Greetings everyone, I hope you have a chance to take a look at my final assignment for 540. I decided to take a look at the history of acronyms and how they have influenced text language. I also wanted to look at the future outlook of how acronyms and text language could be changing our spoken and written language.
I created my project using Microsoft Sway. Sway is a new platform for presentations. I have included videos and posters to the sway. I think the best way to view a sway is on your mobile device. (It looks pretty on the mobile devices). When you click on “Go To This Sway” Hit the PLAY button at the top of the screen. If you use your mobile device you shouldn’t have to hit play. This is my second attempt at using sway and I think I will be using it to create my monthly newsletters to parents this upcoming school year. Anyway take a look and let me know what you thought,
Welcome to my final project on the History of Acronyms. I hope you find this project interesting to you as it was for me to make. Since I have been teaching primary I have witnessed studen…
The future always has me second guessing what we are doing now. There are so many things I think about that I have no control over as they always seem to be big issues with our world. Me being one person has little to no say about the future. I am just destined to live it out and see what happens. Can I speculate what might happen with my own personal future? Sure, as I have some control over the outcomes. With languages, I think about what has happened in the past. Many languages have vanished from existence along with cultures. English language continues to change thanks to technology. So here is my best guess as to what will happen to us in the next thirty years.
TASK #12 SPECULATIVE NARRATIVES:
For the two narratives I have first created a wordle with words expressing how in the next 30 years we could have failed with our relationship with language. I always find speculating about things to be very challenging in my mind. I do not like to think about what things could be like when I know that I have little to no say on how things evolve in our society. I am just one person who teaches primary, I don’t run governments or anything so my mind always finds this challenging. I do think of myself as a dreamer but never takes anything more than that.
Speculative Narrative #1 “ How we have Failed with our relationship with language:”
As we continue to move into a world where we want things no and have little time to waste on anything we have lost our connection to people. We started to lose those connections the moment we start shortening words when we text people. Thirty years from now, people no longer know how to spell words in their languages. They simply post acronyms for every word in their languages. The cell phone has made sped up how people communicate with each other. In thirty years we will have lost certain words and speak with new acronyms. Acronyms make speaking quicker so you don’t have to waste your time talking to people in person. Social emotional connections have all been lost due to speaking with acronyms. Take a look at my Wordle that I have created with acronyms for words we have lost.
Below are a list of words and sentences we have stopped saying because of how we developed the use of acronyms:
LOL-Laugh Out Loud
SOS-Save Our Ship
TTYL-Talk to you Later
BRB-Be right Back
BTW-By the Way
EG- Evil grin
BBIAB-Be back in a bit
BBS-be back soon
KISS-keep it simple, stupid
OMG-oh my god
NYOB-none of your business
LMK-let me know
POS-Parents over shoulder
OFC-of course
WTH-what the heck or hell
YOLO-you only live once
SMH-shaking my head
Speculation Narrative #2 “How acronyms have improved our relationship with our language.”
Thirty years into the future we have come a long way at making acronyms for most of our slang words and have been successful at saving time shortening our sentences and words. Improving our cultures languages has given us freedom to use shortened versions of our English language. Acronyms have paved the way for cultures around the world to shorten the way they speak. They have allowed humans to remove words from sentences so that they can save time and energy to become more successful at the things we do in our daily lives. Take a look at this YouTube video from the Office in Scranton where one of our first tries at removing words from our sentences has saved for more work getting completed.
Thirty years into the future our relationship with acronyms and slang words will be a blessing. The improvement of slang into acronyms for our day to day conversations will have saved us so much time and energy that we can devote more attention to getting our jobs done and more relaxation time. Take a look at the video below to see some slang, abbreviated words, and acronyms you will need to know to be successful in the future.
This was another interesting task this week. I would think this would be a great activity that I could do in my class for story writing prompts in Language Arts. In my own personal life this drives me crazy as my phone will automatically change words that I am trying to write to whatever it feels like and sometimes I am too excited to reread what I have texted before I hit send and then realize I have said something “stupid.” My friends just know and expect that these texts from me are changed by my phone and they laugh.
For this task I took the intro sentences and tried them on my laptop to see what google would come up with.
Education is not about…
My idea of technology is…
Every time I think about our future…
As a society, we are…
This is not my idea of…
For the first one “education is not about”
nothing shocking popped up so that was ok, I then tried it again.
“my idea of technology is…
“every time I think about our future”
For the next one I tried it on my phone just to see what sort of “story” I could come up with.
“As a society, we are…”
Using the cell phone game me more options that would make a good story or statement. I can see using this for a story writing prompt with my students. They would get a kick out of this and could come up with some really interesting statements.
For the last one I went back to google. “This is not my idea of…”
I have come across algorithms on twitter and instagram all the time. I think as humans we are looking for as many shortcuts as possible to save us time. The time we are saving could change, and is changing the way we speak. I have heard students say LOL instead of laughing out loud. I have heard them say TTYL at the end of the day to their friends. These quick words and phrases have replaced actions and sayings that we as humans have always done. Technology is changing the way we speak as we look for and create shortcuts on language. I personally don’t think the sentences created sounded like me, however my friends who have received texts where I go so quickly and words have been changed might say they sound like something I would say. Going fast, having words change quickly without realization might impact politics, education, businesses as in those areas of life you have to be very clear on what you are trying to say.
Well this was another doozy for me. After reading about advertising throughout history and watching the clips I was pretty interested in this weeks topic. For my BA in History I took a few classes about the history of pop culture and America where advertising played a big part. Then came time for this “optional” task. Well I clicked then clicked some more after about the tenth try I tried another browser thinking it could be the answer. When that didn’t work I sent a message to Ernesto where he quickly replied “oh its clickable” then I realized what I was in for. THIS WAS A PAIN. I could feel my chest getting tighter as pop ups kept bothering me, what was normal was now the reverse. It was AWFUL! I focused and felt like I was in a race as the time kept popping up distracting me from trying to fill this form out. When I reflect back, I shouldn’t have felt pressured by the time because why was filling out a form considered a race? Anyway its over now, and I feel relaxed again. Good luck to everyone who tries this one out 🙂
This task was quite a doozy for me. I will be honest, I had no idea what I was doing or even looking at. It took me an entire morning to even figure out how to use the program and then find where my name was grouped. So here I go. I am thinking that group 4 (which I was grouped in) is together because these are pieces of music that are the most familiar to people. The music we listed in our golden record are more popular than the other choices. I know when I created my list I went for songs that I have heard before and ones that I remember hearing the artists name before. These songs would defiantly showcase humanity and what we represent as humans if found by aliens.
Here is a screen shot of group 4. Looking at it, one could simply say we were classified together because we all picked the same songs? I really have no clue now. One thing I don’t understand is why some songs are stretched far away? Maybe only one of us selected those songs? After playing around in the program I learned you could in fact move the songs around and people so I am not sure if they have any special meaning or not being stretched out. This is still puzzling to me. I am thinking that perhaps Margret, Robin and myself selected the same piece of music for #1? Johnny B. Goode seems to be the center of our web, that could play a factor.
After playing around with the program some more I went back to the beginning before stretching and realized the input generated a different picture of the group. Some of the songs were not even connected meaning we probably didn’t pick the same songs. Maybe we are linked because all three of us had two songs that nobody else picked? As you can see in the picture, we each have two branches that are not connected to anyone but ourselves. Could I be on to something? I do not know. I do know that this type of information is useful in the world to see how things like common words are used and how often. I do not think I would do something like this in my primary class since this seems to be way over my head I can’t imagine how to explain it to my students. I have used a program called Wordle before. This program takes all words and makes a scramble of them in an artistic way. The students love that.
I did for one did not really enjoy this task as I find that this music is well dated and could be easily replaced with new music and better choices that represent the human culture differently. I am a big NASA nut; however I find this project of the golden record just something for the American hype of the space race. I will say, it is amazing that Voyager is still out there and could one day be found by someone or something is pretty exciting. (If you have watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, hopefully it doesn’t turn against us) If we believe there are alien life out there, some which can travel around the galaxies and visit Earth being undetected I am positive they are way past the record player by now. Heck, if we look at the supposed Roswell New Mexico incident, there are reports of the wreckage of the space craft being made up of indestructible materials. If this was true we know for certain that aliens are beyond a record player heck even a VHS tape would have been better to launch out into space. Anyway, enough of my ranting but here is what I pulled out of the list to create my own list.
The tracks I am picking for my condensed record will be;
“Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
“Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37
Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
Reasoning:
The reason why I selected these 10 pieces of music was; For one, I was aware of who the artists were and had listened to some of these pieces before and second a few of the pieces were representations of how music has influenced the cultures. However being an American project they could have included a few more different nations to have the entire Earth represented. So I would also say I based it on music that plays to ones emotions and how music is influencing cultures. For example, Johnny B. Goode was created by the father of rock and roll. Times were changing and these songs helped shape their time periods in the history of humanity. Instrumental, classical music are pieces of music that play to one’s emotions there are no words. Hopefully if an alien species was out there and they are capable of having emotions the classical music could would help them realize and familiarize themselves with the human culture before contacting us. That being said, if aliens found this record they wouldn’t really know any of this as they would if they could only get the record to play the music.
I am including a clip of Star Trek for those of you that don’t get my Star Trek reference above:)
Hi everyone, for this weeks task I found it very challenging. I am not great at making videos especially audio ones because I do not like the way I sound. To mode-bend my first project which was my backpack, I used imovie just because I used it in the classroom and was familiar with how it works. When I uploaded it I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. One thing I didn’t like is the pictures went to fast and I had to limit what I said in order to keep up with the photos, I didn’t have a script which is usually dangerous for me as I will go off topic and end up on a rant. I ended up with a short video but that is okay. If aliens found it years from now they will be able to know who I was from my things in there. When I was doing the reading, “multiliteracies” came up and for me that meant that there are many different ways to present “literacy.” Pictures, movies, audi clips, written texts, you name it they all shape literacy. We have to make sure everyones voices can be heard when teaching. We show our students many forms of text. With technology this is getting easier to do. We can load up clips and share with students videos, pictures, sounds like we couldn’t in the past.
As you watch you can see I love curling. My favourite curling team is Team Jacobs from Northern Ontario. I got to meet them last November. They are world class curlers and have won gold in the Winter Olympics. I love curling because its a great workout, and a good challenge. (its not easy). I shared a little video in my video explaining curling. I will include it here in case you want to watch the entire thing.
To check out my video take a look here: My Backpack: Mode Bending. Enjoy!
I have to start by saying I loved this task, simply because I love texting with emoji’s only. I find it entertaining getting my friends to guess what I am really saying to them. I knew exactly what television show I was going to recap. I based my creation on the show because I enjoyed it so much. Can you guess what it is? It was an amazing show. I started with the title because it was the easiest for me to create. It was only made up of three emojis and three words. I sat for a bit to contemplate what emojis were available on my phone and how I was going to put them together to create the synopsis of the show. As I started to create, I found myself leaving out words, and not having a complete sentence created. I based my words on the emoji’s available on my phone. I created the task on my phone and then sent it to myself and screen shot the photo. Please enjoy and try to interpret what I was trying to tell you.
I hope you enjoy my Twine story. I had a little fun with it. I had previously used Twine in another course and loved making it. I was new to coding and overwhelmed at first. Like all coding programs, you have to make sure the codes are exactly correct or you won’t have a product. I struggled with adding the sounds as my code wasn’t correct and I spent a very long time trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. However, in the end it worked as I was putting in a rounded bracket rather than a square one. This is something I would love to get students to do in my school. The challenges would be getting the music and photos on but I believe the students would love to create stories or games using this program. I had fun, and shared it with some colleagues before submitting. They loved it.
I decided to create a chose your own adventure style game. A person is planning a trip to the Island. Do you go at Winter or Summer? It really is a real life situation that many people face when trying to travel to the Island. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it.
click the link to download and play. Enjoy! Tyler’s Twine
References:
All photos taken from creative commons area on Flickr
The five-letter word I selected is “snowy.” Funny story, when I read this assignment I first thought it said any word so I selected “snow” because I love winter and snow goes with winter. When I came back through module four I was shocked to read five-letter word. This was an awful feeling as I had spent my afternoon carefully slicing out the letters for snow. For some reason I chose the sharpest knife I had. Not a good idea! I have to say, I didn’t enjoy this at all. As a primary teacher, I have never created potato stamps and when I saw the choices I wanted to at least try it out in hopes of one day using it in my classroom. Well scratch that idea. The process of cutting, trimming, lining up, making sure you have mirror letters was painstaking. I couldn’t imagine doing this in school as I would end up doing all the work. I will stick to the old-fashioned rubber stamps for now. The major thing that I found challenging was making the letters mirrored. I never thought to think that when I cut them out they would line up perfectly and right sided. When I started with the S I couldn’t figure out how to make it backwards. I had to cut it off and start again. It took me a couple of hours to create. I tried my best to make sure they were the same but I just couldn’t get the O to come out right and the N kept sliding. I feel that the mechanization of writing has improved the human race so much, thankfully we don’t write by stamping anymore. I couldn’t imagine the old printing press where they had to create letters and print newspapers.
