Click on the image

The first thing I noticed about Chelan’s emoji story is that she states which tool she used. I didn’t do this in my task, but I do feel that because these tasks are partly based on design decisions, providing knowledge of different tool affordances can help readers to decide which modes work best for communication. 

One of the similarities between Chelan’s and my task is that we both found it important to display time in our emoji story. I can’t speak for my peer, but for myself, I can say that I am extremely used to stories being sequential. For example, “X went to the store and afterwards, X contemplated if buying a hot dog would have been a better choice”. When searching the internet, this dependency on sequential time is challenged. We can look up a current event, click on it to find its historical roots, and then explore public opinions of the event on Facebook or Twitter. In the case of the emoji story, it begins to read as a mapping or charting (Bolter, 2011); “Topographic writing challenges the (logocentric) notion that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language” (Bolter, 2011, p. 36).

Although it seems arbitrary, one of the most impactful differences between Chelan’s task and my own is that the image of her emoji story is way bigger than mine! Her story also displays at a readable size, so that you are able to look at the text and refer back to her story for visual support. My emoji story is tiny in comparison, and the reader has to click on the image, which takes you to another screen where the image is magnified, but the text is no longer visible. The design of my task #6 page, forces you to switch between modes, instead of using multimodal learning to support the building of new knowledge, while Chelan’s story brings visual and verbal modes together, giving them a unified face (Bolter, 2011, p.73). 

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