Week 3: Voice to Text

https://annekenussbaum.wordpress.com/2021/09/25/task-3-voice-to-text/

Anneke demonstrated in this post just how powerful a journalistic arrangement and approach can be. She departed completely from my (frankly limited) idea of how to approach a post by offering up intriguing key quotations and images that invite exploration. Her writing approach begins with specific starting points that she skillfully transitions from to arrive at larger context ideas. Anneke clearly invested heavily in the readings to pull conclusions from them that dispute the time-locked quality of written text. Instead, as she notes, audio and video texts have a similar stored quality to them that reflect the “value systems of those who develop and use them”.

I took something different away from Haas’ (2013) thoughts on the differences between oral and print texts: the idea of a trade-off of context for precision. Anneke notes (and demonstrates in her prose) the differences of how she approaches writing as opposed to speech—even with informal tasks.

Anneke grounds her writing in an approach evocative materialist theory, whereby texts, regardless of type, are material in nature once captured, stored, and reproduced. As such, they acquire permanence and serve to reflect something of their creators and their audience. As Ong (2002) notes, the etymology of the word text comes from the idea of weaving together. I conclude with this, as it captures what Anneke is able to eloquently do in her well-crafted treatment of the topic.

Week 4: Potato Printing

https://blogs.ubc.ca/ddperrott/2021/10/02/potato-printing/

First off, DeeDee’s site was inspiring. That’s another way of saying I felt keenly aware how little effort I had made to craft my own site. The visuals and layout choices made me want to look at everything else she had posted. Her motivation to choose the potato print option resonated with me, as it was a task that invited departure from screens and fast text-creation in favour of a more process-heavy, slow and methodical approach. We both found the task satisfying, despite making the same mistake of not reversing the letters on the stamp.

Deedee, I’m inspired by the setup of your site and the visual choices you make for each post. I’m a little embarrassed by my own lack of attention to detail on my site. I like how you referenced the therapeutic quality of this task. I found myself immersed in it similarly and not so bothered by the oversights and mistakes I had to correct. The Twine Task on the other hand. . . well, the swear jar filled up a little more during that experience. Funny how both are slow crafting, but this one seemed more rewarding for its tactile qualities.

Week 5: Twine

https://blogs.ubc.ca/reoliver/2021/10/05/task-5-twine-hypertext/

Robyn’s approach surprised and delighted me: it was refreshing to see a personal journal approach to the task that very much echoed my own experience of learning to use Twine. The structure and approach offer more insight into the process than an after-the-fact summary. Robyn’s site reflected who she is; it had a warm and invitational tone to it. I went at this with a far more academic-sounding voice in my writing, which prioritized the readings more overtly and privileged a narrower audience. The very language I sought was the product of the imagined judge I had in mind; Robyn’s imagined judge was quite different than mine.

I commented the following on her post:

Robyn, I was relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only one to find Twine daunting to learn. I somehow got through life never having coded until this project. I appreciated your journal approach to discussing the process.

Week 6: Emoji Story

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sprott/2021/10/17/task-6-emoji-story/

I still have absolutely no idea which film Danya summarized with emojis. That said, I could pick out the semblance of a plot by looking through the frames of emojis. Danya appears to have followed the convention of left-to-right writing with emojis in her summary. I found this challenging, given that I found I was writing pictorially and not with text. I stumbled upon an approach from both sides of a line toward the centre. Danya noted that she was very accustomed to constructing shorthand, then text-based emojis. It was an easy transition for her to present-day emojis. I almost never use them—I didn’t own a cell phone until the early 2000s, and I never texted in the era of a 9-digit keypad.

Danya uses a mainly text-driven layout on her blog site. Once again, I’m sheepish about my comparatively poor layout. Her integration of the emojis into the text of the post was much better than mine. I also found that, by structuring the post with subheading questions, the writing was more navigable.

 

Week 7: Mode Bending

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540ajazieni/2021/10/24/task-7-mode-bending/

Having tinkered with audio recording, I was really impressed by Amy’s podcast recording. The structure and interactive listening elements were engaging fluent. The deceptively simple structure worked really well. I was reminded of how I often make things unnecessarily complex in my own product designs, only to wish I could simplify without compromising on insight. The audio track is start-to-finish in structure, which means it appears to not be possible to scroll back and forth to find a particular point in the track. This was a surprising limitation to WordPress. I appreciated how Amy remarked that her project, while an audio recorded podcast, nevertheless is heavily dependent on text-based communication for its planning and scripting. This is an important reminder of the difference between a product like this vs. a YouTube video that may be simply curated set of unscripted clips. While this is possible in audio format as well, it tends to exist more in the form of interviews and conversations that are captured. For the most part, a script makes a world of difference.

 

Week 10: Attention Economy

https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540withmstucker/2021/11/14/task-10-attention-economy/

I noticed that Lexie’s experience of and responses to task 10 was one of impatience and pragmatism. Lexie noted that her relative patience for technology was proportional to advances made to speed it up. This differed somewhat from my own experience of the task. I found its design to be more implicitly playful and inventive. That’s probably why I spent far longer to get to the end than Lexie: I was trying to take in and figure out everything. Lexie describes going on her phone while waiting for the site to advance or load. It made me second-guess why I was so intrigued by the game of it. Perhaps I’m more suggestible?

Like me, Lexie used UBC’s WordPress blog site to host content which, in this post, consisted of text and the screenshot of the finished game. I liked the clean layout of her site with more open space and a menu on the right side. The colours are limited to gray and white with no additional graphics or visuals. Its elements are similar those I chose for my site. It reminds me of the perceived purpose I had for my site at the start, which was more functional than aesthetic. Her site contains no personal information; she titled it with Ms. Tucker, which lends some formality to the site. We both have a comments section at the bottom of our posts, but no contact information.

Lexie focuses on the cautious optimism of Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017), in which there is reason to see present-day ethics around the use of algorithms as lagging behind the technology. We’re still asking, what can we do with this? In time we’ll instead ask, what should we do with this?

Lexie poses the question, “with technology and advertising occupying so much of our brains and the brains of our students, how much room is left for learning?” This implies a kind of real estate bidding war for our attention. I don’t know if the issue relates directly to technology itself. Rather, the technology amplifies what is already there, just as COVID exposes weaknesses in governments’ social and health services.

My bias emerges here: I don’t think companies like Google and Facebook have any consideration of ethics beyond those that serve their cultivated and perceived image. While the tools they have developed are used for constructive purposes, these will always be subordinate to shareholder and (advertising) client interests until laws demand otherwise.

And here is a limitation to my own site. I didn’t construct it with the belief that it would be viewed by fellow students. I overlooked aspects of page and site setup that allow for others to comment. In this sense, some of my posts were substitutions for what I might have otherwise constructed on a word-processing document.

 

Week 12: Speculative Futures

https://blogs.ubc.ca/litt540/2021/11/25/speculative-futures/

Braden created a pessimistic first narrative about a future where migration and environmental degradation widened the gaps between the wealthy and poor. It envisioned city states that resembled those of early Renaissance Italy, only these were self-contained islands of relative luxury. The idea of a rural and urban divide departed from what I imagined taking place. Migration tends to flow to urban centres and not outlying areas. Digital technologies, at the end of the day, exist because of resource extraction industries. Someone (or something) has to extract the oil products, metals and other raw materials to supply manufacturers who create such products. I didn’t think about the collapse of nation-states so much as the deterioration of democracies. I also didn’t grasp how the departure from paper-based communications would accelerate this process.

I connected personally to the second narrative more, as it depicted a nearly unrecognizable version of a teacher’s job description. This displaced and disembodied class didn’t sound very appealing to me. I thought the character’s final reflection about isolation was powerful. It raised questions for me about how, presently, the job of teaching can be quite isolated even in a physical school, let alone in an online one.

Braden, your integration of AI assistance in the teacher’s role (2nd narrative) grabbed my attention, because it brought me right back to online teaching during COVID and my dread of the live classes. It reminded me also of the questions I’d ask myself about what the students would possibly gain from listening to me talk on a Teams meeting or attempt a class discussion. I don’t remember the reading that said it, but you capture very well how technology amplifies what already is there in human tendencies.