I have been at my wit’s end for two days trying to hack a solution to get the software to exchange and use information. The feeling of frustration and annoyance was a valuable insight into how some students might feel who only have use of their phones to access course content. I must admit that I abandoned both the phone and the tablet so that I could have the pages open as I followed one tutorial after many attempts to load the content via the Moodle LMS, Review My e-learning, and on WordPress without a plug-in. The responsive e-learning project was distorted in so many unreadable shapes. It has been a valuable lesson about checking out the inoperability of proprietary and open-source software.
Nick recounted a folk tale, The Tongue-Cut Sparrow that he seemed pretty familiar with for the speech-to-text piece, thereby producing a quite structured outcome. As a result, it was easy to quickly follow the storyline, with only a few spots requiring a second glance. Otherwise, the word substitutions, lack of punctuation, and capitalization did not interfere with the reading flow.
The brain’s capacity to read fluency regardless of missing or erroneous elements should not be surprising as the brain’s circuits have been adapting (Ong, 2002) to invariance in writing (Dehaene, 2009) since the creation of the cuneiform script by the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia (Schmandt-Besserat, D, 2009; Lamb and Jim, 2020)
The folk tale has two main characters: a friendly hard working humble man married to an older barren woman who is portrayed as a greedy shrew. However, what was unsettling was not the negativeness of the portrayal but that this depiction was encountered in an educational setting where inclusivity, understanding, and reducing inequities are goals. This is what brought me back to revisit the blog.
Initially, I described my transcript resulting from the speech-to-text as an unpunctuated stream of thought like Kafka or Gao Xingjian’s stream-of-consciousness technique in a scroll-like document.
I was trying to weave two memories into a coherent, organized, coherent story, but I found that spontaneously delivering for over a five-minute duration was proving to be tricky. Moreover, this feeling of being taxed brought about the intrusion of the thought about the fairness of judging an individual’s English fluency in the IELTs test two-minute monologue.
My transcript, like Nick’s, did not include any writing conventions. I had also used pauses to indicate changes in thoughts but found out later that I needed to state the punctuation as one might due in a dictation exercise with ESL students.
I revisited Nick’s blog for the fourth task due to curiosity to see the difference between his text-to-voice and the script versions of the Japanese folk tale.
In the handwritten script, the portrayal of the older woman stood out more. Perhaps this is due to that reading someone’s hand requires more attention.
The visit turned into a discussion about how often the stock character of older women is that of a shrew.
On another note, we both felt that the writing tools made a difference in the writing experience which brought joy. Nick’s choice of pen and paper adds to the quality of his experience.
The affordance of the pen and paper released me from the virtual to the actual.
While Nick stays centred in the act of writing, the task took me on a few Proustian moments in recovering some lost time of a former self. The freedom of movement brought forth images of Plato’s cave dwellers, which resulted in returning to the tale, unfortunately, an online version and not searching for a copy from my bookshelves. Thinking about the tools led to examining sheets of paper from Richard de Bas’s paper mill, and the nib pens tucked away in a drawer. Even the legal paper brought back the history of working for a paper and visiting a printing press.
It can be surmised from the length of Jame’s story about the cat from outer space produced via his phone that he has fluency with social media. Furthermore, his strategy of obtaining the names (the designated noun phrase label) for the appropriate selection of these ideogrammatic icons is quite nuanced. It shows a concern for universal accuracy of outcome regardless of platform.
However, the intended meaning of the label does not ensure that the semantic layer will be interpreted in a like manner. For example, Rashidi (2020) concluded there were differences in the interpretation of emojis between genders. Moreover, this conclusion might extend to varied interpretations due to other sociodemographic constructs.
Using the affordance of the phone for the emoji narration would seem logical, yet first, I composed mine on a word processor. Unfortunately, being ill-versed in the language of emojis, it, therefore, took several attempts to move beyond merely translating the written English code. The academic course content influenced the evolution of each attempt.
Puzzling over punctuating this iconic text brought forth the duh moment that I should be working on a messaging app. Nevertheless, I did not turn to the built-in chat of my iMac or iPhone but went to WhatsApp. The final copy directly applied knowledge from Kress, Bolter, and McCulloch, which created communication in real-time between two iPhones instead of producing a translated static one-voice written narrative. The mimicked dialogue was captured through screenshots.
pubescent daughter kidnapped and guarded by the slaves of by the”wise holy man”
female representation
49% of world population
Europe
Flowering Stream
Chinese representation
18% of the world population
Asia
Johnny B. Goode
youth representation
18% of world population
North America
Tchenhoukouem
instrumentation
Africa
Morning Star and Devil Bird
didjeridu
male vocalization
aboriginal representation
Australia
Graeme and I used the region as a criterion and human vocalization. However, he portrayed the diversity of humanity through musicality, while I left musicalness aside. I tried to be mindful of population, demographic, and continental representation.
Stanford’s Palladio algorithm created and populated Community 0 with Grant, Emily, Sheena, and Elizabeth from the Golden Record curation data.
I intended to view Grant’s blog because of the Palladio network; however, I accidentally stumbled into Graeme’s blog. Interestingly even though we were not in the same community, Graeme and I matched on five selections far more than half of the nodes in my network.
Networks are established by the closeness of the nodes, the members. Grant and I have the most matched selection (5), which is indicated by the closeness of the data visualization. Sheena and I have the least matched selection (3), indicating a greater distance in the path. In the following two task selections, I verified for commonality between the network members beyond the music selection matches.
Grant summarizes the assigned task. Then he explains how the storytelling data visualization results from algorithms that are run behind the scenes to make connections in the data.
He found that running the Palladio software was easy and explained the size of the bubble representing the nodes: the largeness represented the number of matching outputs. This explanation reflected the suggested course content.
However, he stated that the interpretation of simple data representation was influenced by personal context. This realization led to pondering about the limitations of visualization and the determination process of membership.
He used simple screenshots to provide examples from Palladio producing the light grey background colour.
There were two significant differences in Grant’s experience with the task and my own.
Like Grant, Palladio was easy to use. Nevertheless, I informed myself about the tool to determine the range of visualizations: tables and graphs, which could be produced with the class’ relatively small data set. From a previous experience working with Netlytics, another ethnographic tool, I understood networks, links, nodes, and size indication of frequency in the data set so time was spent looking at graph theory, simple data models, spaghetti data, and algorithms.
The second difference was creating visualizations with eye appeal. Once I figured out how to download an active graph, it was simple to take it into Adobe Create Cloud to differentiate the nodes by size and colour. The process of colouring links and nodes resulted in a more detailed examination of the content of the visualization. As Grant stated, visualization tells a story, but the digital world requires content staging so that the audience looks at that story.
Sheena was another member of Community 0 from the network task. Even though the overlap in Golden Record selection was low, there is some likeness in our reaction to the task, informed by Brignull, the conclusions, and the extended action of checking out the company website.
Sheena’s writing feels bloggish, focused and inviting to read. The length and language are accessible. The humanized touches are relateable such as the feeling of annoyance trying to navigate a poorly designed interface or being frustrated with dark design when unsubscribing.
She offers up just enough analytical content to engage the reader in further thought, yet stays on the fence so that polarized opinions still have a takeaway: straightforward UI design desired, but unprofitable vs dark pattern UI design deceptive, but generate clicks and profit.
I struggled to find the balance of producing a blog that was both personable, yet academic. This struggle reflects my minimal contact with most social media. However, this may be a struggle that needs to be addressed as many students want a social media-like experience that still has content depth and integrity.
Sheena displayed two images; on the other hand, my post included seven. The habit of using images to support written and oral content arises from LINC’s obligation. Nevertheless, more importantly, obtaining these images from the task required a do-over, which brought about reflection, not upon dark patterns, but on online content, designed to avoid navigation snags for those with only a little online experience.
I avidly consumed the Biggar website and the assigned and suggested course content and then applied the insight into my LINC course converted from face-to-face to online, which will eventually morph into a blended format next spring. Thus, the task functions as a muse of that gleaned information.
The favoured authoring tool that all the examined posts used was writing with added images and a few hyperlinks. On the other hand, there was a lack of podcasts, music, videos, and animations even though all are possible in Word Press. With the ability to add plug-ins to extend functionality or add other features, this narrow choice of tools could be caused by habit, time restraints, or unskilled in the available assets. However, technology affords a more dynamic interactive experience, and the students expect it.
References
Ong, W. J. (2002). Chapter one: The Orality of language. In Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 1–11). Routledge.
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2009). “Origins and Forms of Writing.” In Bazerman, C. (Ed.). Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text. Links to an external site. New York, NY: Routledge.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind, entitled “From the Vault: Invention of the Book,” Part 1
I choose to make the infographic with Mobile. I decide to make the infographic with Mobile First Design as I currently have four students from my online LINC day class who are using their Mobile for the LMS and Zoom. However, since this was a decision made at the last moment, and I had not cleared this in advance, I have provided the required 22 x 33.9 pdf file.
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission. (2019). Communication monitoring report: Communication Services in Canadian Households: Subscription and Expenditures 2013—2017 (pp. 1–336).
Medow, J., & Sheldrick, O. (2020, April 9). Only Connect: In support for the marginalized, technology + digital policy [Academic]. First Policy Response. https://policyresponse.ca/only-connect/
The potential relationship between media, education, text, and technology shifts my thoughts towards those displaced people that Canada provides refuge. Of those refugees, the single Sub-Saharan African mothers with their children live at the margins of Canada’s marginalized. These women function in an almost state of “primary orality” (Ong, 2002) arising from their meagre education. A lifetime of conflict, displacement, years of the encampment, and femaleness has exacted a heavy toll. “Secondary orality” (Ong, 2002) develops with their coming to Canada mainly through television and their cell phone that is permanently close at hand. Hopefully, most of this group will end up in Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) offered by the Government of Canada.
The federal program provides English instruction for those who need it. Classes are streamed for English level, but not for tertiary-educated nor refugee-camp-educated. This mixture potentially poses instructional challenges—as many still employ teacher-centred mass instruction. Furthermore, as a group, the refugee-camp-educated students’ progression pales compared to those who are well-versed in formal education and equipped with modern literacies.
Learners with Interrupted Formal Education
I can read, write, and do arithmetic. And for most people, reading and writing is pretty straightforward. Arithmetic is pretty straightforward… As so even in today’s world, what we mean by literacy is highly conditioned on [your] life. -Doug Fisher
Unfortunately, a quieted griping could be heard amongst instructors ill-equipped to handle the discrepancy, let alone the despondency, forgetfulness, or exhaustion found within the classroom space. The tipping point for some was the incessant phone calls with animated unintelligible voices interrupting the sanctity of the occasion.
Literacy pedagogy … has been a carefully restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language.–The New London Group
A class created for over-aged learners with limited traditional literacy, modern literacy, numeracy, and formal education.
As a result, the Learners with Interrupted Formal Education (LIFE) classroom was created to work with students with low literacy, numeracy, technology, and learning in a formal environment. However, it was capped at ten students. Furthermore, admittance to the class was only through recommendations from regular stream instructors. Thus, it was not surprising that LIFE’s wait-list became long.
The living children are scattered over three continents.
Our heroine is Hawa, a reserved woman from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who joined the LIFE classroom. Her previous instructor felt that her slow laboured responses were indicative of cognitive issues. Moreover, her neediness in the computer lab and constant phone interruptions were even more reasons for leaving the regular-stream. Little effort was given to knowing about her lived experience; it would cause discomfort, so canonicity and textuality (Scholes, 1992) were hidden behind.
Textuality refers to a collaboration between language and the human consciousness that always distances us from reality without ever replacing the reality.– Robert Scholes
who is this student in front of us
Like most of her classmates from other unsettled Sub-Saharan African countries, she had found safety from civil strife, ethnic cleansing, and genocides in Kakuma. Nevertheless, as a woman-headed household, she suffered from severe poverty. Moreover, as a refugee, she could not supplement the meagre UNHCR rations sustaining her family.
A female-headed household is the poorest of the poor.
Kakuma was established for the Lost Boys of Sudan in 1992. By 2021, it has since surpassed its capacity of 60,000 by almost threefold necessitating sub-division. This influx has strained the camp’s infrastructure and resources, so clean water, food, and medicine are scarce (UNHCR, 2021). In addition, donor countries’ donations dwindle even though displaced people keep arriving.
Females are not prioritized for education.
They carried what they could and arrived with nothing.
She was four months pregnant when she left her village afoot with the seven children carrying parts of their life. They entered Kakuma emptied-handed after the exhausting trek across borders – it had been chosen because of rumours that settlement abroad was accessible through Kenya. Years passed before Canada accepted them for resettlement; the eldest three had reached the majority by then and had become ineligible. Only the eldest daughter had been able to find a third country, the Netherlands. The two sons remaining behind were still part of her monthly expenditures. In Canada, she heads a household with two pre-teen children and two youngsters abandoned to her care by their parents.
Frigid airs contrast harsh desert heat.
Canadians pat themselves on the back for their country’s generosity. And why not, after all, previous students, women-heads of households, had requested a counsellor at the school to help negotiate the paperwork needed for the three levels of government. Immigration Canada Refugee Citizenship (IRCC) came up with the funds. That counsellor had also secured Provincial Training Allowances (PTA) to help stabilize their lives while studying to improve their skill sets to become employable in Canada. Furthermore, the federal government had fulfilled the request to equip the LIFE classroom with technology such as Smart Screens and tablets to increase their digital skills. As a result, learning was swift, and some of the students even started to dream of a future.
A novel examines not reality, but existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that [wo]man can become, everything [s]he’s capable of.– Milan Kundera
Computer labs and tablets were part of their daily school life.
That was then and this is now
We Support Refugees! was a campaign for a Saskatoon mayor candidate a few years back. The premier echoed this slogan. Nevertheless, that was then, and this is now. At the same time as that campaign, the Saskatchewan provincial government stopped the PTA for refugees. As a result, some women found night employment as cleaners, and while they tried to continue studying during the day, they were often found asleep at their desks. Working, running a household, and studying was more than their bodies could handle. At the same time, others went on social assistance to keep afloat; it allowed them to continue their full-time studies. But there is a difference between PTA and Social Assistance governmental support; PTA requires the student to show up, like a job, to receive funding.
If a student had only limited cash for one device, which would be bought: desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone?
And then COVID-19 hit. A few of these over-aged female learners managed to finish the term: April, May, and June, but when the new period started in August, all the women had vanished. The reasons are numerous—for example, the cost of the internet is out of their range; they were relying on the free internet provided by the school. To study, they now needed to find access to free wifi: the local mall? Some had difficulty connecting to Zoom and the LMS with their phones.
In contrast, others had trouble doing the homework designed for desktops, laptops, and tablets but which did not function so efficiently on the phone. The tablets that they were using in class were squirred away for safekeeping. The dystopia for women like Hawa is already here. As educators and society, we must ask ourselves how their fate impacts their futures and what about their children’s future?
The exact time zone, but 100% different clientele.
The mission of education … its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. – New London Group
Was the problem these women faced unforeseeable? – Dune & Raby
Today, we don’t really have a person. We only have a person with a phone in hand. That’s the extended self… but by 2025 … our students will be extended selves. And of course, that has huge implicaitons for how we teach and even what we teach. – Jaco Hamman
Digitally challenged students need help in the beginning to access programs like Zoom.
The Life class had experienced the utopia before hitting the dystopia. True accessibility meets the students where they are with the technology that is at hand. It allows them to dream of a future and provides the possibility of realizing it.
dawn of a new age
As for our heroine, Hawa was hit by the loss of PTA and found employment as a cleaner. However, she was one of the lucky ones as she had moved through the system before COVID-19. When she needed to be transferred from the face-to-face format, her computer skills were strong enough for a blended-class design. At first, she was overwhelmed with the change but providing her with targetted help increased her confidence to work solo. She still was using only the phone, but the programs used were more phone friendly which decreased the troubleshooting required, thus reducing the frustration she experienced. As her English skills improved, she moved from the LINC program onto the Basic Education program and completed a primary caregiver and first aid certification. She is now employed in that field.
Accessibility: The dreams of students marginalized should also be attainable.
Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. – The New London Group.
“The future lay not with expanding information, but compacting it” (Price, 2019)
Evolving technology will improve learner agency, moving them to the centre of their educational process; thus, transcending away from a teacher-centred instruction from behaviourist glory. However, this requires educators to embrace the change.
The smartphone was a viable learning tool for Hawa as it is her sole digital technology outside of the classroom. This holds for many students found in the larger Canadian society. As O’Neil poignantly argued in the interview with Mars (n.d.), as educators, we need to evaluate the overall effects of our choices, evaluate for whom our options fail and know what harm falls upon them from that failure.
By working, Hawa eventually saved up enough money to purchase each of her children a smartphone plus subscribe to a family mobile plan with unlimited data. Her children taught her how to text and use the affordance of the phone, which kept changing with advancements like artificial intelligence, voice- and object- recognition, and the lithium battery capacity.
Nevertheless, she was still unsettled when the phone disappeared thirty years later. She felt odd talking into the digital wearable. But, on the other hand, she enjoyed the device’s capability of letting her chat with her sons’ and daughter’s holograms.
She appreciated her son’s driverless car taking her to work at the senior care home. It was more cost-effective and convenient than using the bus. In addition, she cooperated and collaborated with the intelligent affective-computing robotic humanoid at work. She was continually amazed at its ability to distinguish between the patients and staff, plus react and remember all their stories from their interactions.
Unlike the humanoid, she only remembered snippets about her childhood life. More importantly, she thought about the future that she had trouble understanding, but where she knew children would be a part of this new age of technology.
At work, Hawa always felt under surveillance. Nevertheless, she was safe in Canada; her biggest worries were her two sons in Kenya. The democratic government had been deposed, and the new regime monitored everyone. However, the country’s digital super-intelligence system efficiently handled the massive amounts of data collected from the digital devices in the country, the smart glasses of their agents who lived among the people, and the incessantly circulating drones—those who the government felt threatened by had brain chips implanted for continuous tracking. And more and more, those individuals talking about freedom and democracy were picked up by the police. These individuals were either reprogrammed or disappeared.
She worried for the worse as there was no place for her sons to hide from this ubiquitous surveillance and the heavy hand that controlled it.
With no regulatory oversight, the exponential advancements in technology are fueled by the profit of private tech owners. Technology holds promise but also worries about its dark and disturbing potential. As Elon Musk stated, we need to have a future where we get up and want to live.
References
Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., & Gee, Jim. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 1–60.
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Chapter 5: A methodological playground: Fictional worlds and thought experiments. In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Scholes, Robert. (1992). Canonicity and textuality. In Introduction to scholarship in Modern Languages (2nd ed., pp. 139–158). Modern Languages Association of America.
Canada and United States are founded on the same constitutional structure of the Rule of Law where laws apply to everyone equally – justice is supposed to be blind. The laws should not unfairly target or be advantageous to one person or group over another. Therefore, when I undertook the simulation, “Detain/Release,” my full intent was to make the high stake judgements in an impartial, consistent way. I was equally aware of the need to prevent overcrowding for those remanded to custody while awaiting the trial. I was also mindful that the American judicial system balances accountability to popular and political pressures with its laws. Moreover, I intended to defer to the Canadian viewpoint where Canadian and American values differed, such as drug use and guns.
Recalled
Unfortunately, I did not meet the needs of the American system. I was recalled after judging 21 defendants out of 24 due to the increase in public fear. Five of the high-risk-of-flight defendants that I had released did not return to court. Most importantly, one defendant was charged with fraud, with low risk for fleeing and risk of violence, and whom the prosecutor recommended releasing and thus I released her. Later she had a warrant out for manslaughter. This defendant caused a significant spike in the public’s confidence in my judgment.
I was consistent when reflecting on my decisions: I considered the prosecutors’ recommendations, but downplayed the defendants’ impact statement. I found myself thinking when dismissing their impact statements that perhaps the defendants should have considered their reasons before committing the crime. I had already judged them guilty, contrary to the presumptions of innocence and the guarantee of a fair process by the independent and impartial trier of facts as laid out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
When I looked at the three algorithmic derived scores, I automatically released those who scored low for all three categories and found that I was not too concerned by the high-flight risk or drug use. As consistently, I detained those with a high risk for violence and took more time over the consideration about the unlawful use of weapons.
I had several questions that I pondered about: What was meant by low, medium, and high-risk? What did the system mean by “a new violent incident” when the defendant was a no-show. Would I run out of space in the detainment centre? How could you possibly predict a fraudster would kill someone?
Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change https://colourofpoverty.ca/
Algorithmic pretrial risk assessments are an important case study in the use of AI and algorithms in criminal justice. Bail proceedings adjudicate and balance fundamental liberty and public safety issues while needing to ensure high standards of due process, accountability and transparency”
– Law Commission of Ontario (LCO)
Pretrial Risk Assessment
Many American judicial structures introduced algorithmic pretrial risk assessment tools to reform the wealth-based bail system. It was thought that algorithms would eliminate variability, bias, and subjectivism that pervaded the courts. In addition, it was believed that the predictive algorithm would provide consistent neutral scores based on evidence to determine the defendant’s future behaviour (LCO, 2020). For example, the algorithmic pretrial risk assessment tool scores a defendant from low to high on their risk of flight, the likelihood of committing another crime, and their propensity to violence. As a result, public safety was factored into consideration.
“What qualifies as low or high depends on the thresholds set by tool designers and merely denotes the risk a group presents relative to other risk bins”
(Buskey & Woods)
The mathematical equations are trained with vast inputs of curated data from the past. Their strength is their dexterity in crunching, sorting, and evaluating the data to recognize past patterns and then propagating them to predict future behaviour (Mars, 2017; McRaney, 2018; O’Neil, 2016; 2017). Their output feedback into the system to inform future operations. To optimize the algorithm, the designer imposes a definition of success. Without mindfulness of what success is being sought, the algorithm will strongly reinforce the status quo and perpetuate any patterns of unfairness or discrimination. Mars (2017) points out that algorithms impact our society profoundly and imperceptibly.
These are not clear mathematical expressions of the way of the world… we are translating human languange, human perspective into machine language and machine perspective. As we do that we need to be careful on a meta level about how we train the system. –Allistor Croll
O’Neil (2016) argues that a good assessment tool needs to be checked and verified. She adds that the initial action is to build a fair model and then use the learning algorithm for auditing for equity, thereby increasing trust in the equations. The problem is fair for whom – this is a subjective decision. O’Neil advocates that problems in algorithms can be corrected by measurement and transparency, but when measuring the general implications, it is vital to measure for whom the algorithm injures and look at what injuries are being caused (Mars, 2017; O’Neil, 2016).
Vallor (2018) points out that artificial intelligence amplifies and extends human cognition; it augments our performance in ways that would be impossible solo. However, it does not replace human decisions for complex, unpredictable real-world problems but for simple repetitive and routine tasks that can be automated.
Perhaps there lies the problem – humans use algorithms for complex real-world situations around today’s social issues that split society. The algorithms must make a judgment call with vast amounts of bias data from the past, yet culture and values have evolved. With little or no human oversight, the system creates a feedback loop the reinforces the status quo without any deprejudicing.
“When are machines are wrong, … they are not wrong statistically. The data that we feed them is statistically more likely, But if you are trying to change that, but if you are trying to progress away from that, if you are trying to move away from the past, then this sort of bias and prejudice is a real problem It means our machines are morally wrong; they are sociall wrong, and that kind of wrongness is difficult to program out of the algorithms that we have created.” –Allistor Croll
How does this apply to Canada?
Algorithmic tools are shrouded in secrecy from how they code to what is coded. (Mars, 2017; McRaney, 2018; ) However, a fundamental to transparency and accountability of these tools would be an informed citizenry with access to open, understandable software that their government employs in the judicial, services, and policing structures (LCO, 2020; Mars, 2017, McRaney, 2018, O’Neil, 2016, 2017).
Nevertheless, there are no central lists or academic studies on how widespread predictive algorithms are in Canada, even though predictive algorithmic are already employed in numerous Canadian cities by the police service (Robertson, 2020).
“These systems are often disclosed as a result of litigation, freedom of information requests, press reports or review of government procurement websites” – Law Commission of Ontario
The increased use of algorithms in the criminal justice system for “pre-trial, sentencing, and post-sentencing phases” raises many legal issues in Canada. According to Christian (2020), there are three main issues: algorithmic racism, the legality of using AI risk assessments when sentencing, and proprietary vs individual’s Charter of Rights.
Despite Canadians pride in being a country of peace, order, and good government with a multicultural population, Canada has a long history of strained racial relations with several minority communities. For example, many police jurisdictions have been scrutinized for systematic racism and discrimination throughout the years, especially from women, black, and Indigenous groups. Thus, the Stonechild inquiry provides a poignant benchmark to gauge progress. However, unfortunately, Stonechild died during his “starlight tour’ when the city police dumped him on the city’s outskirts in the throes of winter. A common enough practice directed towards Indigenous men by some prairie city police officers. So it would be expected that if the Canadian society wished to move away from our difficult path towards a future of improved racial relations, algorithms based on the past would be less than helpful. Christian (2020) argues that the Canadian criminal justice system had an obligation to ensure that the information they use does not directly or indirectly stereotype and discriminate.
Algorithmic racism … arises from the use of historial data in training AI risk assessment tools. This has the tendency to perpetuate historical bias which are replicated in the risk assessment by these AI tools.
–Gideon Christian
Moreover, Christian (2020) quotes Justice Nakatsuru of the Ontario Superior Court, who noted that “sentencing is an individual process” and not a construct of a group membership. However, algorithmic predictive tools’ risk scores are based on statistics from analyzing big data, anything but individual. Christian (2020) supports his argument with the Ewert v Canada 2018 case in which an Indigenous defendant challenged his risk assessment because he was trained principally on non-Indigenous specifics. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that algorithmic tools trained on one predominant cultural group are unrepresentative.
In Canada, an individual has the right to due process, an open court where they face their accuser to mount a defence against the charges; that becomes impossible to defend against the reasoning of the “blackbox” that has morphed several times since its creation or if proprietary rights trump my rights.
In Canada, an individual has the right to due process, an open court where they face their accuser to mount a defence against the charges; that becomes impossible to defend against the reasoning of the “blackbox” that has morphed several times since its creation or if proprietary rights trump my rights. We have the freedoms to disagree with the government, the majority and work towards change. Even though Canadian society is a work in progress, and there is still far to be inclusive, what exists comes from individuals fighting for their values. However, there is no guarantee for longevity: laws, rights, and freedoms are human constructs. What would a machine construct look like?
‘UI user inyerface’ taunts the target audience to a head-to-head competition against Baggar, who guarantees to frustrate those who dare to attempt completing an undemanding task. Moreover, the masculine overtone of the challenge reflects that the tech economy is male-dominated (Brookfield Institute, 2016; OCED, 2018). Thus, there is a high likelihood that this contemptuous, confrontational jeer directed at 20-25-year-old males (Harris, 2017) who are competent in web programming will trigger a response. A challenge motivates one to compete as the individual seeks to overcome and taste success’s glory. After all, competition is a fundamental human motive in a hierarchical society (Anderson & Hildreth, 2016; Yildirim, 2015).
“All gets brought back into building a more and more accurate model … once you have it, you can predict the kinds of things that the person does, predict what kind of emotions tend to trigger.” – Tristan Harris
n00b vs boss
The first challenge is to gain access to the game. Baggar misdirects, mislabels, and understates interface designs and conventions to achieve this. The challenge is to look instead of relying on past habits to navigate a web interface (Brignull, 2016). For example, hovering over the large green circle with ‘NO‘ causes it to increase as if linked. The green and increased size invite clicking, even though the NO tells the viewer straight out that this is not the link.
‘HERE’ is hidden in plain sight.
Baggar employs other default stylings for the inline elements of links. For example, most users know and expect that underlining ‘click’ indicates the connection and similarly, colouring the ‘next page‘ suggests that the link has not yet been visited. However, the highlighted ‘click’ and attention-getting ‘next page‘ is meant to mislead and delay.
Even though the all caps are shouting ‘HERE,’ it is virtually invisible. On top of the other misdirections, using block letters makes it difficult to scan and increases the time needed to read and interpret.
A UI programmer’s attention would have been drawn quickly to the uninformative’ click Here,’ since programmers typically avoid its use when designing navigation on a web page. Moreover, navigation links generally are placed at the top, mid-page, or bottom of a page.
TLDR
Once in, Baggar has a red box slip in at the top of the screen to draw attention. Red heightens emotions and creates a feeling that this must be dealt with to advance. Their A/B test found within the red box is puzzling. The question is unusual; the “Yes” choice is evident and apparent like ‘no’; however,’ no’ is paired with ‘Not really,’ suggesting uncertainty. In reality, it does not matter whether one clicks yes or no after many tries later; it became apparent that neither one was required to advance. The box is a red herring meant to confuse and distract. Nevertheless, a competent programmer would be aware of the trick as A/B testing pioneered by Chamath has become standard practice as growth tactics by tech companies (Orlowski, 2020).
Would a competent programmer fall for this subtle trick?
“Dark patterns tend to perform very well in A/B and multivariate testing simply because a design that tricks users into doing something is likely to achieve more conversions.” –Harry Brignull
After the red box diversion, the designed loop on the progress indicator solely draws attention to the timer. A timed element acts as an intrinsic motivator in gaming to improve flow, engagement, and enjoyment; however, for others, a timer can negatively impact decision-making competence and performance (Yildirim, 2015). They add variability to the timer: the time it takes to lock the system fluctuates from just over one minute to nearly five minutes. As a result, the emotional state quickly heightens as one races against an unknown cutoff time.
modulation signal directs attention to the timer
erratic cutoff time intensifies emotions
Other distractions and miscues employed on subsequent pages:
Form
The complicated password requires a bizarre Cyrillic element.
There is no overwrite function, so one has to remember to delete the box category labels.
One needs to uncheck the auto-fill.
The standard domain name needs to be accessed through “Other” instead of typing it in.
Help is unaccessible.
Terms and Agreement
One can only reach the ‘Accept” located at the bottom of the page by sluggish scrolling.
Keyboard browsing shortcuts are disabled.
Clicking ‘Accept’ redirects back to the home page because it is infinitely looped.
Term and agreement’s times out so that the lengthy content cannot be scanned.
GTG
unlocks
Disabling the timer increases option visibility.
Simple access: valid password and email.
Click ‘Next.’
FTW
This is Me:
While the blue button with ‘Download image” jumps out, all that is needed is to click on another seemingly disabled greyed function link, ‘upload.’
All the autofill choices needed to be unselected to choose three interests.
The ‘Unselected all’ option is buried at the bottom.
Page 2 and 3 were a breeze.
Verifying humanness
a subtle sleight of hand
This page appears complete, yet the anchor points cut off the top layer of the required boxes to be checked. It simply requires scrolling up on the page, easy to execute, but it took time to imagine this visual illusion.
A competent tech designer would have been able to sidestep the misdirection, mislabelling quickly, and understated elements, thereby making this an elegant way to pre-screen potential tech candidates for skill competency.
A game like UI User Inyerface is by far a fairer way to recruit employees than some algorithmic solutions. For example, some human resources are using algorithms to predict potential “social capital” or “longevity” to a company of a candidate (O’Neil, 2016). Other hiring algorithms run the 37% Rule, where one is rejected not on evidence or competency but on a statistical formula to optimize the probability of selecting the best candidate (Rainie & Anderson, 2017).
Not a gamer: clicked BAGGAR’s icon – the fastest solution –
concluding thoughts
As Harris (2017) stated, “the best way to get people’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works. Baggar is not an inadept design company but a commercial enterprise that seeks clients’, skilled tech programmers and engineers, and perhaps tech writers’ attention. With this game, the company picked up free promotion through posts like Slashdot, technewstube.com, fossbytes.com and chatter of the players/programmers. However, by digging deeper into Baggar’s website, it is easy to recognize a sophisticated Belgium tech company focused on guiding corporate clients towards digital transformation with creative design. UI User Inyerface was not an interface with bad design nor an interface with no clues, rules, and convention, but a reasonably sophisticated design that engaged people to stay on their screens through allusion, tapping into intrinsic human behaviour, and predicting what people would do. It also demonstrated to potential clients the frustration that customers have with lousy interface design.
“A magician understands … some part of your mind that we’re not aware of. That’s what makes the illusion work. People do not know how their mind is vulnerable… from this perspective you can have a very different understanding of what technology is doing… Persuasive technolgy is just sort of design intentionally applied … to modify someone’s behaviour … to take this action we want them to keep doing.” –Triston Harris
References
Brignull, H. (2016, December 23). How do dark patterns work?
Cameron Anderson and John Angus D. Hildreth. (2016). “Striving for superiority: The human desire for status.” IRLE Working Paper No. 115-16. http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/115-16.pdf
One cannot make sense of the massive amounts of data being generated without algorithms in today’s world. For example, I attempted to read Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm (Raine & Lee, 2017) like a “Spider Program” by opening and reading each hyperlink on the page. Three hundred sixty-eight words of the document led to examining the 21,000 words produced from the hyperlinks. In the same manner, the task of manually combing, ordering, combining, extending, transforming, and cleansing each row and column of the tabular data files from the curation of the Voyageur’s Golden Record would be daunting for an individual. Instead, mathematical algorithms retrieve, rank, analyze, and visualize metadata in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
Algorithms rule the modern world, silent workhorses aligning datasets and systematizing the world. They’re everywhere, in everything, and you wouldn’t know unless you looked.
Navneet Alang
The language of numbers is replacing the language of words in our encoded lifeworlds. Haas (1996) argued that “technology is always inextricably tied both to a particular moment in human history and to the practical action of the human life in which it is embedded” (xii). The world has moved towards greater interconnectivity via the internet. Images, music, and words that we send and receive travel through the internet network as pulses of light waves (The internet: How search works, 2017). The waves pulse following the coded binary numbers of (0,1). Therefore, one should not be surprised that the language of numbers has regained prominence as in Mesopotamia to communicate concrete, discrete information (Schmandt-Besserat, 2009).
As Boroditsky (2017) argued, language shapes thinking and how the user attends to and establishes relationships with the world; then a paradigm shift to mathematical thought: abstraction, logic, precision, and unambiguousness should be expected.
We have already turned our world over to machine learning and algorithms. The question now is, how to better understand and manage what we have done?
Barry Chudakow
The following two sections explore a few arguments about algorithms’ detriments or benefits to humanity.
Algorithms, the new phrenology
Many of those experts surveyed by the Pew Research Center, 2017 felt that the central issue of algorithms is the lack of transparency. Another issue is that not every algorithm is tested, debugged, or validated before implementation. As well, they are not neutral nor automatically munificent. Moreover, self-learning and self-programming algorithms’ operations are not transparent; thus, not easy to verify outcomes. “In the future, many algorithms will be trained, not designed; that means that the operations of many algorithms will be opaque and difficult to predict in border cases, and responsibility for their harms will be diffuse and difficult to assign” (Tuff, 2016).
When I consider the sloppy and self-serving way the companies use data, I’m reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly popular in the 19th century. Phrenologist would run their fingers over the patient’s skill, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits … the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation – which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology.
Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big data can fall into the same trap. Models … continue to lock people out, even when the”science” inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions”
Cathy O’Neil, 2016
Algorithms enhance exploration of metadata
On the other hand, other experts acknowledge the challenges of algorithms yet still believe that humanity can benefit from them, as shown by the Stanford Humanities department. Their creation of Palladio as a digital tool was used to map scholarly intellectual networks in 1500-the 1800s. They found that the analytical tool’s visualization revealed hidden patterns and repetitions that had been difficult to discern in the compiled metadata. “Palladio provides an opportunity to create a natural graph in which you have the possibility to use two different kinds of nodes” (Humanities + digital tools: Palladio, 2015). That project has since been turned into a lab accessible to other inquiries like ETEC 540 64C’s Task 9.
All the following visualizations, diagrams, tables have been created through this digital tool. Table 1 indicates which curators have chosen the tracks and clustered the curators into a community. However, it does not indicate which members belong in each community.
Table 1: Track, Community, Curators
Spaghetti Data
The table above has been converted to an undirectional graph. It contains two different nodes: curators and musical tracks. The edges pair a curator with all their chosen musical track. At first glance, it would appear that there is a high degree of connectivity between the different curators.
Lancichinetti et al. (2011) called the Simple Data Models, spaghetti data. While it looks like the edges intersect, in reality, they lay on top of each other like spaghetti on a plate. The overlaps and adjacency are not stored; therefore, there is redundancy in the data as it is stored several times. This causes limitations. As there is no easy way to check for overlap and slivers it is prone to errors which in turn causes analytical errors.
Community structure is one of the main structural features of networks, revealing both their internal organization and the similarities of their elementary units.
Lancichinetti et al., 2011
Metadata merged into five clusters
Palladio merged the metadata into five clusters that represent the community networks. The concise, compact visualizations reduce the need to deal with a maze of abundant edges and nodes resulting from the curated tracks.
Visualization Graph 2 community, the sum of community, size nodes, number of edges
Visualization Graph 3 society, the sum of community, size nodes, number of edges
Graph 2 overlaping indicates logical relations between the communities; yet upon scrolling out, Graph 3 and 4 illustrates that intersections are not stored and the clusters are isolated. Graph 5 indicates community membership.
Visualization Graph 4: community, the sum of community, size nodes, number of edges
Visualization Graph 5: community, the sum of community, curators, size nodes, number of edges
The curators and their edges have been colour-coded to facilitate seeing the links. The selections that multi-curators have chosen create a path between the nodes which indicates a set of nodes. These sets of nodes within this community are listed below. Grant has the highest degree of connectivity.
Track 5 = {Emily, Grant, Elizabeth}
Track 6 = { Emily, Elizabeth, Grant}
Track 7 = { Emily, Grant}
Track 12 = {Sheena, Grant}
Track 14 = {Emily, Sheena}
Track 16 = {Sheena, Grant}
Track 18 = {Sheena, Emily, Grant,Elizabeth}
Track 23 = {Sheena, Grant}
Track 24 = { Emily, Sheen, Grant, Elizabeth}
Track 25 = {Grant, Elizabeth}
Visualization Graph 6: community ‘0’, curators, tracks, edges
The information below also from Palladio about Community 0, (members Emily, Sheena, Grant, Elizabeth) does not match the sets of nodes indicated by Graph 6.
Palladio: Selecting for Community 0, curators, and tracks.
Track Choice: Blog Posting vs Palladio graph
As there were discrepancies between my blog post choices and what was being indicated by Palladio’s graph, I checked the other members of the groups. It seems that membership is linked to the number of sets that connect members. Thus, inaccuracies in the data sets would create erroneous results.
Connectivity is superficial. The edges pinball from one node to another, only distinguishing between curator and tracks. It is as if the digital tool was suffering from agnosia and could not fix on the whole data but just the parts.
The selections did not match, nor did the track numbers with the song titles.
How strong is the relationship?
The lack of transparency does not enable an examination of the validity of the groupings. There is no way to tell exactly why the algorithm arrived at the networks it did. It is possible to guess that it simply summated all the links to each node as the graph was undirected. It could also have factored in which nodes were adjacent to or neighbouring each other.
Algorithms will always encounter missing and erroneous data, which disrupts their efficiency and accuracy, but this also holds for humans. Are the data-driven insights better, worse, or as good as human experience and knowledge in making predictions? We do not need to follow Phaedrus’ path: algorithms will cause problems and enhance our lives. Nevertheless, like writing, algorithms are not going away; they are already part of our everyday life.
Rainie, Lee and Janna Anderson, “Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age. Pew Research Center, February 2017. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/02/08/code-dependent-pros-and-cons-of-the-algorithm-age
Reducible. (2020, June 14). Introduction to graph theory: A computer science perspective. https://youtu.be/LFKZLXVO-Dg
The label overlay provides the story of agency (composer, singer, and musician), the nation-state of the agent’s birthplace and the method of musical performance (classical, singing, or instrumentation).
“Life is understood as emergent, having no natural directions of growth or boundaries or barriers … Like all rhizonanalyses, this [blog] is intended to be an act of experimentation, to foster unpredictable connections.”
(Leander & Bold, 2012, p. 25)
While performing several repeated listening to the curated music selection, I positioned myself within the process (Leander and Boldt, 2012). Not surprisingly, many memories emerged mainly while listening to the only three tracks featuring females. It led me on a journey that attached my thoughts to Smith Rumsey’s article “What can we afford to lose?” to that of a vintage inkwell and its owner, who had not been forced to lead the same type of life even a hundred years earlier as the Peruvian girl lamenting about being forced to marry too young. A couple of days later, the song about Initiating Pgymy Girls ladened my spirit after recognizing the location by its current name. I have witnessed far too many life stories of former citizens who had been forced into sexual slavery and only started their journey to literacy as mature women.
worth or worthless?
vintage inkwell
depicts a female’s life
integrity of authentication
My twenty-year self stepped into the upstairs bedroom where I found this antique Quimper faience inkwell lying next to the ink, dip pen, a sharpened quill, and paper on a small oak writing table—living in a small French village in a house furnished from the start of the 1900s makes one custodian of endless treasures not yet rediscovered. “This collection [was] intrinsically valuable by virtue of being comprehensive and containing much information that [was] essentially unpublished (Smith Rumsey, 1999), documenting the life of an emancipated woman from the context of the twentieth century.
But, on the other hand, for my husband’s aunt, approaching her centenarian, her home and the content had slipped from significance. Luckily, some of the histories of the lived lives still resided in the memory of another village centenarian. Artifacts tell few tales.
In comparison, the house’s 150 year-history of property titles was still intact and could be quickly retrieved from the governmental archives since the stone house had been built post-Napoleon.
“The respect des fonds – the principle of preserving the organic integrity and original order of collections at the basis of the idea of the archive as a lieu de mémoire”
(Kingston, 2011, p.2).
Years later, on our return to Canada, that house’s content was severely edited to a few shipped boxes: the inkwell, the small oak writing table, and the livre de famille among the artifacts that journeyed to Canada.
… and what does this have to do with Golden Records?
The Voyager’s Golden Record Project, like the French house, archives the life of the ordinary and not the powerful. The difference between the two archives is that the project curated a cultural portrayal of humanity for a future galactic audience during the American feminism movement. On the other hand, perhaps personal archives, individual papers, photographs, and artifacts from the life of an emancipated female in the protofeminism period of France is the start like Carter Woodson did for the African American community, of community-based fair and just representation of an activist population (Smith Rumsey, 1999, 2015) not yet privileged.
The challenge of the Golden Record curation was to create a lossy compression to slim further the 1977 cultural curation to the building blocks of the entire image (Sheheta, 2019) of humanity while still maintaining trust in and integrity of the curation. Contrastingly, the challenge of paring the house archive came down to the cost of shipping and documenting century-old artifacts for permission to remove patrimony from the French territory.
“The whole purpose of memory, of remembering things, is so that the brain can build this model of the world … a cultural model of what is right and wrong in the world.”
(Dr. Smith Ramsey, 2019)
Criterion 1: a major share of the world’s population
Three music selections feature the female voice. The most known, Mozart’s Magic Flute, has a storyline where the Queen of Night, a dark, evil female, rages about Sarastro, the male golden sun god, who has abducted her daughter. Likes the females in the pygmy, and Peruvian songs, the Queen of Night’s daughter, has reached puberty and is waiting to be initiated into womanhood.
“Magic Flute,” Mozart, Austria Eda Moser – Queen of the Night, Germany
“Wedding Song “- Peru
Pygmy Girls Initiation Song – Zaire
Ironically, a little over 100 years separated my daughter from her great French aunt, who was educated, employed, and a homeowner. However, in those 100 years and even with suffrage and the female liberation movement, females were only worth 11% of the music selection in the 1977 Voyager’s Golden Record Project, even though females make up 49.6% (World Atlas, 2021) of the world’s population. Moreover, the message cast them into traditional subservient bondage.
“Scientists are creatures of the culture in which they swim and grow up, and so … also are vulnerable to the siren sung which … call[ed] chauvinism, geocentrism or anthropocentrism.
(Sagan, 2018)
Criterion 2: a significant share of the world’s population
By selecting a 49.6% share of the population as a criterion, it seemed logical to continue choosing tracks that reflected other significant population groupings. Therefore three groups with significant shares were selected: China (18.0%), India (17.5%) (World Atlas, 2020) and youth (16%) (DESA, 2019). Again, the goal was to select pieces that would have potentially spoken to these populations. Finally, the three tracks would also be considered classics in their genre.
“Flowing Streams” -Kuan P’ing-hu, China
“Jaat Kahan Ho”, Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar, India
“Johnny B. Goode,” Chuck Berry, United States of America
Criterion 3: instrumentations
At first glance, it would appear that these tracks have little commonality being from various countries, genres, and periods; however, the collection happens to represent instrumentation. Additionally, these pieces filled in missing elements. For example, the predominately Muslim country of Azerbaijan works as a counterbalance to Bach, who wrote religious works for the Lutheran and Roman Catholic faiths. Another example is that while Morning Star and Devil Birds are excellent examples of instrumentation, they also represent the Australian continent.
Bach, WTK 2, no 1, Germany; Glenn Gould, piano, Canada
Morning Star, didjeridu and Devil Bird, male voice, Australia
Ugam – bagpipes, Azerbaijan
Tchenhoukoumen, percussion, Senegal
Like the rhizome [these criteria] spread out endlessly, filling in available spaces and sending out new shoots that connect to any other point on the rhizome.
(Leander and Boldt, 2012. p. 25)
References
Department of Economics and Social Affairs, Population Division (DESA). (2019). International youth day, August 12, 2019. United Nations. http://www.unpopulation.org/
Kingston, R. (2011). The French Revolution and the materiality of the modern archive. Libraries & the Cultural Record, 46(1), 1–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23053618
Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22-46.
Moïse, R. (2014). “Do pygmies have a history? Revisited: The autochthonous tradition in the history of equatorial Africa 1. In Hunger-Gathers of the Congo Basin (1st ed., pp. 85–116). Routledge.
fabriqué à partir d’une des technologies préhistoriques
Let’s find out.
… with tales beyond our dreams
découverons-le.
… vestiges de la technologie avec des histories au-delà de nos experience
Space Chaser (2021)
The bag, a Museum of History of Technology
Le sac, un musée d’histoire de la technologie
Speech-to-Text
Many perspectives can examine the contents of the bag for example we could view it as a museum of the history of technology.
The bag has been created from leather a prehistory technology. As a result, it predates the other technologies within it, such as the textile in the mask, the paper of the voter’s card, and lenses in the glasses. Yet leather has reinvented itself through time from clothing, parchment, leather-bound books, and now it is seen as safe sleeves for the cell phone.
We need archeologists to inform of leathers beginning. Since a space chaser sings “the past swallows up those who could remember.” No oral records exist. The lyrics reflect the gist of getting the skins [Gnanadesikan] argument that the spoken word is fleeting.
However, this would not be the case if we wanted to look at the future of leather instead it could be examined through a digital written copy report like that of the UN’s Industrial Development Organization.
It would be worth following these technologies, from the first inklings, three mediation processes expanded by Boulter, two modern and T. Ancient writings, whether found on stone, tablet, scroll or codex have a signal I was going to ask in states, the potential to speak directly to us, as long as we understand the code. First, however, it is essential to remember Kress’ argument that being quotation access to the power of authorship is strictly governed and quotations; that is the say, written text Represents the elite and their power.
The Oldest Human Craft
Le plus ancien métier humain
Unicode - French
Il existe de nombreuses perspectives dans lesquelles on peut examiner le contenu du sac. Par exemple, nous pourrions le considérer comme un musée de l'histoire de la technologie.
Le sac a été confectionné en cuir, une technologie de la préhistoire. En conséquence, il est antérieur aux autres technologies qu'il contient, telles que le textile dans le masque, le papier de la carte d'électeur et les verres dans les lunettes. Pourtant, le cuir s'est réinventé au fil du temps à partir des vêtements, du parchemin, des livres reliés en cuir, et il est maintenant considéré comme un étui sûr pour le téléphone portable.
Nous avons besoin d'archéologues pour informer du début du cuir. Car comme le chante Space Chasers, "le passé engloutit ceux qui pouvaient se souvenir". Il n'existe aucune trace orale. Leurs paroles reflètent l'essentiel de l'argument de Gnandesikan selon lequel la parole est éphémère.
Cependant, ce ne serait pas le cas si nous voulions regarder l'avenir du cuir. Au lieu de cela, il pourrait être examiné par le biais d'un rapport écrit numérique comme l'Organisation pour le développement industriel des Nations Unies.
Il vaudrait la peine de suivre ces technologies, depuis les premiers soupçons, le processus de remédiation exposé par Bolter, jusqu'à la modernité. Les écrits anciens, qu'ils soient trouvés sur pierre, tablette, parchemin ou codex, ont, comme l'affirme Gnanadesikan, le potentiel de nous parler directement, tant que nous comprenons le code. D'abord, cependant, il est essentiel de se souvenir de l'argument de Kress selon lequel « l'accès au pouvoir d'auteur est strictement réglementé » ; c'est-à-dire que les textes écrits représentent l'élite et son pouvoir.
Demarketizaton of Education
Démarchéisation de l’éducation
Unicode – English
It moves us to another perspective, that of the social context. The bag also represents a diversity of communication channels in the manner advanced by The New London Group. Besides the seen print and digital forms of communication, the bag exemplifies two official languages in the Election Canada’s voter’s card. Unseeable is that phone, and within the wallet bag, there are snippets of two mother tongues, cultures and traditional literacies from France and Canada. Therefore, negotiating differences is part of life. But, the New London Group raised the question of how do we ensure that differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success? The first step would be to stop devaluing the education system. Appreciating instructors and public education would provide increased funding instead as Bayne & Ross advanced the education model’s marketization, leaning and gigging. Thus the instructors would receive adequate professional development. As a result, the students would have a better opportunity to receive a quality public education that prepares them as citizens and the future of our society.
Cela nous amène à une autre perspective, celle du contexte social. Le sac représente également une diversité de canaux de communication à la manière avancée par The New London Group. Outre les formes de communication imprimées et numériques, le sac illustre deux langues officielles sur la carte d'électeur d'Élections Canada. Invisible est ce téléphone, et dans le sac portefeuille, il y a des extraits de deux langues maternelles, cultures et littératies traditionnelles de France et du Canada.
Par conséquent, la négociation des différences fait partie de la vie. Mais, le New London Group a soulevé la question de savoir comment s'assurer que les différences de culture, de langue et de genre ne sont pas des obstacles à la réussite scolaire ? La première étape serait d'arrêter de dévaluer le système éducatif. L'appréciation des instructeurs et de l'éducation du public fournirait un financement accru à la place, car Bayne & Ross a fait progresser la commercialisation, l'apprentissage et les concerts du modèle d'éducation. En conséquence, les étudiants auraient une meilleure chance de recevoir une éducation publique de qualité qui les prépare en tant que citoyens et l'avenir de notre société.
References
les références
Bayne, S. & Ross, J. (2007, December). The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: A dangerous opposition. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, Brighton, UK. https://www.academia.edu/827541/The_digital_nativeand_digital_immigrant_a_dangerous_opposition
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Chapter 4:The breakout of visuals. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011). The First IT Revolution. Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet, 25, 1–10.
The existence of the different entry points affords co-construction of the knowledge between reader and writer. The convention of the traditional page’s one entry point (Kress 2005) channels the reader to the writer’s single pre-packaged interpretation. However, Kress goes on to state that technology had opened the construction and structure of books. For example, SocialBooks (Douglas, 2015) images, interactive stories, and marginalia open the reading process.
However, bringing texts to life requires more than thinking about content. It requires inventive ideas about creating and design and keeping up with the affordance of digital hardware and software.
I started to translate a recently read book and its plot into the emojis code. I choose to attempt this unknown code without assistance, even though https://emojitranslate.com/ exists and ended up with three versions.
version iii
social reading in chat medium
line breaks demarcate utterances (McCulloch, 2019)
second-orality of high tech culture (Ong, 2002)
images display information (Kress, 2005)
heterogeneity in form and content (Bolter, 2001)
The problem of how to punctuate the iconic text brought forth the question: Why am I creating the emojis story with word processor programs and not a messaging app? Thus, the third version examines the task from WhatsApp, a cultural space of memes, gifs, and emojis. Texting works as an expansion of speech. The text utterance combines heterogeneity of form and content (Bolter, 2001). Text, emojis, images, links (video, audio and webs) are cobbled together in a phrase. Therefore, the writer is not thinking in terms of independent and dependent clauses when the thought is complete. The ideas are located in a speech bubble. Finally, the sender hits send, breaking the utterance into thinking streams without the need for punctuation.
Internet speak has freed itself of the idea of the canonical text (Scholes, 1992), where participants can play by layering tone and expressions on the literal words. However, the emojis have a subtle relationship with each other (McGulloch, 2019), so while the third version may have a better look, the emojis manipulation would not be considered authentic by the millennials in this shared space.
version ii
iconic code via static writing program
adding in the affective layer, which was the entire point of the short story
The second version applied my knowledge as a second language instructor. Translations require fluency in both codes. While I have fluency in English, my emojis literacy would be pre-productive. I am not unaware of its existence; yet, my daily written digital verbalization (formally and informally) on a networked screen rarely comprises emojis. The Institute of the Future of Book (n.d.) might attribute this to my working in an academic institute created in the age of print that informs the structure and rhythm of my work. In other words, my preference for words is ‘old school.’
Therefore to reduce the high cognitive demand involved in producing an intelligible text, I resorted to the English labels of each emoji from https://emojikeyboard.io. I also loosened the English syntactic arrangement, not always read left to right with an agent doing an action. I also tried to incorporate emojis to capture the story’s point about a child’s trust and awe in a parent out of step with society, leading to shame. But, unfortunately, I still thought about the static paper medium with the mode of writing. As I still set out the story in sequential order. However, the medium of the screen and the image mode changes semiotic (Kress, 2005). So I stumbled trying to get the icons to narrate the story even though images display information. Kress (2005) claims that “The logic of space works differently: In the message entity (the image), all elements are simultaneously present …and so it is the viewers’ action that orders the simultaneously present elements concerning” the framing of the space (p. 16). So I decided to try a third version.
version i
translation: alphabet to iconic code
translation reduced the storytelling to the basic level of actions (Kress, 2004)
“Writing …is a particularly pre-emptive an imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself” (Ong, 2002, p. 11). Thus, the first version was grounded in written English. I translated the English Roman alphabetic code into the iconic code. I merely swapped the English words for icons that best represented the label. The syntax remained English. The result of framing was a basic simple agent action object pattern in an independent clause-like structure. I punctuated to indicate the end of the thought and paragraphed for the same reason: one idea per sentence and one thought per paragraph. Making more elaborate structures was difficult as the icons represented content and not function words that hold complex sentence structures together.
The book chosen was the last I read for pleasure. I asked myself the salient events and temporal order (Kress, 2004) and attempted to hold to it. Moreover, by adding to this strategy, the substituting of the code resulted in clumsy, stiff unintelligible thought patterns that had a minuscule likelihood of not being discernible to an audience. Furthermore, it in no way captured the gist of the author’s point for the short story. Thus I thought it would be good to treat emojis like a legitimate written code and reattempt the venture.
concluding thoughts
How will technology impact books? As technology changes, so will the affordance available to the book, as technology has always been implicated in writing (Haas, 1996). As a result, icons, marginalia, and images, part of medieval manuscripts, have resurfaced. In addition, there will be other features that will be incorporated into the future electronic book, such as social reading. However, words and physical book will still have their place in our lives.
references
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Chapter 4:The breakout of visuals. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ong, W. J. (2002). Chapter one: The Orality of language. In Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 1–11). Routledge.
Scholes, R. (1992). Canonicity and Textuality. In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Language and Literatures (2nd ed., pp. 138–158). Modern Languages Association of America.
The Institute for the Future of the Book. http://www.futureofthebook.org/
