My Situation Prompt:

Describe or narrate a scenario about a curriculum found a decade into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to entertainment and elicit feelings of amusement. 

Setting the scene:

Ten years from now, society as we know it has collapsed. 

• Arc: 10 years from now
• Terrain: Entertainment
• Object: High School Curriculum
• Mood: Amusement

Framework from the game, The Thing From the Future

Task 12 ETEC 540 Speculative Future Comic Strip by Jill Schmidt

Reflections:

I tend to try and live in the present tense, otherwise I will worry too much about the future. It would be easy for me to lean towards a dooms day view of the future, such as the speculative prompt I was given.  I really appreciated the video introduction that Shannon Vallor (2018) gave to her new book The AI Mirror that comes out in the spring of 2024. I like that she brought a humanistic view to the future of AI, and called us to be good stewards of the devices and powers that we hold. I agree that AI is simply a mirror of our society. I appreciate her advice, and think that we should heed to it by washing the dirt off our own faces.

This was a challenging task in creative ways for me; both in terms of imaging a future conversation in a society that has collapsed and in terms of working on this comic strip in Canva. I  used a curriculum topic that I currently teach (globalization) and tried to image what amusing things teachers in the future might say about it.

I choose to hold hope for a future where humans take action for positive change when looking in the mirror!

Reference

Santa Clara University. (2018, November 6). Lessons from the AI Mirror Shannon Vallor [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UbpSoYN4k&t=625s 

The Thing From the Future. (n.d.). Situation Lab. https://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/

So, it looks like I was a bit too lenient with the drug dealers in my caseload! ????‍♀️ 

I think that I was trying so hard to not be biased that my decisions may have been impacted. The piece of data that I relied most on was the risk of violence. This simulation was a great example of how important it is to reflect on the many implications and consequences of relying on AI-informed decision making.  

As the Gimlet Media Reply All podcast (2022) reveals, the more data that is collected in an area (high crime neighbourhoods) the more details will be uncovered about the crimes and the more arrests will likely be made. The data then turns into a self-affirming cycle. 

Does this happen in education as well? My school has begun to try and crack down on a rise in students not completing their courses. We are now collecting more official data on students’ attendance by recording how many weeks behind students are in their asynchronous, online courses in our Student Information System (SIS). Every two weeks we need to record if our students are two or more weeks behind. The office then takes that data and uses it to make decisions about how to proceed. Usually, we start with support measures to see what is holding the student back from participating, but after several cycles of nothing changing on the student’s part, we move to more disciplinary actions such as reaching out to the provincial attendance board.  

I think that my school is doing a great job at using the initial data from the teachers, to inform the SIS. Over time I am sure that the built-in AI in our SIS will help the administration to find correlations between the types of registrations that tend to enroll and not complete courses and use that data to inform administrators to make enrolment decisions in the future. Thankfully, we are in the business of people (students); meaning I think there is less risk in allowing algorithms to take over our decision making. While I am not naive enough to completely overlook the fact that there are risks of being too data and budget driven, I do still believe that fundamentally our education system does still hold student success as a core value. 

There are many other areas of life that are vulnerable to the use of AI. For example, the lesson mentions “For many years, scientists and linguists have been in pursuit of replicating human speech and reasoning patterns in ways convincing enough that would make human and AI speech indistinguishable (Pena, 2023).” I have noticed in the news (see article referenced below) and on Tik Tok recently, there appears to be a rise in the number of people being duped by AI generated voices of their teenage or adult children in trouble begging for money during phone scams. I must admit this does make a little more conscious and cautious of the photos and videos that I post to social media. 

References 

Gimlet Media. (2022, September 23). #127 The Crime Machine, Part I. Reply All [Audio Podcast]. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all 

Pena, E. (2023, November 17). [11.3] A new breakout? Canvas. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/124246/pages/11-dot-3-a-new-breakout?module_item_id=5919144 

Phone scammers are using artificial intelligence to mimic voices. (2023, July 11). CBS News – Breaking news, 24/7 live streaming news & top stories. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artificial-intelligence-phone-scam-fake-voice/ 

Well, this activity certainly wasn’t subtle, even though the article Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI design (2011) claims that subtlety is your friend when trying to deceive users! It took me a long time to get past that first page. Everything about that User Inyerface was frustrating, from having to erase the instructional words to enter your password to having to click on the terms & conditions and watch it scroll ever so slowly to get to the bottom. Of course, I attacked it with the mindset of just doing the opposite of what it is asking so when that tactic only worked some of the time, I determined there was no real rhyme or reason. My favourite page was verifying that I was human by clicking on all the bows. 

I fell subject to deceptive UI this week when I clicked on a sale for Taylor Swift Merchandise. First, the website was set up to look exactly like Taylor’s authentic merchandise store. Second, there was a pop-up that had a countdown clock for the sale, which is also common in Taylor’s authentic merchandise store. However, after revisiting the website, I noticed that the countdown clock that had only about 2 minutes left on it when I checked out, had reset back to the original 20 minutes. So, at this point, I’m not very confident that I will get any merchandise arriving in the mail, and whatever does show up, won’t be authentic.  

This activity and the reading/videos from this week made me think about the ways in which I design my online courses. There are certain tools I use to force the attention of my students (my users) into preferred behaviours. For example, I have some hidden assignment submission boxes, they are linked to lesson books that must be viewed by the student before the assignment submission box appears.  

Tristan Harris’ TED video (2017) is alarming to me. I am well aware of the attention economy of the advertisement business and yet I still fell prey to it. My kids are those kids who give their Snapchat account logins to friends when we go camping and won’t have Wi-Fi, so that they can keep their streaks. While I appreciate that Harris had some suggestions about how to address this attention economy, I feel like the only attainable goal for the average person is the first one, to acknowledge that we are persuadable. The others, listed below, seem a lot bigger than me and my realm of influence.  

• • we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable 
  • we need new models and accountability systems 
  • we need a design Renaissance 

I do hope that policy makers of the world will continue to fight the advertisement and social media giants to make the changes that Harris suggests.  

Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. (2011, November 1). A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs-honesty-in-ui-design/ 

TED. (2017, July 28). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C74amJRp730 

This type of assignment is not my cup of tea. It put me way out of my comfort zone! In one of my other courses, there was an app called Threadz that analyzed the MET students’ contributions to discussion posts. It has the same visualization effects with the bubbles and the connecting lines. However, I found it much easier to work with because you could also view with tables. Analyzing the visualizations and reflecting on the implications and outcomes provided by the Palladio app was a challenge for me. I do not think in bubbles and connecting lines. I think, visualize, and organize my thoughts in tables and boxes.  

Thankfully, I managed to click around enough on the Palladio App to find data that showed a list of all the songs and the number of people who had picked that song. I copied the information and created my own table and ordered it from the most popular tracks to least popular tracks. I was surprised to find that ALL 27 tracks were picked by at least 3 of the 23 MET students in our class (presuming everyone enrolled participated). Interestingly there were 219 votes cast, which likely means that 22 people voted and someone only picked 9 instead of 10 songs by mistake.  

I noticed that on the default Bubble Graph view the dark grey bubbles were people and the light grey bubbles were the songs. When comparing my own table above to the bubble graph, I was surprised to see my name on the outskirts of the bubble graph. I’m not on the absolute edge, but only one layer into the web of most common connections. I am surprised by this because of my ten choices, half were in the popular majority, as is evidenced by the table above that shows a thick line indicating that the songs above that line have votes from at least half of the participants. 

I understand that a major flaw in my table (in comparison to the bubble graph view) is that I cannot see the connections between the people who voted for the same songs as me. I can only see the popularity of the songs picked. Truthfully though, I don’t see the connections between people anyway! The lines from my bubble go to the songs I chose. I don’t see any lines from person to person. I would assume that the placement of my bubble must determine how many connections to other people’s song choices there were, and that the closer to the middle of the web your bubble is, the more overlapping choices you had with people, thereby creating communities of individuals with similar responses. I did play around with the settings, and ended up finding the images below as the most helpful in determining my “community” of similar song choices.  

We are asked to reflect on why these responses are similar and is the app able to capture the reasons behind the choices. I struggle with this reflection because I don’t know anyone in this class, and without examining each person’s individual criteria for picking the songs they picked, I don’t know how I would be able to understand the similarities. I think it would be safe to assume, based on the nature of the Golden Record’s purpose, that diversity would be one common thread between each student’s choices, but how they came to their choices is still a bit arbitrary. I can’t make any conclusions based on race, culture or gender because I don’t know the race, culture, and gender of each of my classmates. There could be unending factors that contributed to why someone picked or didn’t pick a song. This reasoning also applies to the fact that no, the visualization is not able to capture the reasons behind the choices. 

My task is to curate 10 of the 27 musical selections from the Golden Record. I need to decide ‘what to keep’ or rather ‘what could we afford to lose’. These selections collectively aim to convey the depth and diversity of human culture and music, providing a comprehensive snapshot of life on Earth for potential extraterrestrial listeners.

The criteria for the selections I made were: 

• • It should be diverse in sound, instruments, tempo, etc.  
  • It should be diverse in the region of the world that it originated 
  • I needed to invoke my interest or emotion 

 My selections.

1. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement (upbeat, classical orchestral masterpiece) 
2. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 
3. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. (didgeridoo) 
4. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México.  (strings, upbeat, Spanish singing) 
5. Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. (slow, sad, whistle) 
6. “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong (trumpet, upbeat) 
7. Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. (higher pitched, a cappella) 
8. “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. (Blues music, emotional depth, African-American) 
9. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. (vocals, strings, percussion) 
10. Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull.  

Task 7 Mode –  Bending Reflects

Redesigned- What’s in your bag? Tactile audio:

Challenge:

Guess what’s in my bag based on the sound it makes when I interact with it.

So were you able to guess the objects from my bag, based on the sounds they made when I interacted with them? (The answers are below if you weren’t 100% sure).  I’m curious about your interactions with the audio presentation. Was meaning made with this mode of media? Did the tactile description words that I used help you to visual the object? Did my description of how the objects make me feel while using them, help to make connections with the objects? Did you notice that I tried to use alliteration?

This was an interesting challenge indeed. I’m not great at thinking outside of the box and I’m not a huge fan of redoing tasks. I tried to use the New London’s Group (1996) ‘Mode of Meaning with my audio recording by using tactile words and feelings to increase the integrated meaning for the listener.  I found the audio recording quite frustrating because I would make errors with my words and have to start over, touching again on my lack of enthusiasm about redoing tasks. I had to re-record at least five times before I was somewhat satisfied with the final product.

When considering the readings, Canvas lesson, and videos I absolutely agree that multi-literacies aren’t going anywhere.  The New London Group (1996), states that we need to “rethink what we are teaching, and, in particular, what new learning needs literacy pedagogy might now address (p.61)”. I found the video A Vision of Students Today quite poignant and was excellent evidence for the changing needs of students. I attended a conference this week where the speaker Dr. Lara Ragpot from Trinity Western University also spoke about the changing needs of literacy in a world where multi-media is vying for the attention of people more than ever before.  I see these issues reflect in my own life and in the life of my three teenagers. We no longer seem to have the attention span to even sit through an episode of survivor without reaching for our phones. I think it’s the Tik Tok effect, we have become programmed to be able to swipe to the next piece of information 10-17 seconds. My main concern about this, is the fact that these audio-visual modes are taking place mostly on personal devices, often isolating the user from the people around them.

I do think that audio-visual modes are currently dominating written modes, however, I agree with Dobson and Willinsky (2009) that the onset of digital literacy is an evolution and extension of traditional print-literacy practices, not a revolution.

Answers to the challenge:

1. My fidget friend- the pen
2. The tea bag, then a soothing sip of tea
3. The wooly bag
4. A book

References:

Dobson and Willinsky. (2012). Digital Literacy. In Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (pp. 286-303). Cambridge University Press.

Ragpot, L. (2023, October). The Complex Nature of Mental Health Challenges in the Classroom [Conference session]. ACSI Western Canada, Calgary, AB.

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

This was a fun and challenging task. I did start with the title because I’m ‘Type A’ and must start from the top. I relied mostly on words. I deliberately skipped articles, even in my thoughts, when summarizing the plot. It makes sense, though, since there aren’t emojis for articles. Instead of constructing sentences to express my summary, the way I usually would in conversation or writing; I broke it down to just nouns and verbs. For instance, instead of ‘a man fell in love with a woman,’ I used emojis for ‘man,’ ‘love,’ and ‘woman.’

I was frustrated with the emoji keyboard that I used on my computer for not having an emoji for the first word of the movie title. So, I switched to my iPhone, where I found a broader selection of emojis. I found this quite telling actually, in that, clearly developers spend more time creating emojis for mobile devices than they do for computers. Which speaks to the higher demand for emojis in the form of mobile messaging than from laptops. It also got me thinking about how limited I was by having to use digital emojis as opposed to the options I would have had if we were able to draw images. 

After reading the Canva lesson and Bolter (2001), it became apparent how communication is inherently multi-modal. I suppose I should be thankful that laptops even have extensions that enable me to use emoji-keyboards. Bolter predicts these changes stating, “although these applications (email and news) have been purely textual, they are not likely to remain so, as the technology improves for transmitting graphics and digitized audio and video over the network. (2001, p.72)” I use emojis in my emails and text messages regularly. I find that they modify my messages by making them more personal. For example, at work, I have my Bitmoji account connected to my Gmail account, which allows me to send my students more personal Bitmojis message like ‘well done’. This aligns with Kress’ (2005) call to educators to critically engage with the affordances of new media rather than to conflate the decline of traditional media like. 

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Routledge. Chapter 4 The Breakout of the Visual

 Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.

Commentary on manual script: 

Normally, I type. The only time I write by hand is when I am taking notes for school, writing cards, or maybe making a grocery list (but usually my grocery list is on an app, on my phone). Communication technology has definitely altered my writing and communication habits. As Lamb & McCormick (2020) explain in their podcast, written words become an extension of the human brain being able to store more than we can recall, such as the items on my grocery list! 

I did find this task difficult. The most challenging aspects were time and thought. I had to determine how many lines 500 handwritten words would take, which took time and thought to plan out. Then I found myself thinking a lot harder before putting the pencil to the paper because I knew any edits would be complicated to fix.  

Spelling mistakes were corrected by erasing or writing over top, more boldly. If I forgot a word I went back and squished it in. I didn’t do a lot of editing. I didn’t even re-read what I had written before scanning it. The only major edit I made was omitting a paragraph. I did this by crossing it out. The media I used definitely impacted the lack of editing in my work. If I had double spaced my writing, that would have made editing easier. I can’t imagine having to prepare letter tiles, like those featured in the short film, Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film (2012). Using a printing press would be particularly difficult for those of us with dyslexia! 

The biggest difference between writing by hand and typing were time and accuracy. The only thing I find handwriting is more helpful for remembering and processing information. Here is a table I created using Canva, outlining why I prefer typing.

Reference:

Cooke, D. (2012, January 26). Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film [Video]. YouTube. Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 26). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 1Links to an external site. [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio.