Items in video (links)

Mat&Nat Bag & Hershel Bag

Ghostly Garlic Turkey Day Salt – They used to be in the Okanagan but just recently moved to Alberta, BC. Jenn and Nick are the BEST people and truly make the best garlic product out there. Worth the shipping costs. Not exaggerating when I say I have 20 different bottles.

Blue Light Glasses – If you stare at a screen all day, highly recommend. You can now add a blue light lens on your prescription too on a lot of website.

Pastel Highlighters & Ink Joy Pens

Neocitran – I mean the video truly explains my love for this stuff, but again, not a doctor.

Small Wallet – honestly SOO worth the $11 and it comes in multiple colours/patterns

Benefits & Challenges of mode-bending

I personally think engaging in mode-bending encourages and fosters critical thinking skills. The New London Group (1996) suggest the importance of being able to adjust to cultural shifts in the way language is communicated. Being literate is no longer defined by reading and writing alone, which is where the term multiliteracies comes from (NLG, 1996). What I love most about mode-bending is that it gives the creator the opportunity to create authentic material that is relevant to their cultural context in a specific moment in time (NLD, 1996).

The biggest challenge of mode bending for me was thinking outside the box. We have been taught for many generations to follow explicit instructions and mode-bending is almost the opposite of this. Mode-bending is challenging primary methods of conveying information. Mode-bending is authentic and open to interpretation. I think to truly grasp the importance and value of mode-bending, having an open-mind is imperative. Often we are quick to judge different modes of information, but if anything, this assignment taught me that there is no right or wrong way of providing thoughtful, authentic, and meaningful information to the world. Perhaps mode-bending pin holes your target demographic, but I think a lot of modern media creation is meant for specific demographics anyways (and because the internet provides massive access to demographic groups it makes it much easier).

The biggest challenge for mode bending on a global scale would be access to new media, as suggested by Dobson & Willinsky (2009). Without access to new media, the affordance to bend semiotic modes becomes extremely complicated, if not impossible.

Redesign process

This process was challenging for me in the beginning. I struggled to decide what mode-bending meant to me and what type of product I wanted to create. I looked at a few examples online and saw the vastness of opportunity as both overwhelming and exciting. I chose to do an ‘unboxing’ vlog because the algorithm on my Facebook seems to think I love these videos and has been showing me more and more. The type of unboxing videos I watch are usually surprise purchases being unboxed. For example, someone will purchase a crate of lost mail or a mystery box of goods from eBay. I find these both entertaining and mindless, which makes for easy viewing.

Once I chose the mode of how I wanted to present my project I felt some of the stress dissipate. I wanted to create a product that used as many modes of design as possible and was fun to watch. I have a hard time listening to just audio so I knew I wanted to incorporate the visual aspect of a video. I purchased a stand for my phone from Canadian Tire and found it made a HUGE difference in how uniform the video looked (vs. propping it up on something or using my hand to hold the phone up). The editing definitely took the longest amount of time (behind choosing a mode of presentation). I used a free online editor called Kapwing and found it really user friendly. It also has a variety of pre programmed images, texts. audio and gifs. I used Canva to create some of my own images (such as the rankings and intro page). I wanted the video to be as authentic to legitimate unboxing videos as possible so I chose to add in prices and images depicting where to purchase the items. I find this really useful when I am watching a video and see something I would be interested in purchasing.

Design modes used (NLG, 1996):

• Original project – Visual
• Mode-bended project (multi-modal) – Visual, Gestural, Audio, Linguistic

References

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacyLinks to an external site.. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (pp. 286-312). Cambridge University Press.

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

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I found this task both frustrating and enjoyable (and had a great time getting my husband to read my story as I worked on it since we have been watching the TV show together). I ended up using the emoji keyboard that comes preloaded on iPhones. I typed the story in my notes and then e-mailed it to myself. When I copy and pasted it into e-mails the emojis did change slightly in appearance, but not enough for me to swap any of them out. I started with the title and laughed to myself as I realized how hard it was going to be to try and explain the show with the limited emojis that are available.

I used mostly ideas to construct the title and the plot description. I did this out of habit and also because a lot of the words I was looking for do not exist in emoji form. I assumed it would be easier to try and get the idea of the show across rather than try to represent certain words, which would have made it more of a riddle. Apple rid of their hand gun emoji in 2016 (Ortega, 2022) after controversy arose over Apple condoning gun violence. Because the show I chose to decipher is fairly violent, it made it challenging to convey those messages without having access to certain emojis. I found it really challenging to find emojis that represented verbs as well. For example, bite or eat was hard to represent.

Kress (2005) suggests that images are up for interpretation depending on which reader is the audience at a certain time. Compared to traditional written work, images leave interpretation to the imagination and how the reader connects those to the world using their life experiences. I love the use of emojis to connect to the life stories of different readers. Emojis are cross cultural as well, as they are their own language, that can be understood across the globe. However, depending on how the readers perceive certain emojis depends on culture, demographics, and society. For example “the angel or halo emoji (???? ) is regarded as threatening and a symbol of death in China, in Western cultures, it is used as a symbol of innocence. The applause emoji (????) is similarly different in different cultures. For example, while it symbolizes congratulations or praise in Western cultures, Chinese people consider it a symbol of making love.” (Erceber, 2022). From personal experience, one of the emojis I used, the smiley face with the hands up, can be interpreted as someone hugging or someone making a ‘yay’ gesture. I suppose those have similar meanings, but can mean completely different things depending on the context. In this case, the emoji is meant to represent a hug.

Honestly, who knows if anyone will guess it. If you are currently watching this show, you will DEFINITELY get it. But, if you have not seen it, chances are you definitely won’t.

References

Play my game here… at your own risk!

I had SO much fun creating this Twine game. I will be completely transparent in my disdain for following instructions, and yes… I understand the irony of this. Because of this quirk, I did not follow the YouTube video given by Ernesto, instead I searched for sources that I knew would work for me (explicit and mixed media – some YouTube, some website, etc.) For example, I searched how to change the font colour separate from how to link passages. I love explicit instructions that are chunked and easy to understand.

I created my story and then went back in and added gifs, changed colours, added tags, etc. I found that having a foundation of what my story looked like was less overwhelming then trying to write a passage and then format it. It was challenging for me to come up with a story I thought people would enjoy, and thus chose something from my life that I have lived. I also chose to expand on the hypertexts I used to include links to external sources. Bolter (2001) talks about the limitless nature of hypertext in the sense that using links within a book has confines, but using links within the internet has no bounds. I found this particularly interesting because I grew up reading the Give Yourself Goosebumps Series, which is a choose your own adventure book (Scholastic Kids, 2023). I understand what Bolter (2001) was touching on, in that the story only exists within those pages and nowhere else. With hypertext, stories can exist across such a vast area of the internet, it really is limitless.

I included hypertexts from Spotify, Amazon, Scholastic Kids, and YouTube (see if you can find them all).

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scholastic Kids (2023). Give yourself goosebumps series. Goosebumps. https://kids.scholastic.com/content/kids64/en/books/goosebumps/series/give-yourself-goosebumps.html

References for CSS/HTML (I did not put these in alpha order as I figured grouping them like this would be more meaningful for my classmates)

CSS/HTML coding for changing colours:

How to change the color of the background of a single passage? – Twine Q&A. (31 Aug, 2018). Retrieved February 12, 2023, from http://twinery.org/questions/27357/how-to-change-the-color-of-the-background-of-a-single-passage

Color codes:

Dixon, A. (2022). HTML color codes. https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

Changing text (alignment, size, colour):

Stockton WordPress Blog. (2015). A twine cheat sheet. https://blogs.stockton.edu/textscape/files/2015/04/A-Twine-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

DigitalExposureTV. (2018). Twine 2.0 – How to change main text colour [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_Zp2s0wgg8

Gifs:

https://tenor.com/