Task 1 – Katie Cowen:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540personalwebspace/sample-page/
For this task, Katie and I portray similar lifestyles which is evident in the way we communicated about the items in our bag. I can tell we are both very organized people in both our professional and personal lives. In addition, we both included items in our bags that are there in case of emergencies, which tells me we also both like to be prepared.
Task 4 – Katherine Giroux:
https://sites.google.com/view/msgiroux/etec540/task-4?authuser=0
When examining similarities between Katherin’s task 4 and my own it was interesting to read how we both find it easier to brainstorm on paper, yet faster to type. I attribute this to our age as we are part of the same generation. We grew up in a time before the Internet was commonplace, but everyone was recognizing the importance of computers and the role they would play in the future. As such, we likely both experienced classes at school where we learned how to type or were able to play typing games. This could be the reason why we both find it easier to type. I also think it’s pretty common for people to prefer to brainstorm on paper as it’s easy to visualize all of your ideas at once, and use lines, arrows or other symbols to connect your thoughts.
Task 7 – Jennifer McAllister:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/texttechnologies/task-seven-mode-bending/
I found it interesting to see how Jenn and I both chose a similar approach to our mode-bending assignment based on task 1. Both of us approached this task by humanizing the objects in our bags. When I watched her video, I was blown away at her creativity to thank each of the objects for the service they have provided her. I can’t help but wonder if we approached this task from a humanizing perspective due to our profession as teachers.
Task 6 – Elizabeth Kim:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ekimetec540/category/weekly-tasks/
Task 6 was incredibly fun but was quite a bit more challenging than I thought it would be. Elizabeth’s emoji story was one of the only ones I could figure out! Many people commented on my own task saying a similar thing; that mine was one of the only ones they could decipher. I don’t think this has anything to do with the emojis Elizabeth and I chose, but rather the movies we happened to watch. Her movie (The Joker) had one emoji that clearly conveyed the title. My movie (The Lion King) had the same. Without this aspect, I’m not sure ours would have been two of the easiest to guess.
Task 5 – Helen-Marie Teo
https://www.gnookgnome.com/post/twine-task
The “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of Twine was an engaging way to create and read stories. I found Helen’s to be similar to mine in the theme of our stories. After creating similar pieces of writing with my own students, I can tell that choosing a “spooky theme” is commonplace for this style of writing. But why? I think this has a lot to do with a reader’s engagement. As an author of a Twine story, I wanted to give my readers something exciting or suspenseful to draw them into the storyline and make them want to choose different options (or similarily hesitate to choose others). This could be one reason why Helen’s story has a similar theme to my own.
Task 10 – Amanda Klassen:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/amandastextandtechnologyadventure/
Task 10 had to be the most infuriating task I’ve done in a long time! Amanda and I both seemed to take quite a while to get through this website and we both described the frustration we experienced while doing so. I really liked Amanda’s description of how this site reminded her of browsing the web in its early days when everyone used HTML to create their own sites.
Overall Reflection:
As I went through my colleague’s posts, it was interesting to see the similarities and differences between theirs and mine. I chose to focus on six posts that had a commonality to my own creations, however, I did discover many posts where a colleague took the idea in a whole new direction. I think as a group, we drew similar conclusions about the content but had the freedom to portray our understanding or communicate our ideas in different ways. This stems from us all having different backgrounds, experiences, and strengths, all of which shape how we perceive the world and express ourselves.
It was also interesting to take note of the different layouts of websites and blogs that my colleagues chose to portray their work in ETEC 540. Some chose a very linear layout with pages or a menu for each weekly task. Others chose to have all tasks on one page with the ability to scroll through them vertically. Most interesting was my colleagues who simply added these posts to a pre-existing website that holds information about other classes or important aspects of their lives. Again, this class gave us the freedom to decide how we wanted to communicate our ideas. This opened up the door to select the mode that functions in the way that makes the most sense to us and I appreciated having those endless possibilities.