LINK 1
When reading through my peers’ submissions for this task, it quickly became evident (for me at least) that what was most compelling was not what was in the bag, but each person’s interpretation of their own items. I found myself quickly skipping or skimming over the images to read what the authors had to say. I can see how a task like this would be very different if it was just the image posted. It would leave a lot of the interpretive work up to the reader. However, if no picture is posted, and only the author’s interpretation through text is presented, the “what’s in your bag” experience remains captivating. It really calls into question, the adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and if it is worth a thousand words, whose words? I’m reminded of the TED Talk from Alexander MacDonald, though he is speaking about tap dance, he says “do the steps truly translate when divorced from the stories they tell” (4:19). Likewise, does the flatlay image of our bags truly translate when divorced from the stories we choose to tell?
Of all the submissions, Anne’s was extremely compelling to read. The story she chose to tell and the connections she made, made her interpretation of this assignment unique. One thing that Anne did that differed from my completion of the task is that Anne documented in real time the ways in which she was provoked by what was in her bag. Through her own vulnerability and emotional narrative she was able to evoke emotion in the reader while also drawing attention to the connection between text and emotion. This layering of ideas was a very deft way of demonstrating the human connection to text in our everyday lives.
Given that Anne is a graphic artist, it makes sense to me that she would be particularly astute at making the connection between text and emotion; I imagine she has to do this daily as part of her job. I suspect that in her professional life, she is engaging with ‘text’ in a way that I do not have to in my professional life. In fact, after interacting with the Twine she created, it’s clear that she makes decisions about ‘text’ that the average person does not have to do in their professional or every day lives. She has to think about form and function, clients’ needs, aesthetic appeal, branding, and identity. As a teacher, when it comes to text and my students, I have to think about readability, accessibility, and subject specific language.
Another notable reasons to link to Anne’s page is that the authoring tool chosen is different from mine and all the others in our section of the course. Since her authoring tool is an offshoot of her established website, maybe it was the easier choice or maybe it had to do with being able to better control her end product. Perhaps, because Anne has a strong sense of branding and identity, she wanted to keep her academic ‘text’ on brand with her professional ‘text.’ Her authoring tool certainly stands out among the rest quite literally. If you have all the blog sites from our section of the course open in different tabs, all but three of them share the same ‘UBC’ browser icon and it’s impossible to differentiate them (mine included). On the other hand, Anne’s browser icon is a capital letter ‘A’ and I can easily identify it and toggle to it for reference as I write this.
Because I find immense value in reading her perspectives on various tasks undertaken in the course, I will continue to toggle to Anne’s site and you should too!
Reference
TEDx Talks. (2016, February 26). Oral tradition in the age of smartphones: Alexander MacDonald: TEDxFulbrightDublin [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egO_46P894k&feature=emb_logo
LINK 2
With respect to the Twine task, Ying’s submission brought forward many ideas I hadn’t considered and I found myself thinking about the task from a different angle. One thing that stood out for me was the way in which Ying was able to use the task to elucidate her own thought processes. Indeed, Ying was able to identify a sort of meta understanding of the Twine task: not only did she describe how a fairly straightforward science lab routine might have forks in the narrative, but she also described how her own thinking about the Twine activity established forks in her decision making. Similarly, I found it illuminating the way that Ying was able to articulate that even though both Twine and the connections in our minds operate like webs, we’re still only able to access one path at a time. Ying had a really interesting discussion of how we encode, process, and store information in the brain. I believe Ying is alluding to or making the connection to cognitivism or more specifically information processing theory which ultimately tries to describe how the mind functions (Standridge, 2010). Of note, the information processing model is explicitly based on the computer as a metaphor for how the mind works, which ties in neatly to the week’s readings.
I appreciated the way that Ying was able to connect the week’s task with explicit classroom applications, not only by connecting it to a theory of learning, but also by creating a Twine that has practical use in the science classroom. Ying’s procedural Twine showed how a teacher created Twine could be used to teach a new concept, assess prior knowledge, or determine readiness. At the same time, a teacher could, instead, ask students to make their own Twine to demonstrate concepts, procedures, or readiness. All this isn’t to say that creative storytelling with Twine doesn’t have practical applications, it’s just that there isn’t always room in a science curriculum for narrative storytelling.
Aside from the differences in the way that we approached the Twine task, there are also differences in the way that we’ve approached our chosen authoring tools for presenting our tasks. Though we are both using the UBC WordPress blog spaces, Ying and I have opted for different authoring templates. Though I would argue that both of our templates are fairly streamlined, Ying went for a very minimal blog template. This choice makes sense to me because in Task one Ying revealed that she is a “very organized and meticulous person with perfectionist tendencies. Things out of place and out of alignment irk [her].” Additionally, I also know from her first linking assignment that Ying has made a connection between her academic background and the choices she makes in her posts. Ying notes that her background in science leads her to be organized and analytical. Anyone with a science background knows that in scientific writing there is no room for frivolity; one must find a way to express their ideas in the least amount of words possible and in the most straightforward way. Perhaps it is because of this academic rigor that Ying’s template choice is to the point and without any superfluous design choices. Likewise, Ying has chosen a sans serif font while my blog is written with a serif font. Interestingly, when I submit academic assignments I exclusively default to Arial, which is an acceptable sans serif font in APA standards. This prompted me to do some cursory research into what messages font choices can convey. At least according to this website our font choices are like the clothes we wear in that they can give people an impression about you (for better or worse). As indicated by my very limited research a serif font can convey that the writer is more “reputable, established, and serious” while a sans serif font can convey that the writer is more friendly and approachable. Interestingly, I would suspect that Ying didn’t choose a sans serif font for its friendliness and approachability, but perhaps because it is modern and clean, which can also be conveyed by this specific font choice.
I’ve definitely been inspired by the way that Ying has organized her blog, and that is evident in the way that I’ve come to lay out my linking assignment. Indeed, I’ve followed Ying’s lead.
Reference
Standridge, M. (2010). Behaviorism. In M. Orey (Ed.), Chapter 26: Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology (pp. 271-276). A Global Text.
LINK 3
Inspired by the class’s ongoing discussions of the affordances of hypertext and the goal of creating a web of interconnection between the students of ETEC 540, a few of us virtually got together to play a game of Telestrations. For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s a mashup of Pictionary and broken telephone where players take turns drawing and guessing phrases, objects, or actions. This modified version of Telestrations was a great opportunity to play with text, image, and hyperlinks.
As Dobson and Willinsky (2009) note, networked text environments have effects on people’s ability to navigate information. Consider how your understanding of this game changes based on the order in which you choose to follow the hyperlinks provided. For instance you can follow the game linearly from start to finish (or in reverse) and/or you can jump around from hyperlink to hyperlink.
There were six of us who played. I started the game off with the drawing pictured above. Can you decode what phrase/object/action the image is trying to illustrate? Before continuing, feel free to put your guess in the linked comment section, otherwise click on the image to see Sandra’s interpretation of my drawing. Click here if you want to see the original phrase that prompted the drawing.
If you’d rather just jump around from blog to blog follow the links to see:
- Sandra’s guess
- Kirsten’s drawing based on Sandra’s guess
- Nathan’s guess based on Kirsten’s drawing
- Ying’s drawing based on Nathan’s guess
- Selina’s final guess based on Ying’s drawing
It’s interesting to think about the ways in which computer-mediated communication and hypertext support a game like this and what is lost when we remove the immediacy of playing this game in person. From experience, playing in person, there is an emotional element that is lost when played in a computer-mediated environment, such as shared spontaneous laughter. Additionally, a shared semiotic short hand is developed after several rounds in person compared to online. In person you would play several rounds in succession and would come to understand the ways others find meaning in their adoption of symbols. For instance, I played a game where I drew something like this,’=3′, and I intended it to indicate motion (two dashes and a dust cloud). In the first round, nobody understood the symbol, but after several rounds others recognized it when I used it, and further other players adopted it as well. In our computer-mediated environment the pace of the game is much slower. It took several days for our group of six to complete one round of the game. Likewise, as strangers we don’t have a shared semiotic short hand established the way a friend group might. This is made clear from the get go as I used the ‘x’ symbol to indicate the idea that something was a controlled substance, whereas others interpreted it to mean poison (which, to be fair it culturally often does). This is a good example of Bolter’s (2001) discussion on picture writing and the ways in which pictures are not specific enough in the meanings they may carry. I am also reminded of Helen Zaltzman’s (2019) interview of Gretchen McCulloch on The Allusionist podcast. McCulloch points out that the use of emoji to supplement text relies on shared cultural understanding of the emoji, and how some emoji are used metaphorically. Just like emoji, pictionary relies on these same principles. If I had thought about it longer before creating my drawing, it may have been better for me to use the ‘+’ symbol which in North America sometimes refers to the Red Cross, an organization that distributes medical aid or maybe refers to first aid which is also symbolized with a ‘+’.
References
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). The breakout of the visual. In Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Routledge. (pp.47-76).
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New Rules (No. 102) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Allusionist. Helen Zaltzman. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules
LINK 4
The Network assignment for Task 9, based on the Golden Record task, is the first task that inherently connects the entire class; we’re all implicated in the connections. In fact, it only takes two songs to capture the entire interconnection of the class: Johnny B. Goode and Jaat Kahan Ho. In my reflection for task 9, I mostly focused on my peers who had criteria similar to mine when it came to picking songs. That is, I focused on class members who picked songs based on staying true to the original goals of the Golden Record, specifically choosing songs that had represented a variety of instruments and a variety of regions. Equally as interesting though, are peers who had different criteria when picking songs from the Golden Record. For instance Juliano, like me, chose songs that were based on country of origin and instrumentation, however unlike me he favoured instrumental songs over songs with vocals. Juliano’s rationale for favouring instrumental songs had to do with the enduring nature of instrumentals compared to languages which can go extinct. This rationale makes sense to me and yet my rationale does too. When it came down to choosing between two songs for a region, I defaulted to the song with vocals. I figured that the Golden Record was very much a human centric endeavor and that it made sense to keep in vocals where possible. Ultimately, two out of ten songs had vocals in Juliano’s selection, while six out of ten songs in my selection had vocals. Between us we had three shared song choices: Johnny B. Goode, Melancholy Blues, and Solomon Island Panpipes (one song with vocals, and two without).
Kirsten’s criteria for choosing songs also differed from myself. Kirsten “submitted to subjectivity.” What I appreciate about Kirsten’s decision to choose subjectivity as her criteria, is how considerate and deliberate she was in that decision. Her subjectivity was not frivolous and she was able to articulate how subjectivity was still in the spirit of the original Golden Record curation. Originally, I was tempted to submit to subjectivity myself, but couldn’t thoughtfully rationalize and express that decision within the context of the task. Interestingly, Kirsten and I still ended up sharing six similar song choices despite having differing song selection criteria.
LINK 5
To date, the mode-bending of task 1 has been one of my favourite tasks, not only to complete, but also to absorb my peers’ submissions. I read, watched, and listened to each and every one of my peers’ entries for this task and, really, I could link to and talk at length about any one of them. For example, Anne’s submission was broad in scope, curating many different modalities, Ying’s rap was unique and full of extremely relatable content, and James’ tour of his digital ‘bag’ modernized the original task to make it more reflective of the reality of what we carry with us. However, for this link, I specifically want to focus in on Mel Drake’s mode-bending, which I felt cleverly mirrored/complimented the original task, while staying true to the identity she curated for her audience.
In Mel’s original version of the ‘what’s in your bag’ task she presented items to convey an identity that is defined by her interests and free time. From the items she presented and her description of herself, I conjured up the image of someone who identifies as an explorer, adventurer, naturalist, preservationist, archivist, and perhaps a conservationist. Keeping this curated identity in mind, Mel mode-bended the task by creating the futuristic intergalactic version of herself, Scout 150294. Interestingly, I did not get the impression that it was Mel’s intention for Scout 150294 to be a metaphor for her. The character that she created, though from the future and from a different planet, arguably still reflects the identity texts that Mel originally presented. Like Mel, Scout 150294 is visiting a different place from their home (Mel, a transplant from the States and Scout visiting from another planet). Both Mel and Scout are intent on learning and exploring the world around them; they have a deep need to identify, collect, and archive their explorations. For instance, Mel showed us her digital camera for archiving, whereas Scout archives through audio recording (a sort of Ekphrasis, as Anne pointed out in the comment section).
Lastly, as a nod to the original task, Mel extended the idea of bags of the past and archeological discovery. The first version of the task asked us to consider how an archeologist might understand the current temporal period by examining the contents of our bags. Though Scout does not interpret the temporal period or the reasons for each item, they do consider the function of each item from an archeological perspective. It should be said that Scout is taking items back to the lab for further analysis, where it’s possible that they will try to make connections to their historical purposes.
LINK 6
Like the mode-bending task, I feverishly read through all my peers’ speculative narratives. My peers did not disappoint; each narrative was creative, some were wild and dystopic, and others were more reserved and realistic about the future of education and technology, all were interesting.
Chris’s narratives stood out to me, I believe, because they struck a chord personally. Lately, I’ve found myself glued to my screens, consuming the 24hr news cycle, pacifying boredom, or escaping my current responsibilities. In Chris’s first narrative, he speaks to a futuristic society divided by those that are addicted to their personal devices and those that are not; those that consume versus those that produce. As I find myself drifting toward increasing cell phone use, I can relate to this narrative. I’ve been shocked at my weekly screen time reports, a daily number of hours that I’m too embarrassed to include here. Besides outright getting rid of my phone, I’ve been doing everything I can to reduce my use: turning off notifications, setting time limits, setting my screen to greyscale, and leaving my phone at home. There has been success, though limited. I’m not prepared to get rid of my phone, so how do I learn to use it in a way that I can feel comfortable with. In cases of addiction to substances the goal is to eliminate that substance, and in this case that doesn’t seem realistic with a cell phone. For instance, getting rid of my phone means replacing it with many more devices such as a watch, home phone, calculator, and camera among other items. Chris’s narrative prompts me to ask myself: have I forgotten how to self-regulate? Have I forgotten how to create? As Dunne and Raby (2013) suggest in their book, Speculative Everything, a purpose of speculative design might be to induce reflection in the reader; I think Chris was successful in achieving this.
As for Chris’s second narrative, it had staying power in my mind. I was out walking, when suddenly Chris’s idea of a stim popped up in my mind and I thought it would be lovely to be gifted with a flood of oxytocin from a loved one, truly a virtual hug. One thing that’s been really hard for me during the pandemic is that I have been unable to support my friends and family who are really struggling with poor mental health. I live 6000km away from my family and childhood friends. I would love to be able to send them a stim, a temporary boost of oxytocin or serotonin. I know this is reductive to think of mental health like this, but for now, let’s assume that we could redistribute joy and happiness through a neural implant.
Overall, as a teacher, I can relate to the narratives that Chris has presented, and can see the straight line from our present day reality to the speculative future that Chris has created. Teachers already contend with curriculums that feel farther and farther away from the needs of students in a changing world. We already contend with bored and disinterested students who, rightly and wrongly, challenge the point of school. Personal devices in school can be both a tool for educators and a thorn in our sides. And many times at the end of the day, teachers have their rituals that help them unwind, whether that’s a glass of wine, a long hot bath, a workout, or for myself, meditation. Honestly, the year 2035 doesn’t seem so far away…
Reference
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press.