[1] Reflection on Olga’s Site Design and Potato Printing

[A] Platform, Design, and Literacies

Olga and I have utilized UBC WordPress. Olga uses the conventional top navigation bar and a right-side widget to access her recent posts quickly. In contrast, my site has a single left sidebar bar that provides links to course requirements and the recent posts and comments. Our menu items are similar except for an additional category, “Reading Reflections,” in Olga’s site, which I thought of as a brilliant idea. Sometimes we have side thoughts about the materials. However, we don’t share them because they don’t fit with the task requirements and context.

Olga’s site includes a title and a static header image; her image selection is appropriate to the website’s purpose, unique, and more appealing to viewers. Instead, I created a logo design and placed it at the top of the left sidebar; it may be regarded as an alternative approach to the line of text. My weekly tasks are presented in a grid-based layout showing all post titles and their featured images. In this sense, the page serves as a menu providing the visitors all the posts and “mak[ing] the structure of the site transparent” (Bolter, 2001, p.20) to them. The grid-based arrangement enables “circular” links (p.20); the visitor may navigate to any designated post and return to the main page to explore more topics if they desire (Bolter, 2001). In this essence, the presentation prioritize the stand-alone format or the use of links to define discrete units (i.e., posts) rather than contiguousness. The visitors may also intuitively navigate and flip the individual posts in sequence (if they desire) through the navigation links found at the bottom of each post. The representation manifests a digital form of the codex if we regard that a codex is accessed in an orderly manner (Kress, 2005). But, perhaps, the description is not accurate if I regarded the arguments against the linearity feature of codex (i.e., books) found in Dobson and Willinsky (2009).

Conversely, Olga’s presentation of the weekly posts “treats text like a scroll [or] a roll of pages sewn together at the ends” (Bolter, 2001, p.13). The downside of her design might be that it would be tedious to locate a specific post without scrolling through the lengthy content. However, Olga partially worked around this problem by providing navigation to the recent individual posts through the right-side widget presenting the latest productions. Olga’s weekly posts’ presentations are devoted to frequent updates or the conventional reverse chronological structure (showing the more recent content before the older content). I think her choice is convenient for the nature of her presentation; it would be easy for a regular visitor to locate the most recent update rather than to scroll down. However, I replaced the default convention, so the grid items are displayed in chronological order; it seems to me a more logical fit for the representation I selected.

If we are to regard the potentials and limitations of our presentations, it may seem that the grid-based arrangement affording the display of featured images (of each post) privileges visual over textual literacy. Whereas, Olga’s “scroll of text” presentation privileges a textual over the visual literacy. Regardless the thematic affordances, our posts prioritize text, however, Olga nurtures her content with a richer multitude of visual representations (e.g., videos, and concept maps) that lend themselves to visual literacy and demonstrate her digital literacy (more rich set of technology choices). The multimodality in her posts was effective to explain and elaborate on the textual information, moreover, it fulfills the versatile needs of the visitors (Tobin, 2014).

[B] The Potato Printing Task

Olga and I chose different modes for task 4. In her reflection, she wrote that she “spent a considerable amount of time thinking of a word” (para.1) and that the potato prints required a lot of time and effort. These were the two reasons that made avoid the potato printing option. Firstly, I couldn’t settle on a unique five-letter word to carve. Olga thoughtfully chose a term that holds personal significance for her, “Minsk”, the place she grew in and is called “Potato Land” (para. 1) in Belarus. Her choice signifies that words have power and matter to us; they encapsulate one’s background, knowledge, culture, and worldview (Boroditsky, 2011). Secondly, I am not a tactile person, so I thought I wouldn’t be skillful in carving potatoes; probably, after completion, the results would be unflattering. Conversely, I am at ease with paper, pencils, pens, technologies I am acquainted with since my childhood and and still using them daily.

Both posts shed light on the materiality of writing, Haas (2013) outlined “Writing is situated in the material world in a number of ways, it always occurs in a material setting, employs material tools, and results in material artifacts” (Haas, 2013, p.4). They demonstrate that the tools of writing/ printing (pencils, paper, craft knife, potato, ink) are essential entities in the writing process and emphasize Vygotsky’s hypothesis  “technology (in this case, writing) matters” (Haas, 2013, p.20).

One of the most valuable additions in Olga’s post is the “personalization principle” conveyed in the word selection, images, and the video clip of her daughter trying to pronounce the word “Minsk”. The visual items helped to offer the full and concise meanings (Kress, 2005). Furthermore, they elicited a feeling of closeness and connectedness as you discover common points (i.e., in my case, Olga is a mother and an immigrant); personalization can magically build links and connections between our members and humanize the “non-humanization” that we may sense while studying behind the screens.