Melissa Guzzo: Task 3 – Voice to Text
https://blogs.ubc.ca/melissaguzzo/2021/09/26/task-3-voice-to-text-task/
Much of Melissa’s reflection resembles my own experience with this task. We both focus on the complete lack of punctuation, the complete lack grammatical structure, and the lack of organization due to not having scripted the narrative out beforehand.
Where I have to disagree with Melissa is in her assertion that storytelling is a tradition of the past. I think we evoke oral story telling on a daily basis. A simple “how was your day” elicits a response that takes the form of oral story telling. There are many social situations that require oral storytelling on a variety of levels. This is not a bygone tradition in my eyes.
What I do continue to agree with Melissa on is the formality writing requires. Because it is often planned, edited, and lacking social context, it requires a high degree of structure and communal rules. The lack of context inherent in writing makes it appear more objective than spoken word, hence Melissa’s statement that people tend to put more stock into its validity.
Both Melissa and my experiences with voice-to-text seem to suggest that, while there is a connection between the modes of communication, they are inherently different and operate in different realms of understanding. To try and impose one onto the other often becomes unnatural.
Nick Hall: Task 4 – Manual Scripts
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540njh/2021/09/11/task-4-manual-script/
Nick’s hand-written piece was particularly interesting in part because of their beautiful penmanship. Their calligraphic, flowing script was a pleasant departure from my own childish block printing. But in reading their manual script, I realized that I had to tap into an even older form of handwritten literacy then what my own piece required – cursive. While I did learn it back in school, it so rarely makes an appearance in my life. Being able to read print versus cursive is an additional literacy skill to itself.
I found Nick’s reflection on the process to be a stark opposite to my own. He felt comfortable with the writing process out of a sense of habit. The confidence and beauty of their cursive makes that habit apparent. I also found it interesting that he accepts the flow and imperfection of their writing as part of the process. Where I was more focused on my grammatical mistakes and nonsensical sentences, Nick shrugs off those potential mistakes as part of the process, flow, and art of writing the story. It reminds me more of an oral tradition to just keep going with the story.
Lastly, Nick mentions the medium of writing in comparison to typing. He states that the choice of pen, the ink, and the need to refill their pen part way through writing all make the process a more intimate experience. While I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, I realize that I opted to write in pencil. Again, in my own reflection, I lamented about the poor grammar and desire to make editorial changes and I think subconsciously my choice for pencil reflects those insecurities in producing a hand-written piece. While Nick was more aware of these choices and the impact it has on the writing process, I completely overlooked that facet and focused on what I would have done with a keyboard instead.
DeeDee: Task 6 – An Emoji Story
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ddperrott/2021/10/16/task-6-an-emoji-story/
DeeDee raises a very interesting point about emojis in their reflection that they easily represent some parts of speech, but are virtually useless for others. This makes me think back to the early modules that focused on the history of written word. Typically written language began as representation for whole concept, but eventually had to be parsed out into functional sections and (generally) some type of phonetic alphabet allowing for more complex depictions of oral communication. Emojis in this case are, oddly enough, used in the reverse order. Certainly, for adults in this program, we likely learned to use written and oral language long before emojis ever gained prominence. To then reverse engineer written and spoken language into pictorial symbols to convey the same complexity is exceptionally difficult. Arguably, it is a near impossible task. Considering the general trajectory of written language, most had to find a way to over come the very problems that DeeDee identifies in their reflection.
Looking at the actual content of DeeDee’s emoji story, I find it interesting that both of us used a left-to-right, top-to-bottom directionality in our presentation. While I did experiment with alternate formatting decisions, I found that using English conventions for an English audience reduced the number of interpretive points a viewer would have to contend with. It looks like DeeDee used the same conventions. They do no mention where this decision was deliberate or subconscious, but it was very intuitive. It is interesting how one mode of literacy informs the automatic patterns of another.
Mike McDowall: Task 7 – Mode Bending
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540f2021/2021/10/22/task-7-mode-bending/
Right away, Mike’s mode bend is inherently different than mine. They changed their single photo and written piece into a more engaging video project and spoken-word essay. Their mode bend focused on themself as a learner rather than just the content of the original “What’s in My Bag” task. I appreciated how Mike conveyed this refocus in addition to their mode bend in their reflection.
Right away I noticed that Mike included a lot of place-based emphasis on the context of their bag contents. While I turned my bag inventory into a semi-narrative sound scape that let it speak for itself, Mike truly analyzed their task, altered the mode in a meaningful product that conveyed their personal connections. While the New London Group seemed to focus on communicative modes of representation, Mike adds to this notion be injection fieldtrips and place-based learning through experiential learning – something that would evoke multiple modes simultaneously. While Mike worried that there might be too many modes all at once, I think that their emphasis on place, and the number of modes inherent in being somewhere, would suggest that perhaps there too many is not an issue. I would imagine the smell of a fish hatchery, combined with an additional mode of information would make for a powerful learning experience.
What I most appreciated about Mike’s take on this task was the fact that they approached it from the position of a learner, rather than instructor. When I read through the New London Group’s argument, I viewed it primarily as a way in which instructors should diversify the mode of their instruction to better reach and engage a wider range of student. Mike’s product and reflection emphasize to me the need to also consider how students communicate their understanding and place themselves at the center of their learning.
Derek: Task 8 – Golden Record Curation
https://blogs.ubc.ca/540ddoherty21/2021/10/27/task-8-golden-record-curation/
Reading through Derek’s selection process to create a Golden Record playlist is an interesting one. Their method was quite different than my own.
I initially quite liked Derek’s reasoning for wanting to select tracks with human voices. Voice is often integral to human language. However, I began thinking about other modes of linguistic communication, and found it quite limiting in scope. What about sign language, braille, binary, computer code, iconography, music itself as communication? Fortunately, Derek does address this at the end of their reflection.
During my own track selection, I was very concerned about sound frequency. Human hearing can only hear a certain range of audio frequencies that also rely on pressure waves moving through air. Subsonic frequencies are the easiest to detect even when they can’t be heard, because they are often felt. While I certainly wanted to showcase the range of human voices, like Derek, I was concerned that an alien species might not be able to hear the range human vocalizations occupy. Afterall, to have human vocalization outside human hearing range would seem pointless.
I certainly do not think that Derek can be faulted for having a Euro-centric selection of human vocalizations. As they mention, the original record contained heavy bias towards Western music.
Grant: Task 10 – Attention Economy
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540dgm/2021/11/11/task-10-attention-economy/
It was great reading about someone else’s frustrations with this abomination of an interface. Grant had virtually the same experience that I did when clawed my way through the confusion and double speak. The places where Grant got tripped up playing the game were the same ones that I did.
Grant mentions a concern for digital safety that I had not considered. Not knowing where a clicked link will take the user is a real issue, especially for digital criminals who design their GUI to look official. Hiding downloads in seemingly innocuous links can be very problematic on unfamiliar sites. While this module focused on legitimate companies using patterns to manipulate users into binding user agreements or subscriptions, Grant’s point emphasizes the need for internet safety.
One of the elements that made this game frustrating, was the lack of pattern discernable by the user. Grant also emphasizes this point by repeatedly showing that each time they interacted with a new window, the intuitive action was never yielded the desired response. The true path was always hidden behind a strange technicality placed in an inconvenient position to the relevant information. Grant’s emphasis on these experiences makes me think that the true face of manipulation is not in sneaky double speak, but instead, in the habits users have formed. Those habits in turn prevent users from slowing down and paying attention. Once I slowed down, navigating the game became easier. The only real annoyance were the pop-ups I had no control over. I am not sure that any amount of awareness that Grant hopes for can substitute literacy and attention to detail. If habit overrides those thinking skills, internet manipulation will continue in different forms.