Linking Assignment
Link 1: Michael Cafuta – Task 3: Voice to Text
Summary:
Michael’s Voice-to-Text task captures the tension between spoken and written language. His unscripted story, recorded after returning from Japan and embarking on a health kick, produced an unpunctuated stream of consciousness filled with natural pauses, fillers, and rhythm. In his reflection, he identified the absence of punctuation and paragraphing as key deviations from written English and noted that, while the transcript appeared chaotic, it successfully preserved the authenticity of his oral voice. He emphasized how voice-to-text technology exposes the gap between speech’s contextual flow and writing’s structural expectations—an insight that he related to ESL learners and accessibility.
Reflection:
Michael’s exploration parallels my own Voice-to-Text exercise, though our contexts differ. While his piece documented self-improvement through physical activity, mine recounted an everyday commute gone wrong; both revealed how oral spontaneity resists textual boundaries. His focus on rhythm and misrecognition echoed my discovery that speech-to-text tools struggle with fillers, noise, and accentual variation—reminding us, as Ong (2002) argues, that orality depends on performance and immediacy rather than permanence. I also appreciate how Michael framed error as insight: the “wrong” transcription became evidence of how literacy technologies privilege written conventions. Compared with my own analysis, which leaned on theoretical distinctions between orality and literacy, Michael’s reflection was grounded in personal experimentation. His use of the blog format (a linear text with embedded transcription) contrasted with my more essay-styled page, revealing how web-authoring tools themselves shape our representations of voice and thought. His work reinforced my sense that digital composition is not merely about accuracy but about revealing the material friction between speech, writing, and technology.
Link 2: Bosede Ojo – Task 4: Manual Scripts and Potato Printing
Summary:
Bosede’s Task 4 reflection emphasizes the tactile and material nature of writing by hand. In his handwritten diary entry, he describes how handwriting slows thinking, makes revisions visible, and turns writing into a contemplative act which is quite different from the speed and efficiency of digital remediated writing (Bolter, 2001). In his potato printing activity (pp. 3–4), he highlights the labor-intensive and unpredictable nature of carving letters, noting how variations in pressure, ink, and carving imperfections resemble the artisanal qualities celebrated in Cooke’s letterpress film. He links these practices to Innis’s (2007) ideas about the temporal bias of media, suggesting that manual inscription cultivates presence, memory, and patience.
Reflection / Connection:
Bosede’s work parallels my own Task 4 experience, but his multimodal approach (handwriting and potato stamps) broadened my perspective on the materiality of inscription. While my reflection focused mainly on the emotional slowness of handwriting and the historical shift from scroll to codex, Bosede pushed further into craft and imperfection as meaningful components of literacy. His potato stamps including the uneven edges, ink bleeding, and varied impressions visible on page 3 of her PDF, highlight what my typed work conceals: that writing is also a physical encounter with tools, surfaces, and effort. His emphasis on “visible traces of revision” resonated deeply with my observation that the delete key erases history, whereas correction tape leaves behind small physical scars. Unlike my more academic tone, Bosede’s diary entry revealed a personal, embodied rhythm of writing intertwined with daily life, family interruptions, and fatigue. This difference shows how our authoring choices reflect our lived contexts: he narrates writing as refuge and grounding, while I approached it as an academic lens for understanding remediation.
Link 3: BL – Task 6: An Emoji Story
Summary:
Brie’s emoji story reflection analyzes how meaning shifts when language is translated into symbols. She explains that instead of relying on syllables or phonetic elements, she worked primarily with words-as-symbols, building her emoji text by first outlining events and then reducing them to essential visual units. Her use of mathematical operators (+, :, x, =) to show relationships between emojis draws on her background in discrete math and connects with Hayles’ (2003) description of “learning to speak digital,” where new grammars emerge through the blending of alphabetical, symbolic, and visual modes. Brie also reflects on the importance of shared cultural knowledge: while familiar stories were quickly recognized, peers without prior exposure struggled, echoing Kress’s (2005) discussion of mode dependency and the limits of visual meaning-making.
Reflection / Connection:
Brie’s approach closely aligns with my own emoji storytelling, especially in how we both discovered that emojis function less as literal translations and more as conceptual distillations. While she relied on symbolic words and occasional mathematical notation to convey sequence and logic, I leaned into emotional and cinematic imagery to capture the thematic core of my chosen film. Her experience showing her emoji story to someone unfamiliar with the text strongly resonated with me. My own story depended heavily on shared cultural context, revealing how emojis, as Kress (2005) notes, rely on pre-existing interpretive frames. One difference between our approaches lies in abstraction: Brie foregrounded structural clarity (using operators to signal relationships), whereas I prioritized mood, scale, and visual tension, drawing on metaphors like telescopes, galaxies, and dying crops. Her reflection made me aware of how deliberate her semiotic choices were compared to my more expressive, impressionistic style. Both tasks confirm Kress and van Leeuwen’s view that multimodal composition turns us into orchestrators who must balance visual, conceptual, and affective cues. Brie’s work reminded me that emojis don’t simply replace words—they reshape meaning through visual rhythm, cultural familiarity, and symbolic economy.
Link 4: Jonathan Dueck – Task 7: Mode-Bending
Summary:
Jonathan recreated his What’s in Your Bag task through an aural mode, transforming a visual composition into an audio narrative of ambient sounds and tonal fragments. His redesign explored how meaning shifts when the listener, rather than the viewer, interprets rhythm, tone, and pause. Drawing on the New London Group (1996) and Dobson & Willinsky (2009), he positioned multimodality as both a creative and theoretical act that expands, rather than replaces, print-based literacy.
Reflection:
Jonathan’s project resonates deeply with my own Mode-Bending task, as we both translated the What’s in My Bag piece into sound. While my podcast emphasized personal identity and classroom context through sound effects and narration, Jonathan leaned further into abstraction, letting sound itself invite interpretive play. His reflection reminded me how sound can democratize meaning-making by engaging listeners as co-designers. Technically, Jonathan’s use of pure audio fragments contrasts with my layered narrative approach. His composition foregrounds ambiguity, whereas mine maintains guided storytelling. This difference illustrates how the same theoretical foundation (multiliteracies and transmediation) can lead to divergent design choices shaped by pedagogical intent: his to provoke inquiry, mine to evoke empathy. Both highlight that digital literacy is an evolution of writing, like an ongoing negotiation between clarity and imagination.
Link 5: Julia MacIsaac – Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data
Summary:
Julia’s Task 9 reflection focuses on her experience using Palladio to analyze the class’s Golden Record curation data. Despite initial difficulty navigating the tool, she found that experimenting with filters helped her uncover meaningful patterns in the network. Her group (Group 3) was the largest, consisting of seven members, and she inferred, after reviewing peers’ posts, that they were clustered due to similar selection criteria emphasizing geographical and cultural diversity. Julia highlights an important analytical caution: the network graph alone cannot reveal why individuals made specific choices. While the visualization showed musical overlaps, she needed qualitative data (peer reflections) to understand the nuances of their reasoning. She concludes by noting that even across the entire class, the most popular tracks formed a surprisingly diverse global curation, with popular selections coming from Germany, Java, Peru, Mexico, Australia, New Guinea, India, and China.
Reflection:
Julia’s reflection resonates deeply with my own experience using Palladio, especially her emphasis on the limits of visual networks. Like her, I found that the visualization mapped connections effectively but offered little insight into participants’ motivations or interpretive contexts. Where Julia approached the graph through group-based comparison, checking her peers’ posts to interpret why they were clustered, I explored structural patterns such as central nodes, bridging participants, and stylistic clusters. Her recognition that grouping does not imply identical criteria mirrors my own concern that network visualizations flatten the complexity of personal taste into mathematical proximity. Our approaches share an awareness of the dangers of over-interpreting quantitative patterns without qualitative grounding. One difference is that Julia’s analysis foregrounds cultural representation in the dataset, while my reflection interrogates the algorithmic logic behind clustering and the broader political implications of categorizing human behaviour. Her work reminded me that although networks appear objective, they are interpretive constructions shaped by what is included and what is left out. Together, our reflections demonstrate that digital tools like Palladio reveal only part of the story, and meaningful understanding emerges only when visual data is read alongside human narratives.
Link 6: Angela Jarvis – Task 12: Speculative Futures
Summary:
Angela’s Task 12 reflection presents a speculative scenario generated by Copilot in response to her prompt exploring a future law relating to genetics. The AI-created piece imagines “The Law of Genetic Stewardship,” legislation that emerged in 2085 to ensure that genetic interventions promote collective wellbeing rather than individual enhancement. The narrative highlights health equity, the eradication of hereditary disease, and the preservation of human diversity. Angela’s commentary evaluates the AI-generated story’s organization, tone, and adherence to her prompt, noting its optimistic portrayal of progress and moral responsibility. She praises the clarity of the structure, the eloquence of imagery such as “crystalline towers that breathe clean air,” and the emphasis on compassion-driven science. However, she also points out limitations: the scenario could benefit from more concrete, lived examples, and although the writing aimed to evoke admiration, she personally felt more reflective than inspired.
Reflection:
Angela’s scenario connects strongly with my own speculative project, The Last Blackboard, though we approach the future from nearly opposite emotional directions. Her AI-generated world imagines a society where scientific progress, guided by ethical law, eliminates suffering and strengthens global unity. In contrast, my speculative audio piece presents progress that has gone too far: a world where neural implants have extinguished curiosity and erased the need for teachers. While Angela’s text celebrates responsibility and moral maturity, mine foregrounds loss, disconnection, and the quiet erosion of human learning practices. The contrast between her utopian framing of genetics and my dystopian portrayal of education illustrates how speculative design, as Dunne and Raby (2013) describe, allows us to probe multiple futures simultaneously, each revealing different vulnerabilities in the present.
Methodologically, Angela engages with AI writing as a collaborator, evaluating its structure, tone, and rhetorical choices, whereas I used AI tools primarily for voice generation in an artwork I designed myself. Her experience demonstrates how generative systems can produce polished, human-like narratives that align with prompts yet still lack certain depths of experiential detail. My piece, by contrast, relies on affective ambiguity and sensory cues (the polished steel, the frozen gesture, the echo of a question that no one asks anymore). These differences highlight two distinctive literacies emerging in speculative media: the ability to critically assess AI-produced texts, and the ability to craft multimodal speculative artifacts that leverage sound, narrative, and atmosphere. Angela’s reflection enriched my understanding of how admiration and optimism function in future narratives, and made me consider whether, in my own work, I lean too instinctively toward cautionary tales. Together, our pieces illustrate the flexibility of speculative storytelling as both critique and possibility, and how future-making is always shaped by the values we choose to emphasize.