Link #5 – Maurice Broschart
Linking to Maurice Broschart’s Task #5: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540texttech/task-five/
Maurice created a Twine about the first day of school. I enjoyed working my way through the Twine and deciding which path I was going to take. I appreciated all the different options and how he was able to have different text pop up within the task. The images and pop-ups added to the experience as a viewer/reader and allowed some elements of the storyline stand out and have more emphasis than others. In reading his reflection, I right away connected to many of his thoughts. I connected Twine to the “choose your own adventure books” and I also teach using hyperlinks. While I don’t use Canvas as a platform in my teaching, I do use Google Classroom and in a fairly similar way. I also use the Google Apps for Education and link items into documents, allowing students to access audio, visual, text, websites etc. all from a common document. This makes it easy to guide a student through different learning opportunities and provide different resources for learning that cater to different learning styles. In the creation of the Twine, Maurice resorted to pen and paper to map out his storyboard. I tried to do this step digitally in the Twine program, but found that I often had to click back and open previous boxes as I wasn’t sure what the last prompt was. It would definitely be helpful if you could see a little preview of the story boards as you plan instead of just the title each storyboard. Maurice and I both used YouTube clips to support our Twine learning. It is interesting how times have changed where we get our information from. In the past, books or encyclopedias were often used as a source of knowledge when someone was unsure of something. Now, those who have the advantage of computers and smartphones, can google or YouTube almost anything and learn the process. Both Maurice and I learned from someone who had posted their tutorials to YouTube, and this process of learning online through videos is becoming more and more the norm.
Maurice’s blog space is set up so the user can navigate their way through the tasks by using the links at the top of the blog. The user is able to leave a comment after each post, so they are able to interact with the blog if they want to. While the blog space itself is very plain, with a white background and standard blank font, there are some images in some of the posts themselves. Once I navigated to Maurice’s website, I had a hard time knowing who the blog space belonged to and had to go back to the class page and work my way back to the blog in order to know who the author was. Perhaps it was a conscious choice to hide his identity, or perhaps an oversight in the creation of the blog itself.