Link 1: Richard Wong
Comment and reflection on Sept 26, 2021
Hi Richard! I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed watching your video for this first task. It was refreshing and reinforced many of the points you were making at first about how, even in a professionally and academically digitized world, visuals and oral messages help to communicate in a way that can show so much about a person. Your use of well-highlighted and chosen images together with your use of voice (to show humor, for example, when you talked about the soy sauce in your bag) added to how I felt I ‘got to know you’.
Overall, I think you approached this task from a completely different perspective than I did. You highlighted what you were showing as your personal narrative (someone who lives in a city and uses various technologies (computer, digital or otherwise) throughout your day. I appreciated how you categorized each type of item in your bag, and then after explaining each, you usually tried to add some thoughts about how technology (printing, text technologies) are at use within each item (for example, it really resonated with me that you talked about your car keys then discussed how both text and text technologies have you to control aspects of the car). I also appreciated your points on how a modern library has changed from those 15-25 years ago. One aspect that we touched on in Task 3, that you bring up here in Task 1 is the use of written and oral language, and how different or similar each are, whether the use of writing has changed our culture, and whether oral and written story-telling is similar or different, and how? I noticed that you highlighted your use of earphones to listen to audio books. Audio books are a funny mix between a written story that is ‘told’ by, usually an actor, or someone at least with a gift for transforming the written version of the book into something we enjoy listening to. I find this an interesting mix between written and oral story-telling. It’s even more interesting when we consider how AI voices are being used to ‘voice’ parts of commercials (have you seen what this company is doing? https://www.synthesia.io/ – it’s suggesting that humans no longer need to record anything, just let an AI program do it for you! I have some colleagues who are not as confident in recording audio and video for e-learning who are pushing to use this technology in place of human speech and presentations at our university. I have strong feelings against this, but what do you think? It’s a very interesting can of worms!).
I enjoyed getting to know you through your well-organized and explained bag, Richard. Thanks!
Delian
Personal reflection:
Beyond the comments I made to Richard, I felt that our perspectives and approaches were quite different. In Task 1, it was quite clear that Richard was demonstrating his perspective as a city-dweller, highlighting his use of written and technological literacies. I have these literacies as well (not sure if they are to the same extent of course!), but I chose to highlight what I actually do outside of my work (which may not have fit well with this course, but was me being true to who I am). I can see this difference between what each of us chose to demonstrate based on the items we each chose to highlight – I chose non-digital versions of things, for the most part, while Richard highlight a laptop, textbook, tablet with iPen.
It was also interesting that Richard used a video screen capture of a PPT with his voice over and small sized view of his upper body to communicate this task. I felt that this was an inspired choice considering he was explaining how he tried to instill more visualization and oral communication within his tech-based work and academic life since this minimized misunderstandings. I used a simple image I took from my phone then typed directly into the WordPress post. Not the most inspired use of technology.
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Link 2: Sheena
Comment and reflection on Oct 26, 2021
Hi Sheena,
I appreciated your explanations on the process you went through to create a clearly legible handwritten text. Your approach to this task was quite different from mine, since I created a set of potato stamps which made me appreciate how difficult it is to create legible typefaces – so painstaking! The natural fluidity of handwriting seems like the opposite to creating a typeface.
What I found especially interesting in your explanations were your musings on errors being ‘lost thoughts’. This is extremely interesting to me, especially as we learn more about the way we are writing more and more using computers (word processors), which make it so easy to ‘fix’ errors as we type, so these ‘lost thoughts’ seem less likely to be preserved. How many theories have been lost to the ‘backspace’ and ‘delete’ keys? I know we can use ‘track changes’ in Word to see how our writing has changed over time, but I wonder how many of us would use that tool while developing a text? What about you? How do you preserve your lost thoughts when typing into a computer? Do you feel that ‘lost thoughts’ merit the same value in a typed document on a computer as they do on a handwritten page?
Thanks for your interesting reflections!
Delian
Personal reflection:
I chose to comment on Sheena’s experience in Task 4 since her experience with handwriting and reflections on the role of errors within handwriting were a complete contrast to my own work in this task. I was inspired by her descriptions of errors as being ‘lost thoughts’ that could later be gathered to create new idea or works. I didn’t see how Sheena translated that idea of mistakes as lost thoughts to typed writing though, so I asked her how she kept her ‘lost thoughts’ in this medium, or if she valued lost thoughts created on a computer as much as she did when she wrote by hand. I feel that there is something about the effort and hand-eye movement with handwriting that we may value over typed text, or perhaps the efficiencies of typing encourage us to delete rather than save our ‘errors’. Though many of us, including myself, do more typing than handwriting, when it matters (for example, when I want to take notes to remember), I will handwrite instead of type. I found this article relevant to help me understand why I have this impulse to handwrite my notes. My notes are FULL of ‘lost thoughts’ too!
I want to also add that I reflected quite a bit on Sheena’s labeling and discussion of the role of crossing-out errors, but not erasing them as being part of someone’s ‘historical archive’ as I listened to Abby Smith Rumsey’s lecture on ‘what we can afford to lose’ as we digitized our experiences and work. When we write directly into a digital medium (like this), it is almost impossible to stop myself from revising and saving over previous versions of work in order to save ‘space’ within my digital folders or within this blog space.
My own handwriting, especially note-taking, is completely different when I write on a computer (like this) vs. in the notebooks or papers I use for notes. I return to handwritten notes again and again, and they gain meaning as I add more to them. This is completely different to how I use my digital files.
Here is a pretty ‘neat’ version of some of the note I took a few weeks ago for Module 5.
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Link 3: James Martin
Comment and reflection Oct 29, 2021
Hi James – Wow! This is amazing! I really appreciate how you imagined then created this interactive interface, especially using emojis. The way you used emojis for objects that are given an audio ‘definition’ on your x-axis is a fantastic idea. In our earlier ‘Emoji story’ task, I struggled to use emojis well, and I’m inspired by how you’ve made these emojis more understandable by creating a sort of ‘index’ that the user can use. It took me a few minutes to figure out what I was supposed to with your grid and emojis when I first opened your file, but I really think you’ve turned the original ‘what’s in your bag’ task upside down, not just with genre and mode, but also by demonstrating your advanced Twine skills! I had no idea that Twine could function like this. I took the Summer ETEC 365 course at the same time you did, and I remember your group’s Druid twine story still! Great work for both tasks, and thanks for the inspirations!
Delian
Personal reflection:
James is one of the first of my peers in this course that I can clearly identify is taking his ideas in a completely new and novel way to mine. I was initially a bit confused when I opened up his mode-bending Twine interface because it was so far from what I expected. I needed to read through his reflections on creating the interface, and then understood that each emoji had an audio sound file attached to it, and that he’d even created what I called an ‘index’ for users to refer to so they knew what each emoji ‘meant’. This whole approach of flipping to a new platform and integrating a different tool (Twine) to show the users about the different items in his bag was extremely novel, I think. I feel like James has some past experience with Twine (I don’t know what level of expertise he had before the course I took with him in ETEC 565 (Game-based Learning) in the summer, but already then, he was creating cool Twine games) and he is using this tool to add to the message / meaning he is trying to communicate. Using Twine allows him to have ‘readers’ change their role to become players in his tasks, especially for Task 7. This was a different way of engaging or expecting reader participation in the text (though I know he was aiming for limited text, he still depended on the player understanding his use of bag items using his emojis + audio, so he used picture words that he defined so there was still some textuality).
In terms of my own textual architecture as I have created my tasks in the first 6 weeks, I have added some simple multimodality and have tried to be creative with what I am reflecting on, but I haven’t branched out in experimental ways to other tools like James just demonstrated. I feel like I have created posts to fulfill the tasks requirements, but I am quite inspired to try to think beyond simply using functional tools. Perhaps I can try to have the reader/audience engage with my posts in different ways (as a player rather than reader, for example). I don’t have the same experience with Twine that James seems to have, so there is some programming literacy that he is demonstrating that I do not have – not that I can’t get it, of course.
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Link 4: Susanna
Comment and reflection, Dec 4, 2021:
Hi Susana – I enjoyed reading through your post detailing your experience with this super frustrating website! I too felt many of the same things you did (as probably most people were meant to). I felt so anxious when the clock was set to 60 seconds and it took me a long time to get past that anxiety so I could realize I could ignore it. I also began to ‘get it’ once I realized that the web designers had actually put in road blocks to confuse us through out their interface. I also appreciated that you felt you were able to understand the designers’ strategies in this game. For me, I felt that they were throwing everything and the kitchen-sink at their users to get us to be frustrated, but now upon reflection, I can see how individual ‘roadblocks’ used in this game are in use on other sites, yet more subtly.
Personal reflection:
Susana’s experience was somewhat different from mine with this annoying computer interface game because she seemed to be more relaxed and able to see the theory and double-meanings behind some of the ‘tricks’ the game designers played on us as users. I also found it interesting that there were certain ‘tricks’ that bothered us as users differently. For me, by far, having the count-down timer created so much anxiety that I couldn’t focus on how to find a workaround for many different tries with the game, while when I read other peoples’ experiences with the same thing, they seemed to have much more difficulty with the password difficulty. For some reason I know to just put a bunch of nonsense in these password names (which may not say much for the quality of my own passwords!), but few people commented on that they had multiple meltdowns due to the timer. Yet, the timer must have served a purpose because it does represent a trigger to deceived and subvert our expectations and captures the user’s time when first starting the game.
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Link 5: Grace Reid
Comment and reflection (Dec 4, 2021):
Hi Grace – I also completed this Detain / Release simulation, but got very different results than yours. By the time I got to the 20th defendant, the town’s ‘trust in me’ was depleted and I was told that I had been voted out as a judge! Still, it’s interesting because reading your reflection here, we seemed to have many of the same concerns while completing the simulation. I appreciate the questions you were asking about the size of the jail (I hadn’t considered that). The ‘fear’ factor must have been related to whether any of the defendants we released ended up back in court (I actually had three of these, and the fear factor went up each time).
I also felt that we were given very vague information about these defendants and I felt manipulated when I noticed the same crime being committed by two young men of different ethnicities, yet the AI told me to release one over the other. I really agree with you about the consequences of making decisions based on this type of data, especially for a judge who might be trying to be ethic, but pressured into using these tools that seem to have bias within them.
Personal reflection:
Grace’s experience was quite different from mine in this Detain/Release simulation because she wasn’t voted out by her constituency! I noted that some of my peers in this class just didn’t even complete this simulation so I couldn’t compare my experience with theirs, while one person who did complete it, had the same experience (Noelle Peach was also voted out – she and I seemed to have similar strategies – do not incarcerate for anything that isn’t violent). Reading Grace’s reflection, it is still unclear how she was able to maintain the ‘Fear’ levels of the town, so I am guessing that she must not have looked as closely at the ethnicities of the pictures – it was still pretty clear if you looked at the neck level of these blurry images what ethnicities were being represented, and I guess I then took the second step to look critically at what the AI tool was interpreting for me if anyone wasn’t a Caucasian male. Grace didn’t mention a strategy to her decisions when choosing who to detain vs. release, so maybe if you just trusted the AI tool, this would have been enough to get through the simulation without being voted out? Hmm….I have worries about that since I took detailed notes while completing the simulation so I could look back at what the AI tool was suggesting, and it was biased.
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Link 6: Natalie Cheung
Comment and reflection:
Hi Natalie! You wrote two very creepy versions of the future. Great writing! I really liked how you contrasted the exact experience from utopian to dystopian for the same character – good idea! One question I had in both versions was why the protagonist had no agency? I guess in the utopian version, the algorithms were working so well that Haven had no desire to think outside the box, right? But with the dystopian version, it was so sad that she had these thoughts about how unhappy she was, but she couldn’t escape somehow. Was the issue that humanity no longer had the motivation to reduce its connection to these personalized algorithms? This is, in the long term, what I think we need to fear. Have you seen the show “Creeped Out”? You could write an episode for this show – especially this episode here about an AI controlled home: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/creeped_out/s02/e03
Thanks again for your creepy but interesting views of the future!
Delian
Personal reflections:
Natalie wrote a pretty sophisticated critique of how humans may be seduced by personalized algorithms in the future, to the point that either we no longer have the desire to think or experience life without challenge or potential conflict, or we somehow no longer have the ability to do so (this wasn’t clear from her dystopian version). Either way, I really appreciated the way Natalie used the same character in the same experience as literary device. In the first version the protagonist, Hazel is the unquestioning, sort of dumbly happy consumer who is entirely pleased by having everything presented for her day after day, while in the dystopian version, Hazel now questions and resents these personalized algorithms but somehow feels she is unable to escape them. I asked Natalie what caused Hazel to come to that awareness because I think that is the potential difference between how a person experiences this scenario. Of course, these are all kind ‘first world problems’ though because for many people in the world, having a future that may have too much personalized technology in it is a fantasy. Perhaps that may be a future – portions of the world living like unquestioning children fed and satisfied by their AI companions, while other parts of the world struggle still to live through the climate chaos I worry will affect us. Having a strong Internet signal will only help so much if we have droughts and floods to contend with.