gender representation. 

Regarding the creation of communities, after reading the blog posts and selections, I could see the logic of the nodes and links in the visualizations and found them to be effective in creating communities and commonalities based on our reasoning and selections. My concern about the visualizations and links is that they create communicates based on simplified ideas and miss nuances. In this case, Ernesto created the communities based on his interpretation of our selection criteria. Whether it is human made or a machine looking for common words to link us, there is the potential for bias or a limited view of who we are.  

There is also the risk that people just identify themselves as like-minded or part of a community and miss out on other arguments. If we are not open to other perspectives, then we limit ourselves to communities that only share similar views. This has serious political implications. A concern would be algorithms that expose us only to information that we want to hear. Or what if something was not popular or not selected because it has fewer connections. This made me think of this week’s video on search engines, where the sites with the most hyperlinks to them are the ones that show up as top results. One can argue that sites with more hyperlinks are likely the best or most useful, as they are the most selected, but what if valuable information is lost because it has fewer links. 

 While my preference is for text over visualizations, I do appreciate that others are more visually oriented.  I’ll be interested to hear how others reacted to this exercise and if they preferred the visualizations to reading people’s posts. Though I find it a bit disheartening to think about, I’m open to the idea that algorithms may be better able to find links, connection, and commonalities that we cannot perceive. And perhaps algorithms and be set up that collect so much information that they know us better than we know ourselves. My fear would be that this information is somehow used to lock us into communities where we are not exposed to the ideas of other communities. 

Choosing 10 pieces of music to represent humans to extraterrestrial life was a bit of a daunting task. There were a couple of takeaways from this week`s reading and podcast that shaped my selections. Dr. Leetaru’s visual map of the reduction of digital works archived over time because of copyright also brought to my attention the vast gap between materials archived between western nations and other countries. And Dr. Smith Rumsey made an important point regarding the challenge of curation being that we do not know in the present the value of artifacts in the future. With these two points in mind, I tried to avoid my personal bias and familiarity with western composer like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and other familiar pieces and tried to select 10 pieces that would cover as much of the globe and different cultures as possible. These are the 10 pieces I selected. 

1. Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56 
2. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26 
3. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14 
4. Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51 
5. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20 
6. Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57 
7. Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38 
8. China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37 
9. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30 
10. “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15 

For this task I changed the mode of the “What’s in your bag” task from week one. The purpose of the previous task was to provide a visual and textual representation of a day in my work life. In the previous task, I used a photograph of my work bag and the items in it and explained in text what I used the items for and what they say about me. This week I focused on audio and created a narrative collage of the sounds that define my typical workday. The audio piece begins will an alarm and follows my journey to work by ferry, the communication technologies I interact with and support at work, and ends the day with my walk and return home.  The piece supplements the image and text from task one and provides an audio representation of a day in my life.

Here is my emoji synopsis of the last film I saw in a movie theatre. It was a screening of an older movie and the first emoji represents the title of the film. See if you can guess what it is 🙂

Here is my Twine game “Coffee Quest”. The goal of the game is to find a strong cup of coffee, so you can give an amazing presentation at an education technology conference and impress your MET colleagues.

I was unable to set it up to automatically open, but if you download the HTML file from this link and open it in a browser it should play.

Task 4

For the task this week I wrote a short story named “Bob the Frog Looks Back” as companion piece to my voice to text story from last week. I found writing a story much easier than trying to create and verbalize a story. I had more time to think when composing the story.  Articulating in writing came much more naturally than speaking a story. I really enjoyed writing by hand. I used to write by hand first for assignments in university and then college and it wasn’t until 6 years ago that I trained myself to compose while typing. I like the flexibility and easy editing that comes from typing, but there is a connection between pen and paper that I miss.  

 In the story I wrote for the assignment there weren’t too many mistakes. When there were, I scratched out a word and pressed down heavier with my pen to write over a letter. I only did one draft of the piece. If I was to do a second draft, I would scratch certain lines out and squeeze in new sentences or words wherever I could fit them. I found writing by hand made me more careful with my spelling. I’ve come to rely on auto-correct when typing and this has negatively affected my spelling.  

I feel that writing by hand is a much more thoughtful process. And there is something very tangible and satisfying with applying pen to paper. It feels more personal. Perhaps, I have this feeling because this was the primary way I composed work until 6 years ago. I’d be curious if those who grew up typing rather than writing would have a similar or different experience with this assignment. I appreciate typing because  it is much more efficient. It eliminates a second step when first writing by hand and then typing; it allows you to edit more easily and move text around; it is much easier for readers who may struggle with deciphering; handwriting, and it can be easily duplicated and shared. This was touched on in the podcast that handwritten texts were composed with more care and that readers would absorb the personality of the text, study and memorize it. But print made more information available to readers allowing for shared ideas, learning, and the scientific revolution.  

Task 3 

Here is the link to the voice to text story I made in Google Docs. Below are the answers to this week’s questions and some reflections on the task and readings.

What would you have done differently if you have had the chance to script the story? 

My story was called “Bob the Frog Sees into the Future.” Beyond creating a title before I started, the story was completely unscripted and improvised. I set my watch and recorded voice to text in Google Docs for 5 minutes. I typically enjoy making up and writing stories, but I found speaking and making up the story very challenging when trying to come up with a coherent piece.  If I had scripted the story, or at least had some bullet points to hit, I could have better developed a story arch (a beginning, middle and end) that would have helped guide me.  

What are the most common “mistakes” in the text? 

In the text, what stood out was the lack of punctuation. Without periods and commas, it was difficult to tell where a sentence or idea started and stopped. This would be obvious to someone listening to me, but it did not translate to voice to text. I would have to say the punctuation to make the text conform to writing conventions.  I also noticed a lot of words were misheard by voice to text for example: he = she,  pond = pain. The past and present tenses were either misheard or I was switching back and forth, so it was inconsistent.  

Why do you consider these “mistakes”? 

I consider these mistakes because of the conventions of writing and grammar that I have learned. The story shouldn’t shift tense and mishearing key words limits the reader’s ability to comprehend the story. There were also rules of writing that were not adhered to including capitalization of words, sentence structure and punctuation. As a written piece it would require the reader to try to decipher where sentences and ideas begin and end.  

In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

Oral storytelling requires more memorization. As the story is not written down or scripted you need to have the ability to remember the details or key points of a story. Oral storytelling also provides the opportunity to add an element of performance to a story. A good storyteller could use different voices for characters or change the tone of their voice to add flavor, drama and atmosphere.  

Reflection on this task and the articles this week. 

I entered the readings and task this week with the thought of speech as being secondary to writing. I think this comes from my education experience where learning is equated to reading and learning from texts. In the articles we looked at, we see how it was the written word that allowed ideas and information to be documented and shared, civilizations to form, languages in text form could proliferate and survive, and the modern idea of education and literacy developed.  There was an interesting point made in Ong, Taylor & Francis (2002) regarding trying to understand oral language through writing that “you cannot without serious and disabling distortion describe a primary phenomenon by starting with a subsequent secondary phenomenon and paring away the differences” (p. 8). The article also made an interesting point regarding the nature of learning in an oral culture where ideas and skills are passed on by apprenticeship, listening and repeating. While in cultures with writing you learned by studying text. If I think of this is modern education, I can see the idea of learning by rote versus hands on and experiential learning. After finishing the task and readings, I had more of an appreciation of speech and the oral tradition, and I think we are entering a time where speech and oral learning will be given greater value. I recently listened to a podcast with Malcolm Gladwell where he mentioned  tat his new book is selling more in audio form than the text version. 

 As I read through everyone’s “What’s in my Bag” post last week, I was struck by how many people mentioned listening to podcasts. I think this is an example of the application of technology that brings back an oral tradition. Perhaps, we will see a rebirth of oral traditions, oral literature, entertainment and learning. Previously, a language had to be written to survive. Perhaps recording technology can help preserve languages. Or at least there will be more of a balance between speech and text.  And when it comes to language learning there are new apps that utilize technology for speaking and listening as mentioned in the Preserving Indigenous Language podcast.  

Hi All,

About my work

A bit about me and what’s in my bag. I work at Dalhousie University’s medical school in the IT department supporting distributed education. We deliver core curriculum/lectures to students throughout Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island by videoconference. We do this using a combination of hardware based videoconferencing rooms and videoconferencing software.

Items in my bag

In my bag you’ll find my laptop. This is the most important tool for my day to day work and for communication with colleagues, faculty and clients. Though not in the picture, my iPhone is used for quick communication or when I do not have access to my laptop. I also have an Allen Key, screwdriver, Ethernet cable and USB stick. These are all handy when I have to fix a hardware issue or go hardwired with a device because of the firewall restrictions in hospitals that can often prevent certain communication software from functioning. I also have my iPhone and laptop chargers. My work often requires me to move location, so having a solid charge is important. Oh, and I still carry a pen with me. I typically use notes on my iPhone when I need to write something down. But I’m always surprised at how handy a pen comes in when providing clients with quick info or when I’m asked to complete a paper form (yep they’re still out there). My personal items include swimming goggles; I try to make it to the Dalhousie pool at lunch to swim laps. A water bottle to stay hydrated and a packed lunch, which is missing from the photo.

How the items relate to text and communication

When I think about the items in my bag in regards to text and communication. I feel that I am still very much reliant on my laptop. Part of it is the screen real estate, which makes it easier to see when using certain software that often doesn’t scale well to mobile devices or the mobile apps that lack functionality. I also prefer to write with my keyboard when creating documentation or written communication that requires more than a few lines. I feel like I should be embracing and utilizing my iPhone more at work, rather than viewing it as a back-up to my computer. Perhaps, a tablet could help me transition.

I definitely have seen an evolution in communication technologies over my past 9 years at Dalhousie. Even if laptops are being used they are being used with mobile and cloud based tools. And regarding video communication students seem less interested in if they can see each other or the presenter as long as they can hear the participants and see a presentation. I’ve also noticed an uptake in the chat features of collaboration tools. Perhaps, a result of text culture, a lot of students prefer to ask questions via chat than speak.

Reading my bag as a text, I feel it is very representative of someone that works in IT. If I think about what the bag wold look like 20 years ago, I suspect, I wouldn’t have a laptop and any computer work would be done from a PC in my office. And when I think about the future, say 10 years from now, I’m imagining a bag where I will no longer need my screw driver and tools for working on hardware, as the technology I support will all be software based and in the cloud. And at that time the software and communication tools will be more mobile friendly and I’ll be working mostly from my phone or tablet.

Charles