867.5309 TextRadio Show

Task 7 – Mode Bending Transcript

Reflection

Postman (2011) wrote that new technologies alter the structure of our interests and I was drawn to create a “radio show” for this task as this form of electronic media culture is markedly important in the history of orality and altering the nature of community (Lunsford, 2006). I quite enjoy thinking of this task as a continuity or extension of the original print literacy of task 1, using a new medium of audio to represent the content of the previous medium of text (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009). 

Similarly, my design rested largely on the transformation of making new use of the old material as the task required (New London Group, 1996). I debated structuring something around a visual design with audio components, filming myself in some sort of artistic gesturing dance, or creating a video with multimodal components. I settled on the radio/podcast-like mode because it is something I have never done before. I was surprised at how much time it ended up taking me in the end, but feel like this is always the case with virgin podcasters; what platform to use, how to add effects, and how to sound okay with minimal equipment for such a task.

The idea of meaning-making practices is especially important in my world of education. This idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, although warned of this binary, is interesting to consider (Prensky, 2001). A dichotomy of myself as a digital immigrant, who went through K-12 without technology being a real participant in my education, compared to those I teach who are digital natives, who have experienced educational technologies before kindergarten. I am also battling both internally and externally with the digital divide, a very prominent and real concern in the community I live. This is fundamentally what actually lead me to the MET program, as I teach marginalized students who have been traditionally underserved including access to digital resources and digital literacy opportunities. 

It was enjoyable to explore this task, of changing the semiotic mode of a previous task. It is a very practical way to teach multimodality and I plan to carry this type of practical experience into my classroom.

References

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (pp. 286-312). Cambridge University Press.

Lunsford, A. A. (2006). Writing, technologies, and the fifth canon. Computers and composition, 23(2), 169-177.

Postman, N. (2011). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. (Original work published 1992)

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1-6. The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

Syllables, words, ideas

I relied mainly on words and ideas, especially with emoji’s you have to get a little creative and some ideas may stretch farther than others to connect to specific words/places/people and other representations of a movie. If I consider how reading is modified in this multimedia environment I would refer to the saying of “a picture is worth a thousand words” and slightly modify it to say “an emoji is worth representing a chunk of plot” for the purposes of this task.

Starting with the title

Yes, I started with the title. There was a specific emoji I wanted to use in the title as I use it throughout the rest of my emoji story, this emoji acts as a representation of a specific place and as this was the closest emoji I could find I wanted to ensure readers could pick it out from the beginning (I thought this representation is made more obvious in the title). I also started with the title because the emojis were what came to mind almost immediately when I thought of this task.

Visualization

I had two choices to pick from recently viewed material, and although one was pretty comical to visualize, I chose the other for its, say… appropriateness and challenge, or more “complex orchestration”. I had a rough idea of what emojis may be possible to use and highlight the key features or ideas, however, I was surprised by the lack of emojis I thought would be available and the ones that were available. I definitely had to improvise or create some looser connections of ideas to representation but in the end, I think I was able to find at least some sort of visual representation for my word or idea.

References

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

Adventure Awaits

ETEC 540 Adventure Awaits.html

Strategy

I have created one previous Twine in another course, so I knew it would take me a while to create something but I find it such a fun process that I decided to take on the optional challenge (challenging for me). I did refer to my previous Twine to remind myself of some of the basic coding strategies, and I also referred to the Twine cookbook if something just didn’t seem to be looking right or I wanted a certain font, colour, size, etc. of text. I find I use the test from here function ALOT, and will copy and paste codes to other pages that have turned out the way I want it. The cookbook and Twinery forums seemed to be my go-to and were often very helpful.

I wanted to create a mini adventure, including a few things that I am passionate about (traveling, adventure, and the outdoors), while being creative and of course, a little silly – hoping to get a few laughs out of participants. I began with a plan on paper; how the story would begin, explained why there is an adventure and the general layout of what each adventure would entail. I chose to keep the layout similar between each adventure, I thought it would be more pleasing for the viewer and of course because of time constraints. I was hoping to find more images that went together but this proved to be a difficult task and I decided to keep the images simple rather than mismatched and clunky. 

It is a little frustrating WordPress does not have an easy solution for embedding a Twine story into the blog, I messed around with plugins for a while but was (very) unsuccessful. I feel like there is always more I could do, but alas, I just needed to finally move on to different tasks (both academically, professionally, and personally).

I hope you enjoy 🙂

History of potato stamps

Potato stamps originated in the early 1900s when North America was seeing an influx of white European settlers and Indigenous peoples wanted to cater to this increased “tourism” by decorating their woven baskets (Made by a Potato, 2022). A cubism art movement was sweeping across Europe and these basket decorating techniques seemed to catch the attention of passing tourists, using vegetables such as potatoes and squash and herbal dyes on ash splint baskets (Bruchac, 2015). Interestingly enough, this practice of weaving and designing baskets emphasized the importance of oral storytelling in Indigenous cultures (connecting to Task 3).

Challenges

Embarrassingly so, I created the first stamp backward and had to redo it. I had one of those moments where you cannot believe how silly you were…like duh! And then I had another moment where I realized that maybe each letter needed to be on its own potato and that we needed five stamps and not two stamps of the full word. But alas, I’ll speak to what I know and did in this circumstance. 

Time taken

I think from the very beginning (full potato) to stamps on the page, my guess would be about 25 minutes. I used a kitchen knife to cut the potato in half and cut out the letters, I kind of thought after that it may have worked better if I used my art knife (but we’ll never know now). I tried to use multiple writing tools to write the letters on before cutting, but nothing seemed to stick (sharpie, marker, pencil), so I had ultra-light markings to follow when cutting. 

Letter choice

The curves of the J and the inside space of the A were particularly challenging to cut. I found the little space I had to work with it made all of the letters difficult to define and refine, the M and the E had a lot of middle spaces that I was worried I would chop off one of their “limbs”.

Mechanization of writing

I thought it was a lot of fun to do a hands-on activity, it was at times calming and almost meditative, this was a first for me in the program. However, my stamps look like garbage, they took quite some time to create and prepare, and they made quite a mess with potato chunks, juice, and paint. I had read somewhere that some people have used cookie cutters to create shapes in the potato, pressing it into the open half and cutting around – this sounds like a fun way to do crafts with kids as well. This may be what I reserve this for, a fun activity to do with kids around the holidays to make cards and build some motor skills along with creativity. 

I do recognize that historically it may have been a low-cost alternative to produce a repeated pattern or message, so it would have been more efficient and quicker than writing or drawing by hand. Appreciatively it was an important step towards more advanced practices and technologies for printing and the way we share information.

As I watched the short film on letterpress technology I almost found it such a beautiful art form. Efficient, no, not in this day and age as it is time-consuming and the actual technology of the press is so dated it is hard to find and/or replace parts, but an enchanting operation. Once textual bodies are all perfectly pieced together, it is impressive how fast it does in fact make copies with the rolling mechanisms. An acceleration of 200 pages to 768,000 pages an hour is a fascinating statistic the printing press holds, it is no wonder it transformed societies (Innis, 2007). My work of potato art was not so transformative!

References

Bruchac, M. (2015, May 5). Potato Stamps and Ash Splints:
A Narrative of Process and Exchange. https://www.penn.museum/blog/museum/potato-stamps-and-ash-splints/

Danny Cooke Freelance Filmmaker. (2012, January 26). Upside down, left to right: A letterpress film [Video]. YouTube.

Innis, H. (2007). Empire and communications. Dundurn Press. 

Made by a Potato. (2022, November 4). The History of Potato Stamps. https://madebyapotato.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-potato-stamps