For the second linking assignment, I am linking to Heidi Dyck’s Task 4 (Potato Printing).

A Comparison of Experiences

I chose Heidi’s Potato Printing task because I could identify with her overall experience. Our experiences were VERY similar! However, despite our similar attitude and initial approach towards the task, we ended up completing the task quite differently with different results.

Heidi mentioned that she found the task frustrating. I share the same sentiment for similar reasons. She mentioned how she should have spent more time planning and cutting the letters into better stamping sections. Me too. She also mentioned how she “ended up creating each letter quite quickly, not spending much time on the details”. I definitely rushed through mine as well.

What intrigued me the most is that she did each letter individually, whereas I carved all 5 letters onto the same potato. Essentially, I created 1 stamp with the entire word, while she created 5 individual stamps that she combined to create her word. I find her process far more superior. If I were to redo the task, I would do as she did and carve each letter on individual chunks of potato to create individual stamps. Her approach gave her greater control and flexibility of how she could have combined her letters to reuse each for subsequent prints. Mistakes could also be more easily fixed compared to my method. For some reason, when she commented on my post, she mentioned that “it would have been so much easier to create a single stamp”. I guess each approach has their pros and cons.

Comparing the end result, I would have imagined that with Heidi’s individual stamps, she would have been able to create identical copies. I imaged she could have bound/locked them together in some sort of ways, perhaps using toothpicks to stab through each stamp to link them together, or used elastic bands to lock them together. However, she ended up stamping one letter at a time to form the word, which explains why her two copies were not identical. Oddly enough, my method turned out alright. When I created my  stamp, I actually carved the word upside down because I “messed up” starting the “C” on the left side. I realized after carving the “C” that if I carved my word the same orientation that I write the word, the word would stamp out all weird (and not just mirrored). So, carving the word upside down solved the problem. The end result turned out pretty good! I was able to make two very similar copies because the letters were all on the same potato as one stamp.

Special note: My wife (Sabrina) later told me that I was an “idiot” and could have just rotated the potato so that I would be carving correct-side up but from right to left. Guess we know who is the smarter one in the relationship.

Comparison of Web Authoring Tool and Literacies

Please click on the links below to access our respective blogs. They should open in new tabs.

Heidi: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540hdyck/

Chris: https://blogs.ubc.ca/iamgroot/

Similarities: 

Heidi and I both used WordPress (course requirement). We both used relatively casual language to recount our experiences with creating the stamps and making the copies. We both began out post with an image that invite readers in. The images also acted as our focal points. Following the images, we both have “written” text to provide additional details.

In terms of website layout, both Heidi and I used themes with responsive design.

Differences:

In terms of ease of access, her overall layout – sidebar, menu, calendar widget, etc. – made the site look awkward at first glance when accessing via mobile devices. See the image below for a view of what her blog posts look like when accessed via mobile devices.

Essentially, until the site visitor scrolls down, the visitor is unable to tell whether they are on the correct blog post. Therefore, the layout of her blog denies mobile users of an easy access/reading experience.

Constraints of Course Design

This task was straight forward and can be chunked down to the following steps:

  1. Make a stamp using potato as the medium.
  2. Make a 5 letter word.
  3. Stamp 2 copies, making them as identical as possible.

While instructions were simple to follow, the task still had room for course participants to take different approaches.

For example, it is clear that Heidi had movable type in mind when she created individual stamps for each letter. However, she did not lock them in place before printing. For me, I was influenced by the video that was provided in the assignment instructions. The video example showed the person carving an entire image, such as an eye, on a single potato; therefore, I viewed the 5-letter word as a single image and carved all 5 letters onto one potato as one stamp. This was also very likely due to Traditional Chinese being my first language. Many Chinese words depict meaning in pictorial form, which essentially makes them pictograms. Having learned Chinese before learning English, I generally think of words as one complete unit rather than as combinations of individual letters. So, my thinking was 1 word, 1 stamp. it would probably have been more appropriate given the task to think this way instead: 1 word, 5 letters, 5 stamps. Despite clearly knowing that our learning was focused on the moveable type used with the printing press, I somehow did not make that association when completing the task.

The instructions for this task asked course participants to take a photo of both copies together. Reflecting on our course, which is supposed to challenge us to look at “The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing”, perhaps I should have taken a risk and recorded an “instructional video” instead. In a way, I think that both Heidi and I documented our tasks the way we did was because the instructions asked us to do it this way. Perhaps if the course design was even more open-ended and simply asked students to present their potato stamp experiences, perhaps our posts would have looked very different in the end.

I want to point out that for this task, there were two options, and the first option asked course participants to write a 500 words entry by hand. This option would be fine for many; however, it would have been challenging for people with dysgraphia (or people with arthritis). For me, I simply have not written manually forever, so I am very self-conscious about my writing. My wife tells me that my writing looks messier than the grade 1s that she teaches; I also agree with her. Anyways, this means that I really didn’t have a choice for this assignment and I had to go with Option 2, which is to create a potato stamp.

One final note regarding a constraint, but perhaps not entirely related to course design, is that we were asked to use a food item as a medium for the stamp during a pandemic when some people had limited access to grocery shopping. I guess the task assumed that most people had potatoes in their homes. For me, I had to use the only semi-rotten potato that I had in my house, making the task more difficult than it probably should have been. If I could do the assignment again, I may very well request to make stamps out of a bar of soap or old packing styrofoam instead.