Monthly Archives: October 2023

Task 8: Golden Record Curation

I found the task this week to be especially interesting and challenging. Prior to this module, I was not familiar with the Voyager “Golden Record” and found myself diving down the rabbit hole, looking deeper into this whole ongoing event. I found it pretty fascinating that you can still chart the two Voyager crafts through NASA: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

In curating this condensed version of the Golden Record I struggled to use my criteria to narrow down my selections, as each of the pieces had already been painstakingly curated in order to be included on the original record. My criteria appear similar to the goals outlined by the Golden Record team with my primary criteria being that: the tracks selected strive to represent the greatest possible diversity and reflect a true cross-section of humanity. I focused my curation around this idea because if extraterrestrials ever did find and listen to the record, I thought that it was only right to attempt to reflect the musical experience of humans as a whole across time and place. I had to fight my own musical bias throughout this process as I was not curating the tracks based on how “good” they sounded to me. In the end I am still not too confident with my list as I think it would be impossible to truly represent all of humanity’s musical texts in ten tracks. Here is my attempt:

Selection Criteria: Golden Record 2.0 (10 tracks)

The tracks selected strive to represent the greatest possible diversity and reflect a true cross-section of humanity.
The tracks attempt to strike a balance between genres and styles in order to offer the greatest variety possible.
The tracks serve as a time capsule highlighting music from various historical periods.
The tracks have value beyond the sound through meaning, such as by conveying aspects of the human experience (emotions, ways of thinking, methods of expression, ways of designing). 

Interview with Leather Bag:

Recently I sat down with Nick’s Leather Bag to discuss life.

For this redesign task, I personified my leather bag and let it speak for itself. Rather than solely changing the medium through which I explored the bag I wanted to also shift the perspective of how the bag is being viewed.

 In creating this task I needed to consider several things. Firstly, I needed to think about the conventions of an audio interview. This got me thinking about the literacy skills required to accomplish this: how to write interview questions, how an interviewer should deliver questions, what the progression of an interview tends to look like, how to use audio recording tools, what type of music is suitable for an audio podcast-style interview, etc. This shift in mode highlights, for me, many of the ideas presented in this module’s exploration of multiliteracies. Had I decided to create a video interview, this switch of medium would again require a shift in the literacy skills required. 

What really stuck with me from this module was the notion that literacy is design. This task helped consolidate this for me as I saw how I designed this audio interview beyond just the words being spoken. As the New London Group (1996) discusses, my task caused me to consider several design elements, namely: linguistic design, audio design and multimodal design. 

References:

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

Task 6: An Emoji Story

I had a lot of fun with this task. I had never considered how emojis could be used instead of written text. As mentioned in our module, I use emojis as a way to both complement my written text and also to help clarify meaning and tone. In recent years I have also increasingly used emojis as a way to respond to messages. Oftentimes times a simple thumbs up emoji can capture my reaction to a message without needing to add any additional written text. I also noticed, however, as Bolter (2001) writes, “the picture elements extend over a broad range of verbal meanings: each element means too much rather than too little” (p. 59). I found this to be my primary struggle in using emojis as many of them can be interpreted in numerous ways.

When I first started the task I found myself attempting to translate my thoughts into emojis word for word. I quickly realized that there are a finite amount of emojis and not enough to represent every single word in a thought or sentence. For example, I found that verbs like “is” are impossible to represent through an emoji. As a result, I pivoted into focusing on nouns, action verbs and ideas in combination with one another to create meaning through the visuals. I started looking at the overall meaning of the title and the summary rather than the structure of the response. I think that this would be a great way to reinforce teaching and learning about summarizing and identifying the main ideas in texts as it forces one to really think in a big-picture sense.

For my task I started with the title. I don’t necessarily think that there was a particular rhyme or reason to this, other than the linear nature of my thinking concerning producing a text. I have always found that starting with a title gives me a launching pad for my text. Even when I write these tasks I have a title on my page. This could also be a product of my own obsessive behaviours.

References:
Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Task 4: Manual Scripts

Manual Script:

Reflection:

I found the manual production of this text to be quite challenging. While I did not encounter too much trouble crafting the words of the text, it was the physical process of writing by hand that gave me difficulties. Clearly, my finger, hand and wrist muscles for this particular fine-motor activity are now vastly underdeveloped. It reminded me of being back in school and spending the first couple of weeks at the start of the year getting my handwriting stamina back to par. This activity made me realize how much of my daily text production is done through mechanized methods of texting and typing. Beyond jotting quick notes on Post-its, writing shopping lists and occasionally brainstorming on whiteboards, I almost exclusively use phone and laptop keyboards to write.

I wrote this text as a free-flowing journal of sorts, detailing a recent development of a particular hobby. And while I did not have many moments where I wanted to rephrase passages, I did have a couple of instances of misspellings. For the most part, I largely left them as is, but in at least one case I crossed out and word and wrote the intended word above. I realized that editing was not really a part of my process for this activity, as is common when I am typing and texting. I found myself trusting my inner narration more with my handwriting, likely due largely to the fact that if I wanted to change something it would require a much greater effort than simply doing so digitally. 

I would say that, without a doubt, I prefer using mechanized forms of writing, specifically typing, over handwriting. I believe that digitally typed text has many advantages over manually written text. Namely, speed and efficiency. When I type a text I can produce the actual letters at a greater pace. Over time, this means that I could produce much longer pieces in comparison, without suffering from hand fatigue or the need to get more writing supplies, like paper. In terms of efficiency, digitally produced text allows me to delete or even move around words or whole chunks of text. This makes the editing process much less tedious than handwritten texts. Beyond that, in digital text writing, there are now built-in functions that assist even further such as spelling/grammar check, word count check, Grammarly and more. 

The single greatest advantage, for me, of mechanical text production over manual text production is the tidiness of the text. I have always been somewhat insecure about the look of my printing and cursive writing. I went through school with my teacher always pointing out my “chicken scratch” or asking me to write more legibly. Mechanized writing has given me much more confidence in my writing as the focus can be directed toward the content and not the aesthetic.