ETEC 540-64C

Narrative 1: School-Based Team Meeting It was clear from the way Frances walked into the room and called up the first student for discussion that this was not going to be a quick and easy meeting. The team had taken up their usual places in the conference room as Roslyn fussed with her lenses, trying to synch them up with her tablet. Dean, currently on year 3 of his residency, was clearly biding his time with his favourite obbie game—his eyes were darting and blinking as he ducked and leapt…read more

This game was maddeningly fascinating and entertaining to play. Once I accepted the fact that I was Alice in a digital Wonderland, I found myself amused and irritated by the gimmicks that were designed to confuse or mislead me. But the most alarming part was the artificial urgency created by what Zeynep Tufekci (2017) would refer to as the “persuasion architecture” of the game design. I was frantically trying to enter correct information about my identity while dodging intrusive pop-ups and a timer that set the pace and tone of…read more

The first thing I noticed about this visual representation of data was what appeared to be an absence of consensus on the song choices: 26 of 27 songs were selected by some member of the class, with the exception of “Izlel e Delyo Hagdutin” (so much for bagpipe-accompanied, underdog hero songs). Overall, our group agreed with 26 of the original 27 song choices made in 1977. I pried away at the model to look for groupings or patterns I could establish by manipulating the positions of nodes. I chose songs…read more

Voyager Golden Record: Top Ten Track 1: “Wedding Song” – Peru This song captures a human voice expressing a complex and fundamental human experience: the marriage. It is set apart because of its representation of a female voice in a way that, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t decided by a man the way Mozart’s “Queen of the night” is. I also chose it because it included no other instrumentation. Lastly, it represents part of a region of the world that otherwise risks being under-represented and not spoken for…read more

My daughter sings in the closing song with me (I lost that piece of text in the film edit). REFLECTION In this revisiting of assignment one, my priority was to incorporate modalities to the best of my ability using the contents of the backpack itself. It soon took me into strange new territory that was creative, experimental and marked by tensions between modalities. I started with what amounted to material for the cutting floor to reflect this process of blurring the line between my private self as a person and…read more

Emoji Movie Summary During the composing process, I quickly noticed that I needed to signify nouns, verbs and adjectives to depict the plot summary of the film I chose. Characters could not simply be named, so I instead set out to represent them with one or more emojis, for instance. This is when I chose to juxtapose two emojis as morphemes that communicated a character’s identity based on one or more defining traits. I “re-named” my protagonist by using an emoji, the smirk, to capture the character’s default traits of…read more

To preface, it was a challenging week because of a tragic incident that resulted in us losing our two miniature horses. Our daughter said goodbye to her beloved pet and companion. I have fictionalized some parts of what she has experienced in the creation of a narrative. Here is the link to the host site for my Twine Story. The .html file needs to be downloaded to be played.   Reflection The process of creating this story or game began with choosing a narrative that resisted being linear in structure….read more

This project was full of little surprising challenges, but it was also satisfying to come upon each one. Creating the stamps was the trickiest part because it required the most technical expertise. I chose to make the letters all capitals for the word “bread”, which made them much easier to cut out, and more durable for stamping. The letter “A” stamp was the most satisfying in part because of it was easy to cut and looked interesting. I would want to make an alphabet based on an easy and durable…read more

Week 3 Assignment Transcripts of 5-minute Narration Listen to an audio recording of the original oral narration: And, just for fun, listen to Microsoft’s Read Aloud version of the transcript: To preface, I wanted to know how Microsoft Word’s Dictation tool would perform compared with Voice Typing in Google Docs, so I recorded my five minutes of talking onto a voice memo that I used to dictate into each. The results were similar, but with some notable differences. To begin with, there is no punctuation in the entire text, as…read more

Needful Things Admittedly, I don’t need to carry a lot of these items around. Perhaps more than anything, the contents of my backpack are for the weekly possibilities I may encounter. I go many days not realizing they are all in there, but this is likely because I have never worked in only one room in my entire teaching career. My keys, mask, laptop, charge cable, mouse, agenda, and pens get the most frequent use. And yes, I drink tea daily. The rest range in need from weekly to rarely….read more