Author: David Jalsevac

When I first saw that I occupied a small nodule in the network, I thought it was a badge of pride—I’m an outlier who chose different picks than anyone else. But the explanation isn’t so simple.

When filling out the quiz, I only chose 7 tracks. This happened because I included two non-“musical pieces” in my Golden Record curation: “United Nations Greetings/Whale Songs” and “Sounds of Earth” (though how are whale songs not music, am I right?). The reason I ended up with 7 instead of 8 tracks is because the music titles sometimes had different names—an English description versus their original language on the podcast page. It was only later that I discovered there was a YouTube link with all the Golden Record tracks, and these names corresponded to the ones on the quiz. One track got lost in the mix because I didn’t want to spend time cross-referencing names.

So the only reason I’m an outlier is because me and two other colleagues chose LESS than the required 10 songs, and I chose the LEAST at 7. My opportunities for connections were greatly impacted. I think it’s good that the quiz didn’t force you to choose 10 songs, as that would have misrepresented what I thought should go on the record (I misinterpreted “music” to mean only musical tracks and not tracks in general—but I want whale songs with Louis Armstrong!). But this creates a limitation in the network.

This exemplified the fact that the visualization can fail to capture the reasons behind my different engagement with the task, which has significant political implications. When someone lacks access to information (like me missing the YouTube page) or doesn’t have the cultural proficiency to complete something in the expected way, they appear differently in the data visualization – but this misrepresentation doesn’t actually reflect their true preferences, values, or identity. It’s a powerful observation about how data collection processes can systematically misrepresent people based on access barriers rather than actual differences in perspective or preference.

I was in a 17/17 facet group with Sourabh—a lonely group of just 2 people—and because there were only 2 of us, none of the three songs we shared became nodules or circles. At first I thought you need at least three people sharing a song to get a circle, BUT when I combined our 17/17 group with the 29/29 facet group, Track 14 (Melancholy Blues) only had Isabella and me sharing it, yet it was still a circle. So circles must come about due to the interrelationships and connection density. This visualization choice of which selections become circles further reinforces whose preferences get emphasized and whose remain peripheral, which connects to broader questions of representation.

These visualization patterns reveal deeper power dynamics at work. My choices were really established by the task parameters, yet I wasn’t given much weight in this network. There’s no way the visualization can reveal that it’s built on the hidden assumption that whale songs aren’t considered ‘music,’ but that assumption effectively misrepresented my actual preferences and pushed me to the margins of the network. There’s almost a power dynamic embedded in the assignment that implies whale songs aren’t music and dictates what constitutes a music record (spoken word and whale songs cannot go on a music album; flute and drums can).

Also, while the visualization shows our preferences, it can’t show our motivations. One person might choose Bach for his mathematical precision, another because of his position in the Western canon. This small-scale example gives me insight into a much more serious problem: how marginalized groups might be misrepresented in data visualizations not because their perspectives aren’t valid, but because the data collection methods themselves contain barriers that disproportionately affect certain populations. What you’re measuring isn’t musical preferences but people who completed the task “correctly” from one particular perspective.

Tracks for inclusion, with justification:

1. United Nations Greetings / Whale Songs – Voyager Golden Record

The necessity of wild juxtapositions. Outlandishness of project, postulating communication we can scarcely perceive. Information-poor language of gilded representatives versus the impossibly noble, majestic feast of information of whales.

2. Sounds of Earth – Voyager Golden Record

The clash between mathematical precision of planetary frequencies, which could be accused of ponderousness, with the ecstatic simplicity of striking a flint creates a perfect tension. Given broad historical perspective, incredibly over-privileging of humanity’s auditory footprint, but I kind of like that. Including an EEG of a representative of earth brilliant yet absurd.

3. Ketawang: Puspåwårnå (Kinds of Flowers), Performed by Pura Paku Alaman Palace Orchestra – Nonesuch Records

Chimes and chanting – that combination is indelible. Also need to represent symbolic thinking, and this Javanese mapping of flowers to philosophical states perfectly demonstrates our genius for correspondences (though utterly incomprehensible from an intergalactic perspective). Categorizing beauty through flowers – there’s a simplicity of intention revealed there, which I love.

4. El Cascabel by Lorenzo Barcelata, Performed by Antonio Maciel and Los Aguilillas with Mariachi México de Pepe Villa – Bicycle Music Company

Dynamic and great. Mariachi horns sound like the apocalypse; it’s always been that way for me. This music captures how our species races (sometimes joyfully, other times exhaustedly) toward oblivion.

5. Jonny B. Goode by Chuck Berry – Universal Music Enterprises

We need Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry captures frenzied hormonal youth – a universal language of sexuality that aliens might recognize (not that Bach is devoid of sexuality). His music represents both our cultural cycles and primal energy – revolutionary once, now simultaneously revered yet quaintly distant.

6. Mariuamangi by Pranis Pandang and Kumbi of the Nyarua clan – Recorded by Robert MacLennan

Maximum drone effect. Need to represent fundamental gestation periods of humanity, when literally NOTHING is happening. The recording captures something primordial, those extended periods of stasis punctuating our existence where change remains imperceptible.

7. Chakrulo by Georgian State Merited Ensemble of Folk Song and Dance – Melodiya Studio in Tbilisi, Georgia

Indispensable Georgian folk song. Shows we are not above acknowledging our darker, aggressive nature – destructive tendencies, capacity to make beauty therefrom. Drinking and violence need to be represented, puncturing the sterility of space.

8. Melancholy Blues by Louis Armstong and His Hot Seven – Columbia Records

The blues is more than a genre – it’s the definitive aestheticization of suffering. All about humanity’s resilience and defiance in the face of hardship, with a profound emotional depth that transcends intellectual achievements.

9. Mugam by Kamil Jalilov – Smithsonian Folkways

This represents our interpretation of cosmic mysteries – a sound journey into the unknown. Haunting, exploratory quality. Shows long before we actually went into space that we had imagined its vastness through our traditional instruments.

10. Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson – Legacy Recordings

Perfect moans and slide guitar. Is there any more universal experience than isolation? The stark, haunting quality, and the ground – there is no ground in space, yet we need ground to stand on and ground for communicating without words.

 

Changed Mode Piece

I started to take out my laptop to charge it, then changed my mind, but it wouldn’t go down to the bottom of the bag because a folder was angled in a way that blocked it. Still holding the laptop in my left hand, I reached for the book pouch – since it was propped up higher than anything else, it was the easiest thing to grab – to get at the charger positioned in front of it. Changed my mind again, and put the laptop back where it now went down properly.

I will take my laptop without any intention of charging it. But when I tried to grab it, it wasn’t a clean grip and slipped, so I decided to leave it in there.

I took the folder of papers out with my right hand. As I was lowering it back into the bag, it hit the lip. While still lowering it, I decided I would take it back out once I got it in. But I couldn’t get it all the way to the bottom of the bag between the book pouch and laptop, so I left it there in its partially-descended position.

I held up the bag from the lip with my left hand to access the front pouch with my right. I decided that if I could smoothly reach in and grab student post-it notes without any stalling in the motion, I would take them out. Instead my hand touched the Airwaves gum. My first thought was that I had to put it back – I had only authorized myself to take out post-it notes, nothing else. But then I decided no – precisely because I had failed to get the authorized item, I had to take out the unauthorized item. It was a necessary reversal: failing the original rule meant I had to implement its opposite.

The Airwaves were resting on the desk. Now, I decided to put the gum back in the bag, taking it in my left hand, but didn’t want to lift the bag with my right hand, so put the gum back on the desk. I picked up my pen to write about this. While writing, I wanted to hold the Airwaves in my left hand, and then hatched a plan to put it directly into the front pouch using my left hand as a wedge to both open the pouch and descend the gum (with the bag still leaning against the desk leg).

I then considered transferring the Airwaves to my right hand to use it as the wedge instead. But while writing about these alternative plans, I realized I needed to verify which hand had originally lifted the bag’s lip and which had reached in. I decided that if my written record showed I had lifted with my left hand and reached with my right, I would allow myself to use the left-hand wedging method. However, in writing about this decision to verify, I had made another assertion about the hand configuration without being completely certain. This created the need to verify not just the original writing but also my recent writing about checking the original writing.

After performing these verifications and finding them correct, I finally had permission to proceed with the left-hand wedging method to return the Airwaves to the front pouch.

Reflection

My mode change transformed a conventional “What’s in my bag” inventory into something more experimental. While my original piece used selected objects to construct a professional narrative (about my teaching, AI use, and linguistic identity), the new version deliberately defamiliarized a different set of objects through detailed attention to physical interaction and decision-making.

What fascinates me is how the two pieces reveal completely different aspects of the same activity (looking in my bag). The first was selective and reflective – I chose objects that could tell a story about who I am. The second became this strange recursive experiment where each interaction generated its own rules. I didn’t even get through everything in the bag because each object opened up so many possibilities for interaction.

As Kress argues, meaning is made through multiple modes beyond just written language. My mode change demonstrates this – moving from purely written description to documenting physical actions and mental processes created entirely different kinds of meaning. As McLuhan suggests, new modes don’t just change how we communicate, they “alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about.” My first piece was interested in what objects revealed about my identity, while the second piece was solely focused on documenting what I actually did with them. This mode change offers both a benefit and a challenge: even though I deliberately created arbitrary rules and pointless manipulations, the resulting documentation reveals something about identity that careful self-presentation cannot. Yet what it reveals resists easy identification of a stable self – it suggests I am only what I do in each moment, even when those actions are consciously artificial.

 

I’m David Jalsevac, an English Language and Literature teacher at Victoria Shanghai Academy in Hong Kong. What follows is my contribution to the “What’s in my bag” exercise, completed on January 19 2025.

This picture was taken after returning from the Hong Kong Public Library after going on a marking tear marking student exams. These are the last formal in-school exams for Year 12 before they write their IB exams. However, because I teach them tomorrow, I was marking Year 11 papers, these are their FIRST in-school formal exams of the Diploma Programme.

The pens in purple, green and black ink of various thicknesses are significant – they are chosen in different colors to contrast with the student’s blue or black. The best pen I’ve found is a uniball Signo 0.7 which feels smooth to write with and does not bleed excessively through the paper like the thicker zebra two-sided markers.

My half-full hydroflask water bottle bears my last name printed in permanent marker by my mother – I have to keep reminding myself to drink during the workday and end up not doing so at all. I took one sip as I left the library today.

My laptop rests in a felt case bearing a digitally rendered image of our school campus – one of hundreds distributed when our new building wing opened. There’s something telling about seeing these identical cases everywhere on campus, each teacher toting the same mechanically reproduced image of our shared space. The usual accessories trail along: laptop charger, iPhone cable, and my Bose Quiet Comfort headphones that help maintain focus during marathon marking sessions.

My staff identity hangs from a replacement lanyard (the original lost en route to ball hockey) – a white digital card with a laminated overlay. The overlay displays my photo, name, and role as “Secondary Teacher,” with the school’s identity presented bilingually in English and Traditional Chinese, accompanied by our accreditation markers (IB, CIS, NEASC). This card mediates access to the school’s electronic gates and secondary staff room, and lets me print at any of the school’s printers.

Colleagues view me as an AI enthusiast, but I see it more as a practical compulsion, no different from any other teacher’s methodological preferences. A deeper tension lies in my linguistic limitations – despite two decades of intermittent life in Hong Kong, I remain stubbornly monolingual. In our English-privileged educational environment this rarely creates practical issues, but it marks a personal shortcoming I’m acutely aware of.

Speaking of bilingualism, I carry a secret shame that I’ve lived here on and off for over 20 years now and I am still a monolingualist. In the environment I’m in which privileges English above Chinese this doesn’t matter, but they don’t see someone who views himself as linguistically lacking.

The exam papers follow a consistent format: booklet-style papers with front matter covering course details, instructions, and academic honesty declarations. Inside, students analyze a blog transcript, mirroring the structure of the IB Paper 1 exam. Their responses are written on lined paper embossed with our school crest, in blue or black ink.

Text Technologies

Since the most significant contents of my bag reflect my marking practice – the exam scripts, pens, and AI-equipped laptop – I’ll focus on how these tools represent my evolving assessment process.

My marking process has evolved significantly. What began as purely individual analysis has transformed into a collaboration with AI. I feed selections from student scripts into Claude-3.5-sonnet, offering my initial thoughts and seeking validation of my feedback (it is very agreeable). I often get it to adjust its responses to a Year 12 comprehension level. These comments often expand to 1000-1500 words – multiplied across 28 students in two classes, it represents a substantial body of detailed feedback.

Let me share a typical example of how AI assists my marking process. When evaluating a student’s podcast analysis, my initial thoughts often emerge as a stream of questions and potential feedback points:

I basically agree with this analysis
Does she need to be more explicit about linking the point about enjoyment to change, by saying that it makes the listener more amenable to the ideas presented to them
She doesn’t have to say that it is stypical of podcasts to use a conversational tone, that’s kind of robotic – “The text is a podcast, which uses a conversational tone” She could simply mention that THIS podcast is conversational
Shoudl I point here, This analysis is fine, but also consider the conversational dynamic between Robin Chatterjee, how they pass each other off as quite convivial (is there a more Y12 friendly word than that), as though they are long-time friends, which also makes readers more susceptible of the message

She could specify that the phrase “Yeah Right” is a colloquial phrase, the colloquialism creates the informal tone

It’s also kind of robotic that she says “as opposed to “yes, I agree”

Should I give her checkmark when she says – or is it better to say it creates an atmosphere of intimacy/familiarity

Grabbing readers’ attention is superficial – should I say that?

When the student says “nformal tone and enthusiastic language can not only make the podcast more engaging, but also create a positive relationship between the listener and the topic of wealth. – Should I say good connection to the guiding question

This positive interaction gives a positive association with wealth – should I say here Specify that this is Sharma’s expanded concept of wealth, not your garden variety wealth = money kind of wealth

Through AI collaboration, these scattered thoughts transform into focused, student-friendly comments:

“No need to generalize about podcasts – focus on how THIS podcast uses conversation”
“Good observation. You could specify that this is colloquial language, which creates the informal tone”
“Consider also how Robin and Vishen interact like friends – their rapport makes listeners more receptive to the message”
“✓ Good connection to guiding question”

There’s an odd tension in how we approach AI in education. While we encourage students to think critically about technology, there’s still an unspoken expectation that teachers should maintain the illusion of purely human assessment. The IB’s stance remains notably vague and non-committal. I find myself in an odd position – knowing that AI-assisted feedback often provides clearer, more consistent insights, yet feeling pressure to downplay this tool’s role in my process.

While AI assists my process, it hasn’t fundamentally changed my commitment to thorough assessment – I can take up to three to four hours on a single script when needed. But now that time is spent differently. Instead of struggling to articulate feedback, I’m collaborating with AI to refine and perfect it. Even my teaching materials evolve through this human-AI partnership, with Claude helping to shape class discussion slides.

Fifteen years ago, my toolkit would have been simpler – pens, notebooks, but no exam scripts as teaching wasn’t yet my profession. Looking at these tools now – the colored pens, the paper scripts, the laptop with AI assistance – they represent a transitional period in education. While younger students increasingly prefer keyboards to pens, showing the digital shift in progress, there remains something uniquely valuable about the physical act of writing and marking on paper. Perhaps that’s why, even as digital assessment becomes more prevalent, these tangible tools persist in our practice.