Gary Reimer's Blog

Linking Assignment 1. Allison J – Mode-bending Some questions to consider when you summarize and reflect upon your links: 1. How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know? The contents of the bag are the first and best clue to how close a colleague’s life experiences are to one’s own. How they describe their relationship to these items complements this first impression. There was almost no overlap between the contents of Allison’s bag and my own. I don’t have vehicle keys, Tylenol, glasses, money, post-its,…read more

Final Assignment Gary Reimer University of British Columbia Student ID: 91757997 ETEC 540 Professor Ernesto Pena Alonso April 14, 2021 The mass movement of globalized capital and labour is a salient feature of contemporary life. In search of change or opportunity, people have left their homes to study or live abroad and this decision has often made it necessary for them to acquire new language skills, usually although not always, this has meant English. Governments, educational institutions, private sector firms and other stakeholders in recipient countries have come to rely…read more

The Dragon, the Princess, and the Gold.html I’ll relate how I created the game first and then reflect on how the ideas in the unit provided insight into the process. The requirements of the task were the starting point as I knew I needed a minimum of 15 screens. Also, to add interest and to experiment with Twine’s features, the protagonist needed to make some decisions so I added places for branching in the plot. As preparation, I outlined this on paper with 15 boxes and labels like a storyboard….read more

After five minutes of fruitlessly trying various gambits to get this game started, I found myself staring at the cerulean blue screen of User Inyerface, thinking distractedly of the X-Files episode, “Pusher” where the killer mesmerizes his victims with this colour before dispatching them. I knew some classmates never got further and was beginning to think I would be one myself. I actually don’t know how I got past it. I was just clicking furiously and randomly on things when suddenly I was on the next screen. Still a mystery,…read more

  1. Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain. I hand record notes in a notebook when reading or listening to a podcast for MET courses. I also make lists and notes to record routine household work. Anything longer than a sentence for any purpose, I would either break up into note form or just keyboard. My English teacher in high school insisted on good penmanship and I still write this way, but meticulous writing requires more concentration and muscle…read more

Dr. Vallor has said that we can improve our machines by improving ourselves. She might also have said that, conversely, we can improve ourselves by improving our machines. Speculating on possible futures to help us design the present are especially important with regard to AI and algos since the future world they help us build will be based on what we define for them as success today. Algos gone awry that lead to negative feedback loops could just as readily work in the opposite direction, virtuous rather than vicious circles,…read more

The task for this week was to take a set of metadata, in this case classmates’ choices for selections on the Voyager Golden Record, and display them as a directed graph visualization using Palladio. Examining the visualizations as a graphic network makes it easier to see patterns with each vertex representing either a student or a sound selection and each edge representing a choice made. Overall, the four most popular selections were Johnny B. Goode, Jaat Kahan Ho, Melancholy Blues, and Tchakrulo with 19, 17, 16, and 14 ties respectively….read more

Making a list like this leaves one with impossible choices. I thought I’d set out a few general guidelines before discussing specific considerations. First, the music had to be as inclusive as possible of all human experience. Having said that however, each of the three great world civilizations on the original golden record, Indian, Chinese and Western, had to be represented, to do otherwise would have been unconscionable. Second, oral indigenous cultures could not be neglected either especially since, being non-literate, their musical traditions are all the more precious. Third,…read more

  The readings this week have had as a common theme the changing nature of what we mean by literacy and particularly how this should be addressed by educators. A central concern of the New London Group has been how the confluence of media offering a wide spectrum of multimodal representation has driven cultural globalization; specifically, the group has been concerned with how disparities in literacy, defined broadly, have impacted educational, social and economic outcomes. The New London Group program is not just descriptive; it is also prescriptive. Taking the…read more

I chose the story as much for simplicity of telling as for ease of visual representation. I knew the range of emoticons would be restricted so I wanted something that would make for an interesting story but would not involve too much nuance. While writing, I quickly found myself resorting to a system used in Chinese, that of roots or radicals. This was a function of a limited number of emoticons to work with and also of the difficulty in expressing complex concepts as images. I have studied Chinese so…read more