I chose to link Task 12 with Adriana’s speculative narratives of the AI planner. Her approach created an immersive experience into how AI may integrate with education in the near future. I felt like her Edison Learning curriculum planner, in particular, was similar to the Personalized Education Learning Experience I had come up with. In both cases, the student’s experience is tailored to their unique situation and needs. I think we both tried to speculate a future that is realistic within the next 30 years.

The use of AI in education has already begun. Bernard Marr published an article in Forbes outlining the various ways in which AI is and will be used to improve the future of education. He includes that AI will drive efficiency and streamline tasks for teachers, foster differentiated and individualized learning, improve education access globally, automate admin tasks and support students outside of the classroom. It feels like artificial intelligence was once a scary and dystopian type narrative where computers would take over and robots would be teaching our students. But looking at the possibilities that potentially fill in the gaps education now experiences including adapting to different learning styles and increasing access; it doesn’t seem so scary. I hope that we do see innovations like the ones Adriana and I presented for personalized education in the near-ish future. AI will never replace teachers but will hopefully improve their workloads and ultimately create the most effective learning environments for students.

The theme I felt to be most important in Task 7 was taking an available design and redesigning it to give it a new meaning that is our own. I was immediately drawn to Marwa’s Mode Bending task. She very creatively wrote a poem and used visuals to describe the items in her bag to express her unique being, daily life and culture. Her poem beautifully illustrates her experience, incorporating all five senses.

I struggled with this task myself and really wanted to force myself to represent the items in my bag in a creative way that, yes, used different modalities than task 1, but also in a way that redesigned the entire presentation of just translating what was visual and semiotic to audio form. I felt that Marwa followed a similar path and truly transformed her available design into something special that represented her in more ways than just what was in her bag. Thinking creatively can be challenging. However, when we do think creatively, I think the outcomes tend to produce a deeper representation of ourselves. It is to create something that is completely our own. If we all wrote a poem, they would all be very different and in many ways, they would be a deeper reflection of who we are; deeper than just a description of what is visual or what we see on the surface.

Marwa’s redesign brought me back to week 2 and week 3. While listening to her poem being read out loud, her accent made me think of the poem read by Christine de Luca and how the enunciation and dictation create meaning. If I read her poem, it would likely produce a different meaning. In her reflection, Marwa says that she is not a person with linguistic intelligence or poetically gifted, but I beg to differ. The way her poem was read, in her voice, in her accent, gave it beautiful meaning and I think that if it were read by someone else, that meaning and reflection of her would be lost. Her rhythm, voice (volume and tone) and enunciation were very soothing and combined with the music and sounds, I could close my eyes and paint a vivid picture.

Choosing poetry for this task also made me think of Task 3 and our experience with telling an unscripted story. Poetry is scripted (and can take a lot of time to script), however, it has structure, cadence, and rhyme which are components that help us remember the story. Ong (1982, p.34) describes this as “mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence”. So perhaps Marwa’s poem redesigns her bags contents, or the representation of her and her daily life, into something that would be appropriate for an oral culture!

References:

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London and New York: Taylor and Francis Group.

There are a few recurring themes in this course. One being “everything is not as it appears”. Weeks 8 through 12 explore the various ways in which connections are made in the relatively new (to language and literacy, anyways) digital world. The Web has taken on new meaning for me. As written in week 9, “ The web is content—a network of interconnected digital documents that use hyperlinks and metadata to establish such connections.” I mean, it’s literally a web of endless connections! Like a spider’s web! Huh, how about that? Out of this web of networks and hypertexts are born predictive algorithms that are meant to process data and give us predicted outcomes. The simple algorithms of predictive text on our phones are a small-scale example of what algorithms do.

I chose to link task 11 to Ian Lee’s blog post. I was interested in how he shared the predictive text of the selected, left, center and middle words on his device. My initial understanding of the assignment was to only select the middle predictions, which is what I decided to share in my own blog post. Interestingly, Ian experienced something similar to me (which I didn’t share in my reflection) where the middle predictive text option would lead to endless loops of the same sentence over and over again.  The middle seems to use the most frequently typed words following a certain other word. I also noticed a similar trend as Ian pointed out, when you add punctuation, the predictions become even more cyclic. If you add a period, it will always begin the new sentence with the most used first word, in his case, it was I, and thus begins the same sentence over and over again. When imagining a web of connections and algorithms that are based on calculations of trends, I think it’s easy enough to understand how a feedback loop happens causing a cyclic and repetitive outcome that doesn’t have any true meaning. It’s a simple example of why algorithms will never be perfect.

I related to Ian’s conclusion where he noted the importance of taking technology slow and reflecting frequently. I have a similar sentiment where these tasks have made me realize that we do need to speculate everything. The Web is vast and complicated and meaning cannot always be derived from calculated predictions. It kind of overlooks the depth we have as humans and just skims the surface of what is observable. So it’s very important to stay vigilant and keep the humanity in trying to understand the Web.

For my third link, I chose to link Task 6: An Emoji Story to Kirsten’s blog. Firstly, I loved Queen’s Gambit! Secondly, I thought it was interesting to see a different perspective in terms of embracing the use of emojis and visuals as a form of communication. As someone who often finds it difficult to express my emotions through speaking or text, I have found some solace in the use of new emoji and GIF technologies. Kirsten expresses feeling the exact opposite. Luckily, I don’t think we’ll ever be in a world where written text is obsolete, and emoji’s take over

This link made me think about a Teachers Tournament Jeopardy episode that I watched recently where one of the contestants shared an activity that he uses in his Grade 3 class: Emoji Checks. After looking into the activity more extensively, it is an activity used to gauge the way your students are feeling. It might be difficult for some students, especially younger ones, to express themselves and their emotions through text only. I thought that this was an interesting and innovative way to build emotional maturity skills. I think it really does open the door to other ways of communicating rather than close a door.

I resonated with the second part of Kirsten blog which approached the activity as a re-design of communication. It truly was a re-design of telling a story through text and “let […] pictures do the talking” instead. I feel like we are all learning to re-establish our fixed ways of communicating and incorporating different modes into our own meaning-making processes. Furthermore, it’s important to acknowledge that what we find meaning in and how we interpret any type of communication (written, spoken, visual..etc) may not be exactly the way another person does. Therefore, whatever we create may be interpreted differently. Both Kirsten and I touch upon this when concluding that how we went about interpreting a story and translating it through carefully curated images may hold a completely different meaning through someone else’s view.

For my second link, I chose to link Task 3: Voice to Text to Anne Emberline’s blog post. Her analysis of the voice-to-text appears before the actual activity and so I initially felt like she held similar sentiments and focused on similar aspects of oral vs written storytelling that I did. Then, when I scrolled to read her actual voice-to-text story, she had told her story about her path to take her MET degree which was exactly what my story was about!

Anne describes a telephone game she has been playing with friends where a person records a video of themselves telling a 25-minute story, sends it to another person who must watch it once and the record themselves re-telling the story before passing it on. As we know, the story often ends up completely distorted with details missing and events out of order. We play this game as children and learn the consequences of repeating stories, rumours or “gossip”. However, this type of storytelling has been (and still is in some cases) the foundation of many cultures around the world. I had mentioned in my own blog that these types of stories, passed on through generations, had to be of a specific form and structure to make them memorable. But I think that it is more than just memory that affects the evolution of a story that is re-told orally. What is more important to memory – fact or emotion?

One of the reasons stories change from person to person is because different people will focus on different parts of a story that is told. What you tend to find more interesting and more memorable will depend on many different demographics and experiences. Your age, gender, culture, education, race, where you grew up, who your friends were, what you experienced in your life will all play a role in what you may choose to remember when hearing a story. I read an interesting article by Breithaupt et al which explores what parts of a story increase the accuracy of it when retold in the Telephone game. According to the author’s findings, the preservation of effect, or move the listener emotionally, will increase the stability and accuracy of the story when it is retold, independent of the factual content of the story. In other words, the parts of the story that made people feel emotion were the parts that were remembered the best. They actually suggest that increasing the “surprisingness” (how shocking or surprising a story is) is a strategy to preserve the story in the telephone game. So it seems that when a story starts out as being quite neutral, it tends to become more distorted than when it starts out with a highly surprising narrative. I would be curious to experiment with the game that Anne plays with her friends and change the story type to see different outcomes!

References

Breithaupt, F., Li, B., Liddell, T. M., Schille-Hudson, E. B., & Whaley, S. (2018). Fact vs. affect in the telephone game: All levels of surprise are retold with high accuracy, even independently of facts. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2210.

I chose to link Task 1 with Chelan’s blog space for my first link. I think, for my first linking assignment, I am really looking for obvious links that I found myself personally relating to. When I first accessed her blog, I immediately was drawn to Chelan’s cover photo of a mossy cliff and a waterfall. I felt she already had a similar vibe. Upon accessing her Task 1 “What’s in your bag” assignment, my initial thought was “wow! I love her purse!” 😀

After taking the time to read her post, I related to nearly every point she made. So many changes have happened over the last year and this exercise reflects it in many ways. As many of us spend our days at home (or just from home to work and back again) we don’t need to carry very much. Only the essentials. Since all unessential activities, which are usually the activities we choose to do, are no longer a part of our lives, it can feel like we’ve lost parts of ourselves. I think both Chelan and I (and many many others) have expressed this in this particular activity. When the contents of our bags usually say so much about us, it seems that most peoples bags now look more alike than they ever have (essentials: mask, sanitiser, wallet, keys, chapstick). I feel like it also creates an under-representation of our actual literacies. As Chelan points out that her current contents do “not indicate much engagement in language and communication” as opposed to her pre-pandemic bag and therefore might make it seem like we are not engaging in the same literacies as we were pre-pandemic. Is this actually true?

Forbes published an article this March examining, through a commerce lens, how the pandemic has exposed our hierarchy of needs and how they’ve evolved over the last year. It makes me wonder how essential certain literacies are when it comes to survival. Being in a pandemic, you could say that there is a more intense focus on basic survival: don’t get sick, have enough food and water, keep your loved ones safe, maintain a secure income. There is a greater focus on basics than on higher-level fulfilment, which I think has created a shift in our general societal literacies. Certain types of literacies have had a more critical focus in the last year. For example, health and media literacy. While knowledge of viruses, immunity and vaccines have become more important, knowing how to navigate the wealth of contradicting information being reported online has become crucial. In addition, students are having to learn and teachers have been forced to teach through different mediums. Digital literacy has also been a highlight of the last year. Our modes of communication have shifted from in-person conversations to text and virtual meetings, which has great impacts on how we speak with each other. Waiting for students to join a zoom call creates a noticeably more awkward silence than waiting for students to enter a classroom where there are a dozen mini conversations happening at once.

All of that to say, I related to Chelan’s focus on pre-pandemic and mid-pandemic items in her bag. I think the difference can be seen physically but is also noticeable on a grander scale when considering literacy. I often wonder how things will shift when the pandemic is over. I have a sense that certain things will never really return to how they were. Education being one of those things.