| Task | Student | Link |
| Task 1 What’s in my Bag |
Richard | https://blogs.ubc.ca/540rp/2023/09/17/task-1-whats-in-your-bag/ |
| Task 4
Voice to Text |
Clarisse | https://blogs.ubc.ca/clarissesetec540blog/2023/09/25/task-3-voice-to-text-task/ |
| Task 6
Emoji Story |
Jill | https://blogs.ubc.ca/jillmet/2023/10/11/task-6-an-emoji-story/ |
| Task 7
Mode-Bending |
Anne | https://blogs.ubc.ca/annegetec540/2023/10/22/task-7-mode-bending/ |
| Task 11
Text-to-Image |
Hasan | https://blogs.ubc.ca/hsinger540/2023/11/19/text-to-image-craiyon/ |
| Task 12
Speculative Futures |
Jerry | https://blogs.ubc.ca/etecjerrychen/2023/11/26/task-12/ |
Link #1: Richard’s “What’s in my Bag”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/540rp/2023/09/17/task-1-whats-in-your-bag/
In this post, Richard lists the contents of his personal bag and provides some context for those items. Beyond that, he dives into exploring the texts present in his bag and questions what someone in future might comprehend about him and his item.
I initially connected with this post as I also continue to carry a facemask in my bag and used to carry the Air Canada Covid kit they provided passengers with. Like Richard, my work has taken me to different counties over the years and so I felt connected to those specific contents. As mentioned in my own post, I continue to keep a mask in my bag as I think it will now be an important health tool for many moving forward. I plan to use my own mask if I start feeling unwell if I am working, for example, in the hopes of keeping those around me healthy.
Upon diving deeper, I learned of the value that Richard places on handwriting his notes. This act resonated with me as I also tend to choose manual production to write my notes, over writing them digitally. As Richard mentions, I too believe that the physical production of the writing helps create a stronger mental connection and assists me in remembering things. Beyond that, throughout my academic career, up to and including this MET program, I have also always preferred handwriting my notes. For me, I think that the manual writing process gives me more of a focus on the things that I am writing as they take more concentration and focus as opposed to digital notetaking.
I think that Richard also left this post with an interesting connection to the latest Mission Impossible film. While I have yet to see it, Richard mentions how there is a scene in which a particular government faction is transcribing information from the internet onto physical paper in order to preserve “the truth”. While I am sure I have not captured the entirety of the scene, it reminds me of the idea that history is written by the victors. I wonder if we will see a return to physical paper use in certain sectors in order to provide added protection from leaks, hackers and AI. I know, for example, that in my school there is certain paperwork that is required to stay physical and locked in a filing cabinet.
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Link #2: Clarisse’s “Voice to Text”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/clarissesetec540blog/2023/09/25/task-3-voice-to-text-task/
In her post, Clarisse has linked her unscripted voice-to-text narrative and goes on to discuss how the text may have been different if it had been written and/or scripted. I connected to this post based on some shared experiences Clarisse outlined and that I also felt when creating this task. She described that she felt “forced” to keep speaking into the microphone. This also happened to me. I was partially worried in some way that my story wouldn’t continue recording if I paused for too long of a time. In reality, I’m sure that I could have taken longer, meaningful pauses in order to keep track of where my story was heading instead of just ensuring that I continued speaking.
In completing this task I began to wonder if we, as humans, have lost some of the skills required to be effective orators in a way. In oral cultures, while I am sure that many stories were memorized to a certain degree, I wonder if they were better able to “speak on the fly”. I also found it interesting that Clarisse mentioned that if it had been a scripted narrative, she would likely have appealed more directly to the five senses. As a teacher, this is a common writing skill that we often model and encourage students to use when creating their own texts. I wonder, then, if this should be a strategy we use when teaching students how to develop their public speaking and communication skills or whether this is a skill reserved for written language production. It is clear, through this task, that the way I speak on the fly is quite different from the way I write on the fly.
Clarisse’s post also made me reconsider my approach to using speech-to-text tools in the classroom with students. Up until this module, I had considered speech-to-text a pretty suitable option to assist certain students with their written output. Going through this task myself, however, I found it quite interesting how much I struggled with keeping my thoughts organized and my speaking coherent when using speech-to-text. Perhaps this points to the idea that speech-to-text tools cannot simply be used as an accommodation tool for writing tasks, but the task itself also needs to be modified as speaking is inherently different than writing. Quite clearly, writing conventions could not be something that could be assessed through a speech-to-text activity, as the application struggles to discern words and apply the correct punctuation and capitalization.
This post, along with my own experience completing the task for this module left me thinking about the style and format of written versus spoken texts. It seems to me that writing for a particular audience and purpose is something that is taught quite deeply throughout schooling from learning how to write letter/emails, to biographies, to formal essays. The same attention has not been placed on oral texts beyond casual and formal conversations. Is this simply because we are no longer an oral culture or that written text is seen as having more value and validity?
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Link #3: Jill’s “Emoji Story”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/jillmet/2023/10/11/task-6-an-emoji-story/
In this post, Jill showcases her emoji text and goes on to describe her creation process along with linking her experience to the module’s readings. I connected to this post right off the bat as Jill describes starting with the title in order to “start from the top”. This is a part of my own writing process and one that I also describe in my post. As mentioned in my post, even when I write my tasks for this course or create Google Docs at work, I need to have a heading/title before I can jump into the content of the text. This is an interesting thing to consider and one that I wonder how many others share. Perhaps it is the way in which we have learned to negotiate writing language- emails must have a relevant subject, essays need to have a title page, etc.
Jill’s process of using emojis as a form of written language also mirrored mine in their focus on nouns and verbs. While she opted to use her phone to access a broader set of emojis, I used a website that allowed for emoji text generation and had an extensive catalogue of visuals. Interestingly, there were many visuals in that catalogue that I don’t think existed on my phone. This points to a correlation between emojis and written languages. Even in the world of emojis, it seems as though there is not one standard set of shared emojis. Different platforms, like different languages, have things that make them unique- from options to style. In language, we see this in the different alphabets and how sounds are translated into symbols. What I also found interesting is that emojis cannot necessarily be copied and pasted across devices and platforms. When I went to paste my emoji story into my WordPress blog, the emojis all became question marks, which forced me to screenshot my story instead.
Jill makes strong references to this week’s module and the concept of multi-modality. As highlighted in the module, texts have become increasingly multi-modal but multi-modality has also oftentimes been present in written text production in some way. When thinking about my own personal interaction with texts I find it interesting that this week’s module discussing the theme of multi-modality was second only to the novel I’m currently reading in terms of lack of multi-modality. The world of academia has and seems to still value densely written language over texts rich in a range of language and meaning forms.
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Link #4: Anne’s “Mode-Bending”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/annegetec540/2023/10/22/task-7-mode-bending/
In this post, Anne reimagines what is “in her bag”, a remix of the first task in the course. I selected this post because Anne interpreted this remix in quite a different way than I did. While I decided to personify my bag and interview it, Anne created an interactive experience that allowed the user to explore the contents of her bag, learn about the origins of the elements of the bag and then pack the bag back up. What struck me most about the design of this remix was the idea that the activity, in and of itself, became a narrative text. The activity has a beginning, middle and end which is started by unpacking the bag and concluded by packing the bag back up. I thought that this was an interesting way to imagine the task as it left me wondering what adventure the bag and its contents were off to once I packed it back up. It also made me feel connected to the bag and its content as I felt that I became somewhat invested in learning about both the author’s use of the items and the origin story of each.
Anne achieves multi-modality in this task by combining written, audio, digital and visual texts. What I found interesting was that this task required literacy skills beyond solely reading and listening. In order to fully experience the task, a user needed to also be literate in navigating digital texts and have an understanding of how to interpret the interactive elements like the pins on the first slide, stars on the second and the drag and drop capabilities on the third.
While this activity is inherently personal and somewhat invasive, in the sense that we position ourselves as voyeurs examining the personal and often hidden contents of one another’s bags, Anne’s remix evokes some stronger feelings in me than any of the original tasks. In the original tasks, I felt as though we remained as a passive reader, even though we could see the contents of the bags in a still image. By contrast, in Anne’s remix, while she invited us into this space, I had feelings that I was an active participant in snooping or invading her privacy. I experienced the first slide as a text similar to a diary, wherein which each pin represented a different entry. I believe that this contributed to my feelings of invasiveness. I mention this in order to highlight the potential power that shifting modes of a text can have on the interpretation of it and the feelings a text evokes in the reader.
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Link #5: Hasan’s “Text-to-Image”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/hsinger540/2023/11/19/text-to-image-craiyon/
In this task, Hasan explores Craiyon and attempts to draw conclusions about the limitations of that specific generative AI platform. Similar to my text-to-image post, Hasan expresses the noiton that generative AI can only be as accurate as the algorithm it uses, allows it to be. This is, of course, based on the ways in which the platform is programmed to learn and what sets of data it learns from, but also what sets of data are excluded.
In my post, I explored the concept of possible inherent bias built into Craiyon’s learning. I looked at how the platform interpreted relatively open and broad concepts like “person”, “football”, “boss” and “gangster” and discussed how Craiyon returned images that were all very similar and seemingly reflective of many stereotypes present in our society. Hasan, by contrast, looked at issues of combining more than one thing in an image prompt. While I believe that Hasan identifies some strong possible causes of this, I felt as though his results also further confirmed some of the conclusions I made in my initial post.
In Hasan’s images of the “cute kitten”, it is likely that the Craiyon algorithm has taught the platform that the words “cute” and “kitten”, when combined in a prompt, lead to the development of a very specific looking cat. As such, all nine of the returned images appear to depict cats with blue eyes and stripes. I have see many kittens in my life and can confirm that they do not all have these features. Beyond that, when looking at Hasan’s images of the cleaning robots, the results are again eerily similar. In his image prompt, Hasan does not desrbice the physical features of the robot he is envisioning. Despite this, Craiyon returned nine images of white and black robots with quite similar shapes.
Between my initial post and by exploring Hasan’s task I am left feeling as though this platform represent poorly executed and potentially dangerous AI. By providing the user with nine separate images generated by a single prompt, I believe that it is implied that the system is attempting to interpret the prompt as accurately as possible by exploring different variations. What seems to be more accurate, however, is that the platform is developing nine very similar prompts based on an extremely limited learning model. That being said, Crayon does represent a free generative AI platform and so one cannot expect that the system would necessarily be of the highest calibre. This leaves me wondering what Craiyon gets out of the equation. What is the upside for this platform by providing this experience free of charge. Perhaps the prompts generated on the platform become useful data for a range of parties, including other pay-to-play AI platforms.
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Link #6: Jerry’s “Speculative Future”
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etecjerrychen/2023/11/26/task-12/
I connected to Jerry’s speculative future narrative as I felt that his text echoed many of the same themes that were present in mine. Despite us having received quite different generated prompts, the common thread for both of ours was the idea of a future where “progress” has continued. Interestingly, while “progress” had continued in both our narratives, this progress was not seen as a positive thing. In fact, both of our narratives embraced a highly dystopian vision of what said futures would look like. Fears of the unknown have always been a source of inspiration for texts and as AI becomes more embedded into our lives, I wonder how many of these fears may be confirmed versus dispelled.
In Jerry’s narrative, AI is becomes a necessary evil for humans as it controls them and satiates them. AI literally replaces the need for the human capacity to think and seemingly do anything. In Jerry’s fictional world, AI replaces physical existence. This is a literary trope that has been explored for decades, especially in sci-fi texts of all forms. While AI has gone mainstream, in a sense, over the past year, the concept of machine learning is something that humans have explored for centuries.
Reflecting on both of our narratives, I am left wondering what the speculative future of text technologies is. It is clear that both Jerry and I are cautious with the term progress and do not necessarily equate the word as having an inherently positive connotation. The course has taken us on a journey through time as we have explored the birth of languages through to the recent developments in generative AI. As we consolidate our thinking from the course I am reminded of the recent writer’s strike in Hollywood and of the alarms sounded by some of the biggest innovators of our time expressing the need to regulate AI and slow the pace and race of development in this sector. In decades from now, what would a course like this look like. There is no clear answer, and while I’m a fan of dystopian sci-fi, I do err on the side of optimism concerning out collective futures. My hope is that generative AI will prove to be the next link in an every evolving chain of text technologies.