Questions to consider:

• How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?
• What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?
• How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authouring and end-user interface?
• What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?
•  What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?
• How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?

 

Link 1: https://blogs.ubc.ca/ekimetec540/category/weekly-tasks/

After viewing many “What’s in your bag” posts, Elizabeth’s stuck with me because of many similarities we share in the items we choose to carry in our bag. Based on the picture Elizabeth posted of the items in her bag was enough to guess she is a teacher. I would say the same for the photo I took for this task. Both Elizabeth and I referenced how important our cell phone is in our everyday life as well as technology in general. The lotion, pen, wallet, lip balm, lanyard, keys and straws for drinking water were some other items we had in common. I also was drawn to the fact she didn’t forget to mention the importance of having a pen in her bag which is something often overlooked with all of the gadgets and technologies we are consumed with nowadays. This is very relatable to me as I still see the importance and ease of using a pen compared to other digital text technologies in certain circumstances.

As for the web authoring tool, again, Elizabeth and I went a similar route and both chose WordPress to publish our site. In a way, I like the way she chose to layout her work and Tasks a bit better than I did myself. I enjoy that the latest post is first on her blog which means Task 1 is the last post in her blog. Each of the tasks has the option to comment and a link to other tasks for ease of hopping around her blog with ease. As I am generally a very organized person in my head, sometimes I have difficulty coming up with an action plan to what it is I am envisioning. After viewing and maneuvering Elizabeth’s visual and textual literacies on her site, I was very impressed with how organized, simple and sophisticated her content was making it an enjoyable experience for the user.

 

Link 2: https://mlyne2010.wixsite.com/etec540evt/project-05

I found the twine task to be one of the most fascinating assignments during this course because of the variety of fictional and realistic scenarios we all came up with. I chose to go the extreme fictional route with my twine task called ‘What should moose do?” I found a few others chose the extreme fiction route as well following the initial twine game we played and because I did one myself, I wasn’t as engaged and lost interest in the silliness. When I came across Evelyne’s twine, I found I was engaged because it was relatable in a sense to when I was a teenager and debated ‘asking my parents’ versus ‘sneaking out’ on multiple occasions! The scenarios I encountered while playing her twine were realistic and I found myself making an educated and/or mature choice based on an outcome I was hoping for. The twine Evelyne created made this tool seem a lot more intentional in educational purposes allowing me to see the value it would have in a classroom on certain real-life scenarios that may be hard for students to talk about or just as a quick assessment on where students are at emotionally, mentally and educationally.

I appreciated that Evelyne created a Wix site to host her twine task as I think it made it a lot more aesthetically pleasing and easy to maneuver compared to WordPress. I liked how the twine was embedded into the site instead of leading you to another page like the one I created on WordPress did. Overall, the interface Evelyne created between the user and the twine was relatable and comprehensible making the task an enjoyable experience to work through.

 

Link 3: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540kim/2019/09/28/week-4-task-4/

I resonated with Inhee’s manual script for a  variety of reasons. Inhee’s written script was relatable as she chose to reflect upon previous and current back to school emotions; something that is very real for every teacher and student out there. Although Inhee and I completed this task with very different ideas in mind, we both chose to write about something purposeful and important to us. I find it interesting we were both so honest and personal in our stories, however, when I think about why, I believe it’s because a personal story has less room for error than making a story up. In my perspective, pen and paper is a much more traditional way of representing our knowledge which then may persuade us to think and write in a more traditional sense as well.

Much like myself, Inhee also did not find this task of free writing by hand difficult because we came from a generation before the inundation of technology where taking notes in class by hand was necessary for our success. This reinforced our language and grammar skills as well as the ability to write in a legible manner. In terms of how Inhee chose to represent her manual script, it was very well organized with a picture above and her conclusions below to follow. This was exactly how I chose to represent this particular task on my blog as well. Inhee also used UBC blogs WordPress to present her tasks and I really enjoyed how each task had its own page in a very particular and organized blog format.

 

Link 4: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540collinge/task-6/

The fourth task I decided to review was Charmaine’s emoji story. The reason I chose her story was because it was the only one I was 100% sure about. Other emoji stories were great, however, I could not for the life of me conclude what show their emoji story represented. When I first read through the instructions of this task I said to myself something along the lines of, “That’s all we have to do? This will be so easy”. When I actually sat down to do the assignment, I was surprised at how tedious and time consuming it actually was trying to think of the best emoji’s to represent the last show I watched. This made me think a lot about the purpose behind emoji’s and what they represent in our language. They were created to add context and emotion to messages but not be the focal point of our conversations. Emoji’s can fill the gap for the intangible things or emotions that cannot be portrayed easily over text such as sarcasm or doubt. I don’t believe emoji’s can or ever will become more important than text itself and this emoji story task brings truth to this statement.

After viewing everyone’s emoji stories, it is clear that without text, emoji’s can make things much more unclear as one emoji can mean many different things depending on the context in which you’re using it for. Charmaine’s emoji story on the other hand had everyone saying “AHA!”, I know exactly what show you last watched (The Lion King). I believe her story was the exception in this case but she still did a really good job at following the plot of the movie using only emoji’s. I also like how Charmaine found a way to make the emoji’s larger in size for the title and then used smaller icons for the plot of the story. I noticed that many, including Charmaine, organized their emoji’s vertically which I thought was extremely smart as it portrayed the sequence of events from beginning to end. This was something I did not think of at the time, but I can definitely see how beneficial it is when solely speaking ‘emoji’. 😉

Link 5: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540dl/2019/10/23/task-8-golden-record-curation-assignment/

I chose to review David’s Golden Record Curation task because I was truly interested in what he had to say about each of the top 10 songs he chose. He dove much deeper into the task than I think was required by giving details as to why he thought each of the songs he chose had a significant meaning to both himself and to mankind in general. I am not sure where he got all of the information to reinforce his choices, but something tells me he is musical himself and has a passion or interest in expressing himself through music. Maybe I am reading a bit too much into his personal interests based on this task, but he sounds like he knows his music!

Some similarities that stuck out between David and I’s take on the Golden Record task was that we both considered diversity first and foremost in the selection of our songs. Among the types of diversity that we considered were cultural, geographical and the artists or composers themselves. We also took Abby Smith’s Rumsey’s lecture into consideration about collecting resources in the present that will help people or other beings understand us better in the future.

 

Link 6: https://blogs.ubc.ca/texttechnologies/task-eleven-algorithms-of-predictive-text/

For my final linking assignment review, I chose Jen’s post on the Algorithm of Predictive Text task. Jen used Twitter as the platform to showcase her predictive text, whereas I used Instagram stories. I have never used Twitter myself, so it was nice to see another platform being represented in this assignment besides Instagram or Facebook which I am most familiar with. I also noticed Jen and I both used our iPhones to complete this task which is represented at the bottom of her microblog post where it states, “Twitter for iPhone”. I would assume most people use smartphones to post to their Instagram and Twitter accounts because they are so mobile and convenient.

In terms of the predictive text content for this assignment, Jen and I had similar findings in how our smartphones were able to determine our next thought. It was clear that we both went an extra step and did a bit of research which concluded very similar findings. We both found that our phones predict what we are going to say next based on a set of criteria including words or phrases we type most often and then determines the probability you’ll use that word again. My phone determined that I use the words dog, lunch and workout a lot accompanied by emoji’s to add visual effect. Jen’s concluded the same, however her post has different words like ‘love’ and emoji’s like the heart kiss emoji that represents her outgoing personality and interests. From her post, you can definitely tell she is a mom and that she has a lot of love to give. Predictive text definitely provides the users and viewers insight to the things we seem to find most important in our lives. From this, I suppose predictive text is meant to make our lives on our phones more efficient, but we still need to be cognizant of having ‘too close’ of a relationship with our phone.