Link 1: Anne George – Task 1: What’s in My Bag?

Anne’s “What’s in My Bag?” task was something that felt relatively familiar. A bag filled with accoutrements of a teacher constantly on the go who is trying to find the time to complete everything they need to complete in a day. Prepare for anything and everything and hopefully squeeze in a little marking here and there.

A point that I thought was particularly poignant that Anne made was, “The constant interaction between the physical and digital world requires the swift navigation of the borderlines of all forms of textual literacies in order to make meaning in combined textual contexts…” I think I found this line of text so interesting because I feel this every single day. I find myself constantly navigating between the two worlds of print and digital media. Back and forth with digital text and physical text constantly in order to create resources, teach my students, and provide data of student learning. There is an almost endless duplicity in the work that I am constantly doing. I have digital and physical copies of almost everything and I switch back and forth constantly in order to do my job every day.

 

Link 2: Louisa Green – An Emoji Story

I was relieved to learn that someone else had found this particular assignment as challenging as I had. I also found it interesting that Louisa also went ahead and followed a similar pattern of thought as what I did and began looking for direct representation of ideas followed by more symbolic representations as she worked her way through the assignment. It seems that when direct word to word translations are not possible, we seem to begin thinking of symbolic and figurative representations in order to fill the gaps.

I had not thought about trying to start by writing out the plot in text form and then translating it into emojis from there. That seems like it would have saved me time, frustration, and rewrites. I suppose the next time that I convert words to emojis, I will have to make sure I write everything out in text first and then translate.

 

Link 3: Laura Orlowski – Mode-Bending

I found Laura’s Mode-Bending assignment to be brilliant. It was so clever, well written, and well presented. Having the contents of her bag presented as the archeological findings of a group of robots was a brilliant spin on the topic. Her mode of presenting the same information from the first assignment to that one was simply a clever take on the entire process. My project feels almost stone age in comparison.

I really am impressed with Laura’s interpretation and I think her work is a brilliant representation of modern literacy. She converted a picture and text into a news report set in a robot ruled future news report. The level of understanding of the two mediums and the interpretation required by her in order to create the project is exceptional.

Link 4: Jerry Chen – Task 12 – Speculative Futures

I particularly liked Jerry’s interpretation of the future as it took the same bleak look in due to unfettered capitalism that my own did. Instead of depleted oceans and fish stock, Jerry’s world is filled with empty headed humans who are completely reliant on technology in order to do everything from entertainment to simply thinking. What was particularly fascinating to me about Jerry’s theoretical world was that this was all done at the behest of unregulated corporations who had the politicians in their pockets as well through the use of the tricky AI candy. It feels all too familiar with the current state of affairs in politics.

I find Jerry’s blame of corporations in his speculative future to be interesting as it makes me think of many of the other modern dystopian novels that have come out in recent years in which the ultra-rich always seem to be at the root of our problems. Is this a result of the current state of affairs in our society? Is the cultural zeitgeist hyper focused on these dystopian futures because they feel inevitable to every individual? I think this assignment as a whole raises some interesting questions and calls attention to the current cultural interest in dystopian worlds.

Link 5: Didy Huang – Task 11: Detain/Release

What made Didy’s approach to Detain/Release was that she tried to not look at faces, age, or sex of defendants and found that she made rulings more lenient to those that made statements pertaining to family and how jail time would impact their family. I did not do anything close to this and paid much closer attention to risk of reoffending and violence than just about any other factor in the information that was presented to us.

I did find that much like Didy, I would get a little lenient in my rulings for a while and then suddenly I would have a released defendant end up in the newspaper and very suddenly I am playing it very cautiously. I would start locking up more people until I felt comfortable or the jail got a little too full and then my values for detaining and releasing would be altered again.

I have to agree with Didy in being terrified that real-world judges could be influenced by these AI risk assessment tools. I do not feel they are a very authentic tool for judging a person fairly. I feel that our humanity would be compromised if we relied on AI for making these kinds of decisions.

 

Link 6: Cody Peters – Attention Economy, User Inyerface, & The Frustration Of Interaction

I think I found Cody’s approach assignment so appealing because he came from a similar background to myself; we’re both well versed in games and have played our fair share of them. I was very surprised to find that Cody went in a completely different direction with his assignment. I was focused on how unusable the website was but he broke it down into a fascinating parallel between speedrunning in video games and the User Inyerface. Once he understood the mechanics, Cody figured out he could complete the game much more quickly than his initial attempts.

What made Cody’s view so interesting was that it was a complete shift in perspective. I found myself exceedingly frustrated with the game but Cody viewed it as a unique gaming experience in which he simply had to learn the mechanics. I saw it as a monument to all that is hateful in a user’s experience but Cody saw it for what it really was; a game.