Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation

Visualization 1: Raw Data 

Conclusions: We are all interconnected. As a science teacher, all I could see was the connection between a food web: 

Due to this interconnectedness, it is apparent why algorithms need to be created to tease out these relationships in order to make connections, rank importance and target ads.

Visualization 2: Names on the outside 

In an attempt to make sense of what I was seeing, I attempted to organize the data by placing the names of the individuals on the outside of the web. This did not help. 

Visualization 3: Songs on the outside

Realizing that we all were asked to pick 10 songs and organizing the names on the outside of the web would just confirm this, I decided to put the songs on the outside of the web. 

From this visual, it appears that the most popular tracks were: track 7, 3, 23 20, 25,18 and 5. The least popular tracks were 8, 10, 17 and 13. 

Visualization 4: My community

I am a member of community 2 on this app. In community 2, there are 4 members, 18 songs and 40 edges. In disseminating this data further it appears that Sophy, Agnes, Alexis and I all picked similar songs; we all picked track 5, 2 and 23. Track 6 was the only song that I picked which another member of my community did not include. Although it is clear why this app placed us in the same community, the reason why each of these people included or did not include a particular song is not clear based on only their names. In the absence of personal information, I can not make a connection to or assumptions about the other members of my community. Perhaps this is why companies sell personal information to other companies in order to further understand the reasoning behind the clicks on the internet. 

In this task we were asked to redesign our “What’s in the Bag” task to introduce ourselves in a multimodal format. The New London Group (1996) argued that a multimodal format allows for increased engagement, while meeting the needs and interests of the learners in a variety of contexts and preparing them for their future endeavors.  

Here is my original post

Click here to view my multimodal presentation

For this challenge, I wanted to find a medium that afforded me the opportunity to include audio, linguistic and visual modes of meaning. I opted to use a combination of iMovie and Powtoons to create my multimodal presentation. I am a beginner user of both programs. These programs afforded me the opportunity to include a linguistic design, with the addition of text throughout the presentation and audio design with the addition of my voice over and background music. I was also able to include a visual design to support learning with the use of videos, animations and photos. 

Upon reflection, this iteration of my introductory task is now much more engaging than the first version. The multimodal version allowed me to capture more than just an image of my gym gear, but allowed me to capture visually what I do with the gear giving the listener a more complete picture and a better understanding. The multimodal version also allowed me to capture the elements of my life that are important (my kids and friends) which was difficult to capture in one single picture. Additionally, I felt that having audio gave the presentation a more personal feel and hopefully allowed the audience to connect more personally with my presentation. From a teaching perspective, the benefit of using different modes of representation allows us to reach a more diverse learner population. It also does a great job modeling different ways of knowing, which the students can then use in their own assessments. 

Although I am fully supportive of the multimodal approach, it does require time, patience and there is a cost. Personally, I invested a lot of time and patience converting this introduction into a multimodal presentation and there was some frustration along the way. Additionally, Dobson and Willinsky (2009) discuss the challenges of the digital divide and the cost of technology. I recognize that I am privileged to have access to these two resources and need to be aware that a number of students will not have the same access. 

References: 

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. 

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.  Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

Task #8 

“All recorded information, from the paintings on the walls of caves and drawings in the sand, to clay tablets and videotaped speeches, has value, even if temporary, or it would not have been recorded to begin with “(Smith, 1999, pg 2).  For this reason, it was extremely difficult to choose which pieces of music to choose to keep on the shortlist for the Golden Record. All songs and sounds from Earth have value, but which ones have enduring value? Which songs would be the best introduction for exterrestrials to human life? 

I am not a historian or a musician, so it was challenging for me to shortlist 27 songs to 10 songs that would represent life on Earth. As I listened to the Golden Record songs, I decided to focus on the songs that included vocals. This would give the exterrestrials a sampling of human voices at different frequencies, various languages, dialects and tones. This narrowed the song choices down to 12 songs: 

Wedding song – Peru

Mozart – Queen of the night- Eda Moser (Germany)

Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia

Morning Star and Devil Bird- Australia

Navajo Night Chant – America

Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry (American)

Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri

Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria

Dark was the night-Blind Willie Johnson – (American)

El Cascabel-Lorenzo Barcelata&the Mari (Mexico)

Kinds of Flowers (China)

Pygmy Girls Initiation Song- Zaire

Once I had the songs narrowed down to only songs that contained vocals, I examined the list of countries and tried to choose songs that were representative of songs around the world. Although it looks like Sagan and his team attempted to do a similar task, l think it is important to recognize that this team was mostly male, white and from a Western culture. If the team had been chosen during a different time period or location in the world, the sampling of songs would have been different.  

With geography in mind, I realized that 3 of the 12 songs were from the United States of America. I opted to keep the Navajo Night Chant, as I thought it was important to have the North American Indigeous population represented. Therefore, I narrowed the Golden Record down to the following 10 songs: 

1. Wedding song – Peru

2. Mozart – Queen of the night- Eda Moser (Germany)

3. Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia

4. Morning Star and Devil Bird- Australia

5. Navajo Night Chant – America

6. Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri

7. Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria

8. El Cascabel-Lorenzo Barcelata&the Mari (Mexico)

9. Kinds of Flowers (China)

10. Pygmy Girls Initiation Song- Zaire

This was a good task as it allowed us to experience the preparation, thought and justification that goes into digitization. The texts that we decide to digitize become our records of the past and in this case, may introduce us to our future. I am looking forward to reading the different techniques that my classmates used to compile their lists. 

Reference:

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why Digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources website: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/

In 21st century teaching, multimodality; the ability to represent an idea in various formats is of the utmost importance (Cloonan, 2015). Multimodality supports students in making meaning out of the world around them and provides them various methods to demonstrate their understanding of the material (Cloonan, 2015). Visual elements are no longer an “add-on”, but are essential elements in communication and education (Kress, 2015).

Digital media has changed communication: online images often dominate over the written word and graphics in newspapers and magazines are being used to replace text (Boulter, 2001). Boutler (2001) also indicates that even in communication such as email that has been predominantly text driven is now experiencing a shift to the frequent use of visuals. Although these visuals, now called emojis, have been present in digital media since 1999, social media has increased the use and development of emojis (Pardes, 2018). As with all technological changes; this has been embraced by some users and condemned by others. 

According to the World Economic Forum there are 3,353 emojis used worldwide and 74% of people in the US regularly use stickers, or emojis in their online communication (Buchholz, 2020). Emojis are used in digital communication to convey tone, emotions and facial expressions (Pardes, 2018). Visuals or emojis are also used to put verbal text into a specific context (Boulter, 2001). A major advantage of emojis is that they have a global reach; thus someone from a different culture, geographical location or first language could understand the meaning of emojis (Atanasova, 2016).

In this task, I have attempted to summarize the most recent book that I have read using only emojis (See picture below). 

I began this task by attempting to write the title word for word using emojis. Due to the plethora of emojis, one would assume that this would be a simple task. It was not. One of the words did not exist in the form of an emoji, so I opted to represent the word with two emojis hoping that the reader would know to combine the words. 

I continued this task by summarizing the book using emojis to represent the idea and emotions present in the story. The result was confusing and hard to follow. I believe that unless you had read this book, you would have a difficult time understanding my summary. Click here to read my emoji story decoded.

My concluding thoughts on this task is that multimodality is important. Multimodality needs to be the interconnectedness of different modes of representation (Korhonen, 2010). Emojis are limited in their ability to tell a story and need to be supported by other means of representation. This lesson can be applied to classroom teaching as well; providing students with multiple representation: auditory, visual, text, etc will provide a greater understanding of the task at hand. 

References: 

Atanasova, A. (2016). Emojis: Why we love them so much and what they mean. Social Media Today. ​​https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/emojis-why-we-love-them-so-much-and-what-they-mean-0

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Buchholz, K. (2020, September 30). The history of the 5 billion emojis used every single day. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/emoji-numbers-facts-social-media-how-many-twitter-facebook-instaltural ligram

Cloonan, A. (2015). Integrating by Design: Multimodality, 21st Century Skills and Subject Area Knowledge. In: Cope, B., Kalantzis, M. (eds) A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137539724_5

Korhonen, V. (2010). Dialogic literacy: A sociocultural literacy approach. In: Practicing Information Literacy. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/multimodality#:~:text=Multimodality%20refers%20to%20the%20interplay,%26%20Van%20Leeuwen%202001%2C%20p.

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning.Computers and Composition, 22, 5-22.

Pardes, A. (2018, February 1). The wired guide to emoji. Wired Online. https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/

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