Here is the link to my podcast: https://anchor.fm/trista-ding9/episodes/Task-7-e1kp92d

Transcription:

Hi everyone, welcome to my podcast. For this mode bending assignment, I decided to record myself talking about the items in my bag. Instead of focusing on the text technology that we did in assignment one, this time I will try my best to come up with a story with each item in my bag to share a little more about my personality and my identity.

Here I am looking at the same purse that I showed in assignment 1. I saw my phone and I noticed that my phone is always on mute. For some reason, the ring tone and the vibration always give me anxiety and I do not like to be disturbed with them. Therefore, it is very difficult for my friends to find me and I get a lot of complaints about that. There is my car key. I have been driving for 5 years, and I consider myself an okay driver. Definitely had some small accidents but I think I am a pretty careful driver in general. Then there is my card holder, which contains my back cards and my driver’s license. On my driver’s license there is a lot of information about my identity. From the photo you can see that I am Asian and I am a woman. I also identify as female and use she/her as my preferred pronouns. My signature under my photo is in Chinese, which is my first language and I identify as Chinese Canadian. I lost the lip balm that was in the picture for my first assignment, indicating that I am not a very careful person when it comes to organizing and keeping personal items. 

So, what have I learned from this mode switching? I notice that when I switch the media for meaning-making from writing to speaking, I immediately approach the task in a more personal manner. Perhaps the nature of speaking makes me want to share more about my personal story. You can probably hear from my tone that this podcast is not meant for a serious academic presentation, rather, it is more like talking to people who do not yet know me and giving them a sense of who I am. According to the Design of Meaning by New London Group, From the same Available Design, the same items in my bag, I, in the process of Designing, was able to re-represent the meaning behind each item, and this recorded part of “what’s in my bag” becomes of a Re-design, a product with newly constructed and transformed meaning. How does this mode switching affect my listeners? My audio recording would serve as Available Design for them to draw on personal experience and context for meaning making for themselves.

This seemingly never-ending process of Design of Meaning is happening constantly around us, in our personal life, public life, and work life, taking forms of different modes: visual, audio, linguistic, spatial, gestural, and multimodal that include everything mentioned above. To help our students understand this process and become capable designers that can navigate through the differences, cultural or contextual, the call for multiliteracy pedagogy is necessary.

Reference

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