Part 1. Utopian Speculative Fiction

A typical school day for Sean, a high school student, in 2050

8:00 AM

The alarm from Sean’s personal AI system rings. Sean gets up, eats breakfast, and gets ready for school. It’s optional to physically go to school, unless you have PE classes, or it is requested by your teachers. But Sean enjoys seeing his friends in person, so he chooses to go.

8:30 AM

Sean drives to school. Traffic is quiet and roads are not busy as work-from-home or study-from-home is the norm now except for essential service workers.

9:00 AM

Sean arrives at school and gets ready to go to history class. School seems very empty as nobody likes to physically come to early morning classes.

9:05-10:20 Period 1

During today’s Art class, they get to go on a virtual field trip. Ms. Smith uses virtual reality to show a simulation so that the class gets to tour the Louvre. They get to examine the art works very closely with explanations from AI.

10:20-10:35 Break

Sean realizes none of his best friends has come to school, so he stays in his classroom and plugs in his headsets and goggles to “meet” and chat with his friends in a virtual space they designed and created together. It is a beachside with different kinds of buildings and their favourite anime characters. A couple of his friends are still lying in bed. It’s like their secret place they hang out all the time.

10:35-11:45 Period 2

During Sean’s study block, he sat at a table at his school’s study space as he has to work on a group project with his English classmates.

Only one of them shows up in person. The rest three appears at the table using VR in a few minutes. It’s a productive meeting.

11:45-12:30 Lunch

Sean orders lunch from the cafeteria through his personal AI assistant and it is prepared and delivered to his table as soon as he enters the cafeteria and sits down at a table.

He is a little disappointed that his friends choose to stay home for that day’s class. He is hoping to have lunch with them at the table and play frisbee after that.

12:30-1:45 Period 3

In Sean’s biology class, they use VR to act like Read Blood Cells in the blood stream, which travels through a human heart. They get to experience the pumping from the inside and get a better sense how a heart works. It is way easier for them to memorize the on-way traffic system for blood flow as they act as RBCs and go through the whole process inside a heart. It also helps them to understand how the heart valves work and how every heartbeat comes from.

1:50-3:00 Period 4

In Sean’s physics class, they have been talking about astronomy lately. As a result, Mr. Lam initiated a VR so the class get to visit Jupiter’s Moons. The class is able to “travel” to the space to stand, walk and touch the surface of the moons. Mr. Lam, standing on Jupiter’s moon, explains how Jupiter and the moons formed while the scene changes according to his explanation. It is quite a visual experience for everyone.

3:00-11:00 PM

School ends and Sean drives back home. The roads are empty as usual. He plays video games with his friends using VR again.

After dinner, Sean works on his English projects for a bit as well as his biology homework to create a simulation of blood flow in human heart using VR.

11:00 PM

Sean goes to bed and hopes to see his friends tomorrow at school so they can play frisbee.

Part 2. Dystopian Speculative Fiction:

The “Perfect” Education

In the future, there are no “schools” with concrete walls or subject teachers. There’s no set curriculum about what kids need to learn. There is ONE administrating body deciding what is good and needed for the entire human population. They make all the rules, and they want to make sure they can get use of everyone’s talent as much as possible to achieve what they want.

Every child will be genetically assessed even before they were born to decide what they might be good at: fine art, engineering, astronomy, literature, politics, etc. Once their talent is assessed, a teacher will be assigned to only one child when they reach school age, around 6-7 years old. The teacher, an actual human, will change their physical appearance to be the same age as the child. The teacher will mentor the child and grow up with them together outside of family time. The teacher, or the mentor, will guide the child through their life one-on-one, teaching them social emotional skills as a friend, show them how to solve real life problems using the skills have learnt, whether if it is math, science, arts, etc.

In this way, the government can also make sure no child accidentally slips to the wrong direction. They are able to ensure that the teachers teach the kids exactly how and what they want. For example, if they think the country needs more soldiers, they will direct the teachers to guide the kids in that particular direction.

The English Version of Predictive Text using Twitter:

The Mandarin Chinese Version of Predictive Text using Microblog:

Reflection: 

I personally don’t rely on predictive texting too much so I decided to try it in both English and Mandarin. I would have read those kinds of statements in people’s blogs or microblogs, such as some of the motivational quotes. They both don’t sound like how I would normally text using my phone, especially the English post. To be honest, I rarely post anything except updating my moments with friends I actually know in person. Both statements here sounded a bit more formal than I would normally post. This reminds me that I actually use smart compose a lot more while writing formal emails. I often would use the prompts popped up while I was composing the emails for booking an appointment, writing the closing sentence, etc.

I also noticed the difference between using predictive texting in English and Mandarin. English keyboard only provided me with three options, mostly just words. The limitation of choices and also English not being my first language might have resulted in extra thinking time while I used predictive texting in English. I found myself struggling to make a grammatically correct sentence. On the other hand, the Mandarin keyboard gave me way more options of words and phrases to choose from. I was able to scroll left and right for a better way to express myself.

Also, the reason why I tried two different platforms is to try to see if that affects what the predictive texting give me. It turns out that it’s just Apple’s keyboard and I came up with relatively same choices using both platforms. Nowadays, even upper intermediate school teachers encourage their students to type their good copy of writing and proof read using Word. It is very useful for its autocorrect feature to help the ELL students with misspelled words. However, sometimes the suggested changes and the red underlines can be very distractive and may not be better.

In my own experience, my students don’t even rely on laptop that much for writing anymore, more on their phones instead, especially the younger ones. When I was teaching in a BC offshore school in Asia, 70% of my students writing time in English was on their phones, messaging each other, and the rest 30% would be at school using pen and paper. As a result, the autocorrect and predictive text features have a massive impact on their ability and style to write. I often find them very stuck when they were asked to hand write a piece of writing, even as a draft. I’m not sure if the technology is helping or slowing them down from practicing the correct spelling and sentence structures for writing. And if they are able to learn how to write in English using the autocorrect and predictive text features? If yes, are they able to transfer those skills to academic writing eventually?

Visual representation of data:

• At first, it seems very messy and unorganized with whole bunch of unweighted nodes and edges. 

Filter by source:

• Music selection of each source

• It allows you to see how many and who else chose the same piece of music if you click into the specific target (piece). However, it is an unweighted network of all the undirected nodes and edges and do not allow visual differentiation directly from looking at the graph. Also, it’s a bit frustrating that you can’t click on the nodes and edges on the graph directly to trace the hyperlinks.
• 

• If two sources chosen, it is able to show a connection between these two sources. For example, Track 3, 11, 13, and 21 are the common choices between Jade Lee and Tamara Jabbour. However, when more than 2 sources were chosen, it was a bit hard to spot the common choice among them. Again, I wish it could use weighed edges and also highlight or enlarge the size of the common nodes for the visual representation.

• 
• When you choose a specific track, it shows who in the class has made the same choice.
• 

Communities:

• I’m not quite sure how the communities were created. My guess is that is a group of sources with most similar music choices. From the graph, it is hard to predict the reasons behind the common choices.
• 

After listening to the Voyager’s Golden Record, researching about the background information, and reading people’s comments about each piece, I chose the following 10 tracks for my playlist:

1. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
2. Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
3. Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
4. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
5. Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
6. “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
7. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
8. China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
9. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
10. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20

While I was listening to it, I was curious to know why and how they picked these particular 27 tracks to be sent to the space. It reminded me of this week’s reading about selecting content based on power and authority (Apple, 1992). It seems like the Golden Record project initiated in Western society and was lead by middle-upper class, causation scientists, such as Carl Sagan. Does their selection of music truly a representation of Earth’s sound from all culture? When they have decided these tracks to on go the record, what are we not including? “Why can we afford to lose” if those end up being the only proof of music left from the Earth after humanity disappears? (Brown University, 2017)

I’m trying to pick and choose a variety of music based on my listening preferences as an East Asian living in the western society for the past decade. I’m also trying to choose pieces that are more likely to represent the cultural diversity of humans. In addition, just like what the 20kHz Podcast Channel mentioned, the aliens might only be able to hear high/low pitch sound, or no sound at all but only the rhythms.

References:

Apple, M. W. (1992). The text and cultural politics. Educational Researcher, 21(7), 4-19.

Brown University. (2017). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”

https://view.genial.ly/62c19630ebf04f001ddbe597/interactive-image-interactive-image

References:

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

Dobson, Teresa M., and John Willinsky. “Digital Literacy.” The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Reflection: 

I use emoji’s or meme’s all the time when I’m chatting with friends using my phone. Reading about this task first reminded me of the Christmas song emoji quizzes and some other emoji pictionary quizzes that I would compete with my cousin all the time.

This task was a lot harder than I thought as we were only allowed to use emoji’s, not a combination of both words and emoji’s. I was originally going to create an emoji story about my favourite crime shows. Later, I figured there were too many characters and individual stories and it would be extremely hard. As a result, I switched to this one.

I started with the title and I worked very hard on it as I thought it might give people some hint if it is accurate enough. I had a lot of trouble finding the exact emoji to represent the words referring to a specific character, object, place, or concept. I found myself typing the word using the search function in my emoji keyboard on my phone to look up for the exact icon. I failed 60% of the time and I was getting frustrated.

In consequence, I had to switch to representing the ideas and using the emojis that are related. I also used some emoji’s to show the body language, emotions, and feelings of the characters. When I looked back to my emoji story, I was actually surprised by how little of the feeling emoji’s I used, such as “lol”, “facepalm”, “eye-rilling”, “happy”, “sad”, etc. Those would be the emojis I use 90% of the time when I communicate with friends.

The process reminded me of the language I read, write, and speak. Chinese characters were originally pictograms and ideograms, which means that the words actually come from how people drew an object/idea/concept and it symbolizes that.

For example:

• Pictogram：
• Ideograms: convex 凸, concave 凹

I thought using emoji to share stories is a great way for communication among people using different languages and with varied literacy levels. I might actually do a similar activity for my ELA year end lessons as my students are slowly losing their focus. However, I think there are many limitations as different cultures have their own interpretation of the same emoji. Some would be considered appropriate in one place, and totally offensive in another country, depending on the context. In addition, there are lots of words that I couldn’t find a best fit emoji for. I also use different “emoji” Apps, such as Bitmoji to help me better express my feelings beyond the limitation of text on a screen.

Weekly Task 4

Instructions：

1. 1. 2. Choose a five-letter word and print it twice using potato stamps (a short tutorial on how to create these stamps is available below). The word cannot have repeated letters. Try to make both copies as identical to each other as possible. Take a picture of both copies together and post it in your personal space along with a reflection on the process of preparing, crafting and producing both copies (approximately 300 words).

      You may use the following questions to guide your reflection:

      • Was there something particularly challenging in the process?
      • How much time did it take for you to create the stamps?
      • Have you notice anything particular about the letters that you have chosen to reproduce?
      • Considering the time and effort that took you to create a 5-letter word, how do you feel about the mechanization of writing?