Jocelyn Chan

Links: My post for Task 7  ·  Sophy’s post for Task 7

I chose to link to Sophy’s post because she leveraged the audio form to share her experience of culture, which I think is a really clever way to tackle this task! I’ve been looking forward to linking to one of Sophy’s posts — I also really enjoyed her posts for Task 4 and Task 5, and her post for Task 7 is another one of my favourites.

I will skip the Xanadu-inspired linking for this post (which I’ve done for all of my other linking posts so far), since Sophy and I approached our tasks quite differently.

---

How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?

• • Our experiences: From what I’m gathering from Sophy’s soundscape, there are differences in how we experience culture on a daily basis. Listening to Sophy’s soundscape reminded me of a previous point in time for me — prior to the pandemic, I used to take transit everyday; I’ve since bought a car and also don’t have to leave home much. If I were to create a soundscape of a day-in-the-life three years ago, it would’ve sounded similar to Sophy’s, but if I were to create one now, it would primarily consist of clicking sounds from my keyboard and mouse, water boiling (for tea), and the quiet hum of my fridge.
  • Our approaches for Task 7: Sophy and I each explored the sounds we hear related to our items, but whereas I described mine from a personal lens, Sophy described hers in the context of how she experiences culture, which I thought was brilliant and is what drew me to her post!

---

What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?

• • For our blogs: We’re both using WordPress on UBC Blogs.
  • For our posts for Task 7: We both primarily leveraged audio for the activity and shared our reflections using text.

---

How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authoring and end-user interface?

I imagine the content-authoring capabilities for our sites are similar since we’re both using WordPress on UBC Blogs. However, we’re using different themes, which results in differences in interface:

• • Navigation panel: Sophy’s theme, like Emily’s, uses a left navigation panel. Mine uses a right navigation.
  • Profile image: The theme that Sophy is using has a placeholder for a profile image in the top left corner, and it looks like she used that space for an illustrated self-portrait. Sophy had referenced her interest and experience in art in her previous posts, and with that in mind I think the illustration works perfectly in welcoming the audience to her blog.
  • Font: Sophy’s theme uses a serif font whereas mine uses sans-serif. At some point sans-serif fonts were recommended for computer screens but it seems like that is no longer necessarily the case (Nielsen, 2012). I personally like serif fonts more and really like how the serif font looks on Sophy’s blog.
  • Tagging: I also noticed that Sophy tagged her posts, and as a reader I find the tags very helpful in providing an overview of the topics. I will definitely be considering adding tags to my posts.

---

What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?

I will leverage two key themes of The New London Group’s (1996) article A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social future — cultural & linguistic diversity and modes — in exploring the literacies of our sites and posts.

Cultural & linguistic diversity

• • Language (similarity): Sophy and I both use the English language for our posts. In addition, in her post for Task 4 Sophy mentioned she lived in Taipei last year, and a few years ago I had lived in Hong Kong for two years. I wonder what additional similarities are (perhaps subconsciously) afforded by our blogs, with both of us also having lived in cities that share the same primary written language.
  • Appreciation for art (similarity): Both Sophy and I have referenced our appreciation for art in our previous posts, and I think this has surfaced in how we approached our tasks compared to some of our peers.

Modes

• • Visual design (similarity): Similar to my theme, Sophy’s theme uses a narrow post layout, which means that a single sentence can easily span across multiple lines. I also noticed that Sophy and I both use relatively short sentences and paragraphs for our posts — I wonder if the way we’re writing our posts is influenced by the themes we chose.

---

What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?

As I noted earlier, Sophy’s post explores her daily experience of culture. I especially like how she put it in explaining her decision to create a soundscape — a soundscape allows us to “catch a glimpse of an individual’s private life in this public space” (Chu, 2022). This suggests to me that she has a deep understanding and appreciation for her interaction with culture, and in turn would be able to make more conscious choices about her participation.

I also really enjoyed reading her thoughts on how public transit can be an analogy for “the boundaries between public and private” lifeworlds (Chu, 2022).

---

How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?

Sophy’s point about the boundaries between the public and private helped me realize that the use of blogs for this course is also an interesting blur of the boundaries between assignments created for a course and for public consumption.

While the target audience of these posts is our peers and instructor for the course, they can technically be accessed by anyone with access to the web, and most of these posts do not require extensive context for someone who isn’t the target audience to consume. I also think that having our tasks in our individual blogs makes for a more cohesive body of work, as opposed to the one-off assignments for many other courses.

I will keep this thought in mind as I create my posts for upcoming tasks and see how I can better leverage this blur of the boundaries.

---

References

Chu, S. (2022, July 6). Task 7: Mode bending. ETEC540 – Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540thc/2022/07/06/task-7-mode-bending/

Nielsen, J. (2012, July 1). Serif vs. sans-serif fonts for HD screens. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/serif-vs-sans-serif-fonts-hd-screens/

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. http://newarcproject.pbworks.com/f/Pedagogy%2Bof%2BMultiliteracies_New%2BLondon%2BGroup.pdf

Links: My post for Task 6  ·  Jessica’s post for Task 6

I chose to link to Jessica’s post because we both considered the constantly-evolving interpretations of visuals, but looked at this from slightly different angles and identified different examples. I believe the points we made in our posts support one another, and thought it would be interesting to dive deeper into Jessica’s post.

Themes we both explored:

1. 1. Limitations to emojis
   2. Using multiple emojis to convey an idea
   3. Potential for misinterpretation
   4. Our understandings of how to identify topics
   5. Now and near future

Click here to view image in full size · The approach to this image was inspired by Xanadu (Nelson, 1999)

---

How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?

I will borrow one of Jessica’s points to respond to this question — she noted that while many of us in the course “share culture and language”, she “struggled to decipher both the title and plot” of others’ posts, since “we all have our own unique way of attaching meaning to the images we are seeing” (Presta, 2022). I felt similarly when I was trying to decipher my colleagues’ emoji stories.

It also occurred to me that we, as students in this course, with all of our similarities — such as being in the same program at UBC and working in similar fields — there are still many ways our experiences could vary, down to the media we choose to consume. I believe the show in Jessica’s post is Selling Sunset, which I have heard of but not seen yet; I also have not read the books referenced in Emily’s post or in Katherine’s post.

---

What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?

• • For our blogs: We’re both using WordPress on UBC Blogs.
  • For our posts for Task 6: We approached the task very similarly, starting with a screenshot of the emoji story, and then responding to the prompts using text.

---

How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authoring and end-user interface?

I imagine the content-authoring capabilities for our sites are similar since we’re both using WordPress on UBC Blogs. However, we’re using different themes, which results in differences in interface:

• • Full post versus excerpt on main page: I chose to have full posts displayed on the main page, whereas Jessica chose to display excerpts. I really like how easy it is to locate each of Jessica’s posts and how the viewer is able to see a snippet of the post before deciding to view the full post. It doesn’t look like multimedia is displayed in the excerpts though. I will test out displaying excerpts and see which I prefer for my blog.
  • Number of words per line: Similar to what I noticed in Erin’s blog, the theme that Jessica is using displays more words per line compared to my theme. This means it would take longer to read one line on Jessica’s site, but my posts would appear to be longer.

---

What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?

I will leverage two key themes of The New London Group’s (1996) article A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social future — cultural & linguistic diversity and modes — in exploring the literacies of our sites and posts.

Cultural & linguistic diversity

• • Language (similarity): Jessica and I both use the English language for our posts.
  • Experience as a critical care nurse (privilege in Jessica’s site): Jessica mentioned in her post for Task 1 that she has worked in the ICU for 10 years. I imagine her background would allow her to identify connections across the discourses of critical care and education, and gain a deeper understanding of both discourses as a result.

Modes

• • Visual design (similarity): As mentioned above, the way that Jessica and I each structured our posts for this task are very similar. I’m also seeing that she and I structured our other posts quite similarly as well, primarily using text, supported by images.

---

What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?

To me, Jessica’s posts are incredibly thoughtful, make great connections to the readings, and the way she writes is very clear. I wonder if her background in critical care may have played a role in how I’m experiencing her work — I imagine that thoughtfulness, detail to attention, and clear communication are especially important in her line of work.

---

How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?

I would like to take this opportunity to iterate the mind map I created for my other linking posts (linking post #1 – Task 2; linking post #2 – Task 3, linking post #3 — Task 4) in response to this same question.

Updates:

• • Added all new linking posts

Click here to view mind map in full size

Observations:

• • The task with the most linking posts so far is Task 4, with 17 posts. I’m seeing that there are 41 students across the two sections of ETEC 540, which means that 42% of the students have made a linking post on Task 4.
  • The task with the least linking posts so far is Task 5, with 3 posts. This means that 7% of the students have made a linking post on Task 5. (Note: This does not account for Task 8, which is not yet due as of the time of this post.)

---

References

Nelson, T. H. (1999). Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep link to content, deep versioning, and deep re-use. ACM Computing Survey, 31(4). https://doi.org/10.1145/345966.346033

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. http://newarcproject.pbworks.com/f/Pedagogy%2Bof%2BMultiliteracies_New%2BLondon%2BGroup.pdf

Presta, J. (2022, June 26). Task 6: An emoji story. Jessica Presta’s Blog. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jpresta/2022/06/26/task-6-an-emoji-story/