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.