Author: Jessica Presta

Task 12: Jocelyn Fung

This was a super fun speculative future to think about! I really enjoyed how she used an animated video that she voiced over to tell the story of her speculative future. This was a completely different approach to my Triage flyer.

Some points Jocelyn made that stood out to me were how AI and automation of certain tasks can impact jobs and industry. I wonder about the moral crumple zone in education? How will we know if a students learning is being adequately met with their AI powered teacher, and will this be enough to meet their needs? We are well aware that education and learning is a highly social process, and our teachers are often valuable role models for us. How would that change how we think and interact if the majority of our educational lives are lived with AI? Will we be less empathetic? Will we be smarter?  How does AI change the dynamic of collaborating human to human?

I appreciated how we both took this opportunity to speculate about our individual fields of work, and how AI could potentially automate it and impact it. AI and automation and the loss of jobs as a result is always in the news. Is this just click-bait? Or is there something real we need to be worrying about? I would imagine we are a long ways away from seeing too many impacts to job security as a result of AI… I HOPE that AI is well understood and the issues of repeating bias, racism, sexism etc are eradicated before it becomes mainstream use.

Task 10: Liana Ranallo

I really enjoyed reading Liana’s take on the attentional task. She really hit it home when she identified our expectation of technology being in perfect working conditions, be optimally functional, as well as user friendly. If not this quickly leads to frustration. I definitely see this when working on our new EMR system when requests are made of the software to function as smoothly and seamlessly as an iPhone, and when we are not able to deliver on this, the end-users become frustrated and disillusioned. This point also emphasizes Liana’s discussion on the need to remain open minded and patient!

I was quite impressed with how she took her time and was patient with the task, paying more attention to details of the poor UI design than myself. I found I got frustrated because I couldn’t get passed a certain place, therefore I YouTubed how to ‘win’ the game. Liana did an excellent job of capturing the problematic UI design and itemizing each issue out. She was able to identify how inappropriate use of formatting, such as font size, color and location, made it distracting to know how to navigate the site.

Later, we both discussed ‘dark patterns’ of UI design. Despite not knowing the term for this practice, we were both acutely aware of it and could recount ways we have experienced it as consumers of the internet.

Task 9: Joseph Villella

For this linking assignment, I am going to compare and contrast my work to Joseph’s. Surprisingly, he found it fairly easy to use Palladio to look at different groupings of data. Personally, it was difficult for me, and figuring out how to use the site took some time and investment. However once I figured it out, I could better manipulate the data looking for meaning.

I appreciated how Joseph untangled the data and his attempt at interpreting it and giving what he is seeing meaning. I could not help but notice as I was reading his interpretations, I was questioning them. I wondered how he was able to come to the conclusion that a group chose certain songs due to their impressive sounds. Near the end of his analysis, he shared how meaning making with data that lacks context was extremely difficult, and the explanations he has provided would likely be wrong or incomplete. It was here that Joseph and I had the same epiphany. We both came to the conclusion that it is impossible to derive true meaning from data without more context. Additionally, we both identified how our online activity, when tracked, can create data points. This plethora of data points is then analyzed by algorithms, looking to derive meaning from them for the purposes of selling us a product.

Task 7: Erin Duchesne

I loved Erin’s mode bending use of Tik Tok!! So I decided to do the same thing! This is another example of how another peers creativity gave me ideas for my own task!

Similarly to Erin, I also see the amazing and creative ways content creators engage with Tik Tok and wanted to go out on a limb to try and make my own Tik Tok! It is interesting how new forms of technology can be intimidating to learn. I am grateful to learn that mode-bending also got Erin out of her comfort zone, and she felt similarly to me!

Erin put quite a bit of thought into her Tik Tok, carefully curating and matching her short clip to the appropriate sound bite to invoke a mood. I took a bit more of an informal approach with the goal of incorporating more humor. Erin did a great job of putting transitions into her clip, between each item, while adding a funny comment with voice over text. I opted to showcase what was in my bag by filming what a ‘day in the life of a MET student’ looks like. I also used the text to speech functionality to make it more ‘trendy’ and ‘viral’.

Task 6: Jocelyn Chan

I felt somewhat stumped when it came to this task. Therefore I sought out other classmates blog’s to see how they interpreted and approached this assignment. Jocelyn’s page was phenomenal and it was a great example for me to draw from. It helped deepen my understanding of my own thinking and how I would approach creating an Emoji story. I believe her approach resonated with me because we have similar styles in thinking and organizing information. Very logical and systematic. We also approached conveying our emoji story with a similar logic and flow. So it comes as no surprise that she linked to my Emoji story task as well!

Her site offers and demonstrates far more digital and technological literacies than mine. For starters, I am extremely narrative in my approach to work and expressing ideas. This term I felt like I utilized more authoring tools to visually display my thinking and approach to assignments. Whereas Jocelyn went above and beyond in her post to visually display her thinking.

She has a robust mind map, as well as text that is color coded and numbered to compare and contrast her thoughts to my own. This is incredible. I wish I knew how to incorporate the level of detail Jocelyn is capturing in her site, within my own. She has also figured out how to incorporate rich formatting, which I haven’t even figured out how to do on my blog site! This allows her to structure and organize the content on her page, making it more meaningful and interesting to learn. Whereas my site can be quite text heavy and daunting for the reader!

Linking Assignment

Throughout the duration of the course, we were encouraged to visit our classmates blog spaces to engage with their content and find linking relationships between our content. I am very grateful for the opportunity to see my classmates work before, during and after I have completed my own because it broadens and extends my understanding of the concepts. Below I have listed 6 other classmates who’s work either grew my understanding, confirmed my understanding, or who challenged my understanding of the concepts. There were other classmates blog sites that I visited which aren’t represented in this list. Sometimes I left comments on my peers blog sites as well. The headings are hyperlinked to each peers post!

Task 5: Jennifer Guth 

Jennifer and I both created a Twine game geared towards healthcare. I really enjoyed seeing her interpretation of Twine and how this could be utilized for gamified learning.

Her game was incredibly informative! I was especially impressed with how she was able to provide additional, outside learning resources via hyperlinks. I was not able to figure out how to do this and therefore didn’t think it was possible. Due to the hyperlinks she incorporated, I could supplement my learning, based on my own learning assessment, while working through the game. Seeing how she executed her game has given me more knowledge about the affordances of Twine.

I do agree with Jennifer’s cautious outlook on the affordances of the game overall. It is very text heavy and is easy to click through without actually taking in the text you are reading. I also appreciated the points she made about Twine not being portable, hindering ubiquitous learning as well as how challenging it is to collaborate on the same Twine game. Additionally, we both discussed the issue of usability around using this platform for gamified learning, the challenges surrounding the requirement of HTML coding knowledge as well as the limitations of learning itself. To my surprise, when I went back to her site for this part of the assignment, I saw she also linked to my Twine task!