Link #2 – Stephanie Carr
Linking to Stephanie Carr’s Task #3: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540scarr/2021/09/26/task-3-voice-to-text/
I really enjoyed reading Stephanie’s voice-to-text story as I could really connect with many parts of it. I have been to some of the places she mentioned and could relate to what she was describing. I was also in Osoyoos at the time of the fire this summer. Unlike Stephanie who had to be evacuated from her resort, I was on the other side of town and was luckily able to stay! While reading her story, I found that I often had to stop and go back a few words when I noticed that the idea had changed. This was because the entire story was written without punctuation. Stephanie discussed how she talked naturally when telling her story, without saying any of the punctuation. This was because she wanted her story to seem natural and as though she was chatting with a friend. This was a very different experience than I had. I chose to say the punctuation when using voice-to-text because I had used the program in the past and knew that you had to say it. I am an English teacher and it makes me crazy when students write really, really long sentences, so I guess that impacted my decision to add punctuation as I spoke. I did reflect after, however, in that my speaking was very unnatural, which was the opposite of Stephanie’s experience. Another difference between our experiences was the program that was used for the task. Stephanie used office dictation in Microsoft Word. I, on the other hand, used voice-to-text in Google Docs. Both programs are similar except that Microsoft Word saves the files to a hard drive while Google Docs saves the files to an online drive that is accessible from any device with internet access. Lastly, Stephanie and I both took a different approach when discussing oral language versus written language. Stephanie discussed how oral language was more casual, as compared to written language being more formal with consideration taken for spelling, structure and grammar. I completely agree with Stephanie’s thoughts, but when in my post, my train of thought and reflection focused more on storytelling and how an oral story versus a written story is passed on.
For her blog, Stephanie and I both used a UBC Weblog. The template that we used for our blogs, however, is very different. Stephanie’s blog is very modern looking, as compared to my traditional looking template. I really like the colors of Stephanie’s blog as they are very calming and compliment each other well. My blog is a white background with an image at the top. There is not a lot of color, other than in the header image. While there were no images on the voice-to-text task page, Stephanie does have images on other pages that coincide with the theme of the post. In terms of user accessibility, Stephanie’s blog doesn’t have a menu enabling the user to choose which post they would like to go to. The user does have the ability to click on the recent post links, but once a post is no longer a recent one, the user would have to scroll through everything in order to find the information they were looking for. Both of our blogs allow the user to leave a comment on each post. Stephanie’s template also allows for a recent comment list with links so the user can see what others have said, which I thought was a great addition to her blog.