Task 12: Speculative Futures

Trista Ding, linked above, and I both chose to interconnect our utopia and dystopia speculative narrative for task twelve. I wonder if Trista has similar thoughts about the fantasy of a true utopia as I reflected upon based on her approach of toppling the utopia narrative discussed in part one. I chose to use Google Slides to display my narrative which let me more clearly intersperse my narratives, while Trista chose to use UBC blogs to display her narratives. I liked how Trista described the testing and learning environment in detail. This is something that my narrative lacked but was difficult due to my choice of having the story span decades (using the affordances of timelines and clarifying titles in Google slides). Trista, by choosing to focus on only a single day and character, was able to make her narrative concise, easy to follow and with rich details (without needing images or timelines). Both of our narratives leave the reader in some ambiguity as A.D.’s surgery is not discussed and in my narrative “abroad” is never defined.

Both of us struggle to see greater inclusive education in our narratives, likely due to the lack of support for children with disabilities currently in the classroom and a drive for efficiency and GDP growth from those in power rather than a focus on social supports. Both of us also see continuing socio-economic inequality in education as I mention differences in district schools and Tricia mentions a school entrance test and algorithm based at least partially on parental education and income. Again this may be reflected in what we see in the current classroom.

Some elements of the Utopia we share in our narratives such as integration of technology, earlier specialization of education, constructivism, and maker culture. I found it interesting that in Trista’s narrative that lecture and test based instruction is ongoing except with a personal robot rather than a human teacher. I did something similar with lecture being replaced by interactive modules. Using a human teacher to simply lecture is easily replaced by technology, including technology we have had for 100 years such as the radio. Earlier specialization in Trista’s narrative seems to include an element of student choice and occurs on the first day of school, whereas specialization in my narrative occurs at 12 years old and is completely driven by algorithm with no student choice. Earlier specialization has the possibility to enhance efficiency but leads to potential gaps in general knowledge or difficulty changing jobs (not an issue in our algorithm driven narratives).

Task 8 – Golden Record Curation

Winnie, linked above, was in community four with me for task nine when the data from this task eight exercise was analyzed.

We both focused on diversity, Winnie on cultural diversity and myself on a sampling from each inhabited continent. Winnie and I chose five songs in common that did not share a particular genre, culture or theme (however three were instrumental) exemplifying this diversity. We both questioned the current selection on the record particularly regarding the western bias (myself particularly about the amount of classical music). I remarked that music is highly cultural and personal and Winnie indicated that she based some of her selections on her personal preferences influenced by her background. Winnie and I have different cultural backgrounds but this didn’t lead to radically different choices in this assignment given our focus on diversity. If we both simply chose based on personal preferences, we may have seen more differences in music chosen, which would have been amplified further with a wider selection of songs. I also tried to reflect different time periods in my selections, which is likely reflected in Winnie’s choices as well but not directly stated (for example we both chose 2 European classical songs and Melancholy Blues from the 1920’s).

Winnie mentions that the aliens may only be able to hear or feel certain types of sounds and also reflected that in her music choice (attempting to afford accessibility to potential aliens). This is a good point that I missed, though I felt like the aliens may not appreciate the music due to cultural differences. Because I tried to get a diverse mix of songs, sung and instrumental, I also ensured a variety of sounds and rhythms in the end.

Task 7: Mode-Bending

Erin Duchesne, linked above, re-imagined her what’s in your bag challenge as a TikTok and I was inspired by her assignment when deciding to do my fake TikTok challenge on iMovie. I chose to use iMovie as I didn’t have a TikTok account and wasn’t sure about the ease of editing or importing on TikTok. However, using TikTok like Erin would have made it more real looking and limited me to 3 minutes of video.

I really like how Erin had edited her video together with short clips with the short text phrases, music, picture like clips and text to speech voice. It made the clip very engaging to watch for those with short attention spans compared to my 4.5 minute mostly music-less video. Adding background music to my video would have been difficult given some of the object sounds and the piano clip. The use of these various elements in Erin’s video required careful editing, as she describes, to ensure the short text was properly timed with the clip and the voice, whereas my editing could be more flexible. Also since Erin used text to voice and focused on the objects in the video she did not need to put her image or voice online maintaining her privacy online, an affordance of the technologies she chose. This would allow students who don’t feel comfortable filming themselves, like me, to create a video without being personally recorded. Neither of our videos shared near as much obvious information about ourselves as the original assignment, though my video had clips of my house and me that could be used to infer just as much if not more information than the original assignment.

The narration I provided in my video is likely able to be enjoyed without the visual, whereas Erin’s video would be more difficult to understand as a person with visual impairment as the objects are not identified audibly. On the other hand, a person with hearing impairments would be more likely to comprehend the written text plus the visual images of Erin’s video compared to my clips that lose meaning without the narration.

Task 6: An Emoji Story

Jordon Lovig, linked above, did the emoji story task for the book White Noise. As Jordon indicated the title was easy to demonstrate in emojis and was easy to decode as well. However, I then had to google if White Noise was indeed a book- I thought it was a horror film. Never having read the book, I turned to Wikipedia to get an idea of the plot to see if the other emoji’s matched. Wikipedia first told me the main character was a professor of Nazi history and was surprised not to see reference to that in the story such as German flag and wondered if I got the title incorrect, leading me to check the comments for the correct answer (Wikipedia, n.d.). The story did have a graduation cap which was likely meant to express the university. In fact, the first sentence might be describing the main character- a man at the university who is scared of death which is consistent with the reflection (Loving, 2022) and Wikipedia (n.d.). The second sentence likely covers the remaining “central themes of the work …. consumerism and paranoia in the media”(Lovig, 2022). The third sentence represents the catalyst of the story, a chemical spill (Wikipedia, n.d.) but the last sentence confuses me. Does it represent the people who died in the spill? Wikipedia (n.d.) doesn’t mention any further deaths. Could it represent the central theme of mortality being emphasized by Lovig (2022)? I also found it interesting there is no mention of the near murder by the main character or the son riding a tricycle across a highway mentioned by Wikipedia (n.d.), as particularly the near murder seemed like an important plot point.

I appreciated the brevity of the emoji story, mine was quite long as a tried to summarize 8 seasons of How I Meet Your Mother. Jordon and I took different approaches in our translation in that he focused more on central themes while I did a word by word translation summary. The novel, being more philosophical, might better lend itself to ideas rather than plot. Jordon also didn’t use punctuation to create compound emojis as I chose to, completing the exercise closer to its intended design. Jordon’s use of central themes may have also made use of compound emojis less important. I read through a few stories before I could find one I could figure out, which shows the challenges of this task but also the diversity of media consumed by ETEC 540 students.

References

Lovig, J. (2022, June 28). Task 6: An Emoji Story. UBC Blogs. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jordon540/2022/06/28/task-6-an-emoji-story/#comments

Wikipedia. (n.d.). White noise (novel). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel)

Task 4: Manual Scripts

Katherine Kelly, linked above, and I both chose to write a manual script. Katherine chose to write and reflect on a poem given to her by a student’s parent and I chose to write a historical fiction short story.  I decided to do a story because I felt like it would be more linear (as we could not use the copy/paste function of a word processor) but perhaps doing a reflection may have been better as there are fewer expected elements compared to a story. Overall I enjoyed her reflection and her use of a memory box to remind her of the good she does in the world is a great coping mechanism for a difficult day. I have pictures and cards in my office for the same reason.

Katherine chose to write in pen, while I chose pencil. She also lamented the visibility of mistakes in manual writing. She scribbled words out while I used an eraser that left visible marks. I think she would have been hard pressed to find a manual writing method that did not leave some evidence of mistakes. Choosing pen also made her words easier to read than my pencil choice. Katherine has excellent penmanship, which may be due to her use of manual writing daily in her classroom. We both longed for the affordances of the word processor particularly for editing such as being able to move sentences around, spell check and word choices changes. Being able to write iteratively is important to Katherine and I and was not granted by the use of manual writing (except as Katherine mentions by a complete rewrite).

Task 5: Twine Task

Jessica Presta, linked above, and I both focused on a simulation game for health professionals for the task five Twine. Jessica’s game focused on four cardiac arrest scenarios that a nurse may need to manage. Jessica exemplified the affordances of Twine by adding sound, gifs, and images which helped to create engagement with the Twine. I particularly liked that her images were a necessary part of the Twine (to see the heart rhythms) rather than just ornamental. This helped the user to engage in the whole scene presented and made the simulation more realistic. The sound effects added pressure as they simulated those alarms heard in the hospital.

Jessica indicated in her post “one of the limitations of this platform is the inability to link to content outside of the game for purposes of individual study or expanding on the concepts encountered in the game” (Presta, 2022). However my Twine was able to link to a variety of reference webpages by using a modified code I found to open a link in a new tab (<a href=”http://www.google.com”; target=”_blank”>Click here</a>) but the author did specify that it may not work in all browser configurations potentially leading to Jessica’s assertion (Greyelf, 2015).

Both of us also found that the exacting nature of the HTML coding in Twine was frustrating at times and both of us relied on resources and examples found online to use Twine to create our games. Jessica later posted the storyboard and html used in her game which helps to give back like those examples that we used initially.

References

Greyelf [username]. (2015, June). External links in Harlowe [Online forum post]. Twinery. https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/2977/external-links-in-harlowe

Presta, J. (2022, June). Task 5: Twine Task. UBC Blogs. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jpresta/2022/06/13/task-5-twine-task/