Category Archives: ETEC 540

ETEC 540 Final Project

For my final project, I worked with fellow student Kayli McKay to develop an online educational resource for grade 4-7 classrooms.

Our website includes a teacher page with resources (audio, visual, audio-visual, and print), curriculum connections for both Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and suggestions for scaffolding and student projects. There is also a student page that contains a brief written introduction to the importance of muskeg ecosystems and a choose your own adventure style game that was designed to introduce students to the plants and animals of North American peatlands and emphasize their human uses and/or role in the ecosystem.

My hope is that through the use of various modern text technologies we can inspire students to learn about Canada’s natural landscapes, and help them to appreciate the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the environment.

The website was made using Weebly and the game was built in Google Forms.

You can access the website here: https://muskeggame.weebly.com/

Link to Task 8: Golden Record Curation with Selene

After reading Selene’s Golden Record Curation assignment, I decided that I had to link to it because it was so outside of the box. Like myself, Selene felt it was important to include representation of cultures from all parts of the globe. To do this, she “broke the rules” and selected more than 10 tracks. After all, if the reason we need to pare down 27 tracks to 10 is due to space constraints, why not just edit the tracks for time? I admit, I had not read Selene’s rationale before looking at the class data. When I saw that she had selected all 27 tracks, I thought that it must have been an error and disregarded that data.

Selene’s post prompted me to do some more thinking about what I would actually recommend if I were involved in the curation of a new Golden Record. I really appreciate the idea of trying to remove any cultural bias. Perhaps we could make a future Golden Record that is less anthropocentric. What if we included sounds of different animals all over the world? Or maybe recordings of different weather (e.g. rain, wind, thunder). If a future record is still in audio format, there are so many interesting sounds on Earth other than carefully composed human-made sounds. Why not give intelligent life information about the planet as a whole? After all, if natural history has taught us anything, it is that the dominant life forms on the planet tend to change over time.

Selene’s Golden Record Curation

Thanks for giving me so much to think about, Selene! Keep thinking outside of the box.

Link to Task 9: Golden Record Curations with Al

I was drawn to Al’s analysis of the Golden Record Curation data because in reading his reflection, I realized I had found a fellow scientist. As a laboratory coordinator in higher education, I spend a lot of time talking with students about data analysis and topics such as correlation vs. causation. Al explained our inability to know why anyone chose the tracks they did in terms of untestable hypotheses. The clear and concise explanation of his methods of data manipulation were easy to read, and I was fascinated by the way he used the filters in the Palladio app to explore potential cultural biases by looking at the number of times western songs were chosen. The idea of cultural bias had crossed my mind, but I wasn’t sure how to go about looking into it. In the end, I believe that we both came to the same conclusion: that the data can only show us what was chosen and how often, but cannot give us an answer as to the motivation of the humans who chose the tracks.

Al’s Viz of the Golden Record Curations

Great post, Al! If you ever do design a T-shirt with the slogan, “5 out of 4 people don’t trust statistics,” I will order one of them 🙂

Link to Task 4: Potato Printing with Elvio

I chose to link to Elvio’s potato printing because we seemed to take a very different approach to the task, but still ended up with a similar product. I was also interested to see that we both took photographs of our supplies and stamps along with the finished prints! Elvio chose to write the word ‘Crazy’ in mostly lowercase letters with nice curves, like a typewriter, whereas I took the easier route and wrote ‘PLANT’ in all caps to maximize the number of straight lines I could cut. I did all my planning in my head ahead of time over the course of a couple days (sometimes I do my best thinking while I am trying to fall asleep), and then in about 20 minutes one day while I was waiting for supper to cook,  I spontaneously started carving the potatoes. It seems that Elvio was much more careful and tried to draw out the pattern on his potatoes before beginning to carve them.

A comparison of the two prints:

 

In the end, I think that Elvio came up with a more uniform set of prints and his lettering looks more like a hand-written sign. He wrote, “I agree with the argument that Gutenberg’s invention was successful because he replaced and mimicked the look of existing text.” I think that Elvio has done the same. If I were creating letters for print that were in less ephemeral medium, I think I would have taken into account the aesthetics and readability of the lettering.

Elvio’s Crazy Print

Thank you Elvio for the idea of using this task in a classroom setting. In my plant physiology lab, I have an entire activity that centres around osmosis in potato tissues… perhaps I can work on integrating printing into the lab so we can use the remaining potato tissue for something!

Link to Task 6: Emoji Story with Kayli

Warning: spoiler alert for both mine and Kayli’s emoji stories!

I chose Kayli’s emoji story because I immediately knew what movie she had chosen based on the title, even though I have never seen the film myself. An ant emoji and a male face emoji… it had to be Ant Man! I wondered for a while if I had an advantage in guessing it since I’ve been chatting with Kayli for the past year or so and know that she likes superhero films. But when I read the comments made by a couple of our colleagues who had seen the movie, I realized it was just a very straightforward depiction of the story.

We both took a similar approach in that we tried to choose recognizable stories and ended up using multiple emojis to represent a single character. In order to introduce Russel, the nature scout in the movie Up!, I used a tent and a boy emoji. Both of our stories had short titles that were easy to convey. One major difference between our emoji stories was that Kayli seemed to do more of a summary to give an overall impression of the important plot points, while I attempted to include the whereabouts of each character throughout the whole story. In retrospect, I think this made my story a bit harder to follow! Luckily, the iconic house with balloons managed to get my point across.

Kayli’s Emoji Story

Thanks for the fun story, Kayli! Nice work.

Link to Task 7: Mode Bending with Sage

When I first looked at Sage’s redesign of the What’s in my Bag? task, I wondered how she would use ASMR to get the point of the assignment across. Once I watched the video, I realized how effective it was! The combination of the whispering and the sounds such as the pop of the cap on the lipstick tube took an assignment that began simply as a photograph and text and made it all about the audio. The soft sounds and quiet speech had me leaning into my laptop so I could hear what was coming next.

In her post, Sage wrote, “Personally, the most challenging element of this redesign process was overcoming the absolute silliness I felt while recording myself whispering about my various items.” I could relate to this as I had never before made a TikTok, but really leaned into the silliness of adding animated stickers to the still parts of the video. In a way, however, it was actually kind of freeing to just play a little bit when we design tasks. Perhaps Sage cracking a smile while whispering or me giving a photo of myself silly animated glasses will make us seem more human and approachable to our students. Who knows?

A couple of things that differed between our redesigns was that Sage’s leaned very heavily into the audio part of the audio-visual medium, whereas mine had a bit more emphasis on the visual. Additionally, using TikTok meant that my video had to be short, so I tried to cram a lot of content into 2 minutes. Sage’s video was posted on YouTube, so she was able to take her time, which I think was an excellent choice as it added to the calm, relaxing nature of the video.

Sage’s ASMR Redesign of Task 7

Thanks for sharing your creativity, Sage. I loved it!

Link to Task 3: Voice to Text with Agnes

I was immediately drawn to Agnes’ voice to text story because it is all about moving from Ontario to Saskatchewan. I have lived in Saskatchewan my whole life and was excited to read about the perspective of someone who hasn’t always been here. I was so happy to hear about her experiences with the sunrises, sunsets, and distant horizon in the Land of Living Skies. I really think the skies are one of the highlights of the province, and sometimes I take it for granted. A few years ago, I participated in a science outreach program in a small town southeast of Saskatoon. One of the other volunteers was a new international M.Sc. candidate at our university and had just come to Saskatchewan the week before. Despite the minus 30 C weather, he asked more than once to pull over on the highway during our long drive to photograph the sky. It was then that I remembered just how lucky I am to see it all the time!

Agnes used the voice to text tool embedded in Google Docs, whereas I chose to use Speechnotes. It seems that we had similar experiences with the output generated by the technology as we both noted a lack of punctuation and inappropriate capitalization of words. In my story, the word “Garden” was capitalized multiple times and in Agnes’ story the words “Farmland” and “Community” were capitalized as well. I wonder if the technologies picked up on a certain cadence in our voices or some other subtle nuance in our speech patterns to decide that those words sounded like proper nouns. I got the impression that we both spoke a bit unnaturally while dictating to the laptop, which might have had an effect.

Link to Agnes’ Voice to Text Story

Thanks for sharing your story, Agnes! I enjoyed reading it.

Task 12: Speculative Futures

For my speculative futures, I imagined that each student was assigned an artificial intelligence (AI) personal digital assistant (PDA) on the day they started school. To be honest, I found this task quite difficult. I have never been much of a creative writer, and often find myself getting worried about whether my stories are believable. So I challenged myself to take a leap outside of my comfort zone and write a little narrative about the worst-case scenario and the best-case scenario of introducing AI companions to children.

In the dystopian future, the PDA is fully integrated into the students’ everyday lives as a constant companion. The AI has access to their physiological information and learns to anticipate what each person wants or needs. The students learn to rely on the PDA and lose motivation to learn things themselves. They exist in a state of social isolation because they are unable to make friends that understand them on the same level that their AI assistant does. An adult is present in the school for supervision, but does not actively participate in lesson planning or teaching.

In the utopian future, the PDA is designed to act as a tool to facilitate learning. In classrooms that emphasize collaboration, creation, problem solving, synthesis and understanding, the AI acts as a teaching assistant. Although the PDAs can provide tailored lessons for students, the school board has noticed students respond much better to comfort or encouragement from a living entity, so continues to hire teachers as classroom facilitators. Using the physiological data and knowledge of the student’s thought patterns, AI can predict situations where the student would learn best through group activities and communicate with the other PDAs and teacher to form ideal learning groups. The PDAs are programmed not to simply answer questions that students have, but rather to give the students a series of prompts to help them recall prior knowledge and make their own connections.

 

Dystopian Scenario

It is the year 2052 and George sits alone in the high-speed shuttle that will take him to school. He doesn’t understand why he has to go to school, and says as much to his PDA and best friend, Ben.

George: Fifth grade is stupid. Why do I have to go?

Ben: Because it is required by law.

George: Well, still. What’s the point of studying? You can just look up the answer if I want to know anything.

Ben: Perhaps the adults wish for you to have social experiences.

George: But why? None of the other students understand me the way you do. I don’t want to be friends with them.

Ben: Understandable. I do have superior intelligence and insight into your emotional state. Do you want to hear a joke?

Ben has calculated that George is in a bad mood, but knows exactly what joke to tell to cheer him up. George smiles as he leaves the shuttle and shuffles into the classroom to sit at his desk. He brings up the morning assignment on his tablet without greeting any of his fellow students.

George: Okay Ben, let’s get this math assignment done. What is four squared?

Ben: 16.

George: Nice. How about six squared?

Ben: 36.

George: Two cubed?

Ben: 8.

They continue on like this until the assignment is complete. George gets 100%. Then George asks Ben to play him a video. Ben selects the video with the ideal amount of action to keep George engaged. They watch the video together and talk about how cool the fight scenes are until an alarm rings, alerting the students to open their tablets to the next assignment. George rolls his eyes as he scans the science assignment. He can’t wait until it is time to go home and play video games with Ben. 

 

Utopian Scenario

It is 2052 and Amelia is excited for her school day. She skips into the classroom and sits on one of the cushions in the middle of the room, next to her friend Dave. The teacher greets the class and tells them it’s time to start on math. Amelia starts up her tablet and the day’s assignment is displayed on the screen before her. Her PDA, who she has named Barb, indicates that she thinks Amelia will do best working on this assignment independently.

Amelia: What is four squared? Hmmm. Barb, can you help?

Barb: Of course. Do you remember what is special about a square?

Amelia: Um, all the sides are the same length?

Barb: That’s right. So if one side is four…

Amelia: All the other ones are too!

Barb: Exactly. Can you draw that?

Amelia sketches out a square on her tablet and marks 4 on each side.

Amelia: So, four squared is a square that has 4 on every side?

Barb: Yes, in a sense, but how will you write that as an equation?

Amelia looks again at her drawing, and adds a grid pattern to the square. She is lost in thought for a moment.

Amelia: If I make it a grid like this, there are 4 squares on the top, 4 on the side, and… 16 total! And 4 X 4 = 16! Does this mean four squared is 4 X 4?

Barb: You’re correct! Well done.

Amelia: I like math. It’s like a puzzle!

The teacher comes around and checks on the students periodically. Her instructor’s tablet has an app that the AIs can use to notify her if a student is particularly frustrated or having an emotional reaction to the work.

Amelia continues working on her assignment until the teacher announces outside time. The students all follow the teacher out into the schoolyard for some fresh air, chatting back and forth about what they did on the weekend.

Task 7: Mode Bending

While revisiting Task 1: What’s in my Bag?, I thought about the purpose of the assignment. My favourite thing about the task was getting to know a little bit more about my classmates, their interests, and their everyday lives by seeing the different items they carry on a regular basis. My goal with the redesign was to stay true to the original task and use a personal object to convey information about myself, but to use a different medium. I decided to change up the assignment by focusing on a single item in my bag and using it to inspire a short audiovisual story about something that is important to me, why it is important, and how it influences my actions. I made the video using the In Shot video editing app on my iPhone, then uploaded it to Tik Tok as a way to share it. I had intended to spend some time learning how to use Tik Tok this summer so I could incorporate it as a teaching tool in my lab this fall, and this task gave me the push I needed to figure it out.

Something I enjoyed about this redesign is how specific I could get. I was able to target a single item in my bag, then a specific feature of that item, and use that feature to tell a story. This could be done for any item in any person’s bag, and I think each of us could come up with dozens of different stories that somehow relate to the physical items we carry with us. I spent quite a long time deciding which item to use and which story I wanted to tell. Perhaps a fun future project would be to make a series of short videos; possibly one video for each item in the bag. One of the best parts of redesigning the task to an audiovisual medium was how easy it was to insert my personal humorous touches. I feel like using my voice instead of text to convey my story made it more personal.

Some of the challenges I encountered with the redesign included learning how to voice-over a video with multiple short clips and making sure that I had the right video clips to fit my narrative. It was very time-consuming and had specific hardware and software requirements (e.g. camera, microphone, editing software, internet access) that would need to be taken into consideration if I were to incorporate this type of activity into my classroom.

Overall, I thought that mode-bending was a very useful exercise. The products of both Task 1 and Task 7 fulfilled the same purpose, but the process of creating them used different skill sets.

 

@that.biology.teacher

What can the itwms in my bag tell you about my interests? This video is part of ETEC 540 Task 7.

♬ original sound – that.biology.teacher

 

Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data

My responses to the Golden Record Curation Quiz in Task 8 were similar enough to those of Jessica, Jocelyn, Katie, Kayli, and Sage, that the six of us were placed in a community.

On our websites, each of us provided an explanation of how we selected 10 of the 27 original Golden Record tracks, detailed below.

  • Jacey (me): representation of human diversity including geography, gender, race, social status, and language of musicians
  • Jessica: representation of different cultures and musical styles, sound quality was a factor
  • Jocelyn: representation of different cultures, inclusion of both instrumental and vocal tracks
  • Katie: representation of each inhabited continent, priority given to human voice, tracks with the most global influence
  • Kayli: representation of all humanity, each continent, and songs old and new
  • Sage: pertinence to the human experience, wealth of information, and decipherability of tracks

Once I loaded the class data into the palladio app, I spent quite a bit of time playing around the visualization. Perhaps because of my training as a scientist, I really enjoy creating images that summarize data points. One of the first things I did was move around the names of the community members to minimize overlap of text and better see the connections, pictured below:

I then removed the names and connections and selected the option to weight the points. The following image shows the 19 tracks that were selected by at least one of us in the community. The different sizes of the circles associated with each track corresponds to the number of times the track was chosen. The largest circles represent tracks that were selected by all six of us and the smallest circles indicate tracks that were a unique choice.

And finally, because I couldn’t help myself, I made a little spreadsheet that summarizes which songs were chosen by whom. I noticed that in our rationales for our choices, we all mentioned trying to represent different countries, cultures, and human experiences, so I added a column that indicates on which continent the track was created.

It appears that we did quite a good job of representing all of the continents on Earth, with the exception of Oceania in a couple of cases. This, however, is understandable. There were not many tracks on the original Golden Record that originated in Oceania. The track listings did not show the location of origin in the visualization, but a viewer could likely assume our motive of cultural diversity just by seeing the titles of the tracks in various languages. Without listening to each track, however, a person analyzing the data would not be able to infer motives such as effort made to include both vocal and instrumental music, both male and female vocalists, both songs old and new, or the emphasis on sound quality and/or decipherability of the tracks. Even after listening to all of the chosen tracks, the analyst would still be just speculation about our motives. As for the tracks we didn’t choose, I don’t think that the data visualization could ever show why a specific track was not included. Personally, I focused so much on picking the tracks that fit into my set of requirements, that I didn’t spend much time thinking about why I excluded certain tracks. Upon reflection, I had a difficult time deciding to exclude some of the tracks and what it really came down to was personal preference. If two tracks checked all the same boxes of my requirements, I would select the one that I thought “sounded better”. I’m sure there are some subconscious reasons based on my own human experience that led to the decision, but if I can’t even put it into words, I doubt that data could ever show the reason.

One Important Takeaway From This Exercise

Within our community of six people, a total of sixty choices were made regarding which tracks should be included. The number of choices made was more than double the number of tracks that were available to choose from, so I would  have expected to see all 27 of them in our spreadsheet. However, a total of only 19 songs were chosen, 11 of them by at least half of us. This made me think about social media and how we mostly end up interacting with people in our online communities. These communities are often formed by people with similar interests or points of view, much like our community here was based on track choices. This exercise showed me how confirmation biases and misinformation spread so easily on social media. If the tracks were articles that we shared with one another, some of the articles would be shared over and over, while others would not be mentioned at all. Imagine that the articles (tracks) not being shared held opposing viewpoints to the ones we chose multiple times. The people within our community could internalize the information in those articles without ever being exposed to an opposing idea. This analogy really helped me understand the importance of consuming news from multiple sources outside of social media.