Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing

I felt like this was an exercise in what not to do as a designer to hold people’s attention, as I suspect most users would give up on this task and move on to something else. While completing it, I realized that I likely had an advantage over novice technology users.  For example, on the landing page where you need to click ‘here’ to go to the next page, I knew to move the cursor around until it changed and revealed the link in the bottom left corner of the browser.  I couldn’t help but think that if my mother were trying to navigate this site, she would call me, as I doubt she could get the page to advance.  After this first page, I quickly realized that this site would not follow the typical  “rules” users are accustomed to. For instance, the link wasn’t the expected underlined or blue-colored text but rather the actual word ‘HERE.'”

The most frustrating page for me was the second one, where I needed to create a password. The overstimulation from the red and green colors, the constantly changing numbers counting 1, 2, 3, 4, and the confusing wording was frustrating enough. However, what aggravated me was knowing how a page should work but being forced to relearn new (and incorrect) rules. The worst part was figuring out that I had to click on the terms and conditions to accept them in a different window. I suspect this entire exercise gives proficient users a glimpse into the frustration that novice users often experience.

On a broader level, this task made me reflect on how I have been conditioned through repeated exposure to navigate websites and apps intuitively.  This conditioning is so ingrained that I felt frustrated when things didn’t work as expected. I suspect this is why people don’t like updates – they often change how basic tasks are accomplished, and many people dislike change.   However, I approached this task like a game and I was determined to “beat” it. I relied on trial and error to work through the system, knowing it was intentionally defying effective user interface principles. This realization helped me persist. I also understood that a well-designed interface is intuitive, aligning with users’ natural expectations, but this one did the opposite, so I knew to experiment with unexpected solutions.”

Through this entire process, I felt like I was being manipulated because if I wanted to reach the end, I needed to play by these new rules that I didn’t particularly agree with.  In the documentary The Social Dilemma Tristan Harris states, “If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you. And we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment. That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.” (Orlowski, 2020, 30:11) While this task was just a simulation, I couldn’t help but notice its manipulative design. For example, why was I required to upload an image? How many people were tricked into downloading an image by the large blue ‘download’ button, rather than noticing the faded ‘upload’ text buried in the instructions? This is an example of a deceptive pattern, or what Brignull et al. (2023) call a dark pattern. There were also several points where a ‘skip’ button or alternative options should have existed, such as for the image upload and the ‘pick three interests’ section. Additionally, the forced title selection—where users could only choose between ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ and then had to pick the opposite gender to proceed—felt unnecessarily restrictive and frustrating.

This experience was a stark reminder of how much we rely on intuitive design and familiar digital patterns to navigate the online world. When those expectations are disrupted, it creates frustration, confusion, and, in some cases, an insurmountable barrier for less tech-savvy users. The deceptive elements, dark patterns, and unnecessary roadblocks highlighted how designers can manipulate user behavior—especially over time—by conditioning us to act in certain ways. This also serves as a reminder that users must continuously strive to improve their tech literacy to avoid falling into the traps of deceptive or dark patterns.

References:

Brignull, H., Leiser, M., Santos, C., & Doshi, K. (2023, April 25). Deceptive patterns – user interfaces designed to trick you. Deceptive Design.  https://www.deceptive.design/

Orlowski, J. (Director). (2020). The social dilemma [Film]. Netflix.

To better understand the visualization, I first highlighted the source nodes—our names—which allowed me to distinguish between curators and song titles. I then rearranged the nodes by spreading out all the curators in a U-shape. This made it easier to see which songs were the most popular based on node size and which songs had fewer selections. 

By moving a specific track node, I could observe how many and which people had chosen it. For example, Track 13 had five people select it. 

When I slightly offset Track 24 next to Track 13, I noticed that four of the five people who selected Track 13 had also chosen Track 24. However, the visualization does not provide any indication as to why these selections were made.

I found it challenging to interpret connections with so many nodes and edges. It would be helpful if the visualization incorporated color-coding. For example, if selecting a source node changed its color, along with all its corresponding edges, and a different source node triggered a different color, patterns might be easier to identify.

In community one, I used a similar method of node arrangement and observed that all five curators in the group had chosen Track 7. Additionally, several other tracks were selected by three or four of the five curators. However, again there is no clear way to determine why they made these choices. Is there a common factor among these curators that influences their selections? Another important question that the given visualization cannot answer is whether all curators chose a particular track for the same reason. In fact, there may be no real similarity between these curators if they all selected the same track but for entirely different reasons.

This dataset contained 27 tracks, and all of them received votes, with the least popular having two votes and the most popular having 15. However, if some tracks had received no votes, they would not appear in the visualization at all. This absence could prevent viewers from considering why those tracks were not chosen.

Ultimately, the visualization provides only basic connections without deeper explanations. With additional data—such as age, gender, location, or musical preferences—it might be possible to identify relationships between song choices and external factors. This highlights why so much data is collected about us. More data enables a deeper understanding of connections and can be used to influence behaviors, such as purchasing habits or even political opinions. If advertisers can determine what persuades one group to click on a link and buy a product, they can apply similar tactics to other groups with shared characteristics.

It is unsettling to consider how our thoughts and decisions are influenced—or attempted to be influenced—without our awareness, shaped in part by our network connections.

View my Golden 10 playlist

To choose my ‘Golden 10,’ I omitted any song with vocals.  There was already enough speech on the record, and it is unlikely that words in any language would be understood. 

Tim Farris, who led music selection, was not worried about mistakenly threatening extraterrestrial life forms, stating there was no evidence in the history of the human species to suggest this (Taylor, 24:45).  When I first listened to the tracks, I immediately considered how they might be perceived by extraterrestrial beings. Thus, I omitted anything I thought sounded offensive in tone or threatening in any way. I fully acknowledge that there is no way to tell how other life forms will interpret the recordings, but I needed something to determine the criteria.

Last, I picked songs that for me resonated with one or more of the following terms: cheery, friendly, lively, light, welcoming, or calming. Surprisingly, once I set my criteria, I struggled to find 10 songs I truly wanted to include. Do these songs fairly represent all of humanity? Undoubtedly not. But in my view, they reflect the best of what we should aim to share.

References:

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound. 

View and listen as Clio the Cultural Anthropologist and I discuss the items in my bag.

*dialogue created with Humy.ai

https://www.kukarella.com/dialogues-ai/gzzGdwRoVx1F4HPYApd5

Often, teachers will afford students different assignment choices to show their learning. As Pena and James point out (2024), “Transmediation in a pedagogical context is commonplace, yet seldom is it identified as such, nor is it the subject of explicit teaching; often, however, it is a part of a devised curriculum that accommodates differentiated learning and learning styles” (p. 1619). As a student, if given choices for an assignment, I would most likely choose the traditional essay writing assignment.  I don’t consider myself artistic or creative, nor do I particularly enjoy acting or speaking in front of a group. 

Due to my preference for traditional writing assignments, this task has proved to be the most challenging for me so far. Along with struggling to come up with a creative semiotic mode change, I struggled to clarify the difference between semiotic and sensory modes. This was compounded by the lack of clear definitions of terms in the 1996 New London Group article, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, where modes of meaning are suggested as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial and multimodal. I was further confused by the concept of the different modes of meaning because the linguistic design is presented as a stand-alone mode.  However, I feel language is inherently intertwined with the other modes.  We need language to think, so language is involved even when viewing an image with no words.    

Peña & James (2024) “propose three categories of non-exclusionary transmediation: sensory, semiotic, and signal transmediation” (p. 1614), which was helpful as I tried to navigate this task.  Additionally, Danielsson & Selander (2021) helped further clarify this for me by stating, “semiotic resources are resources that we use to organize our understanding of the world and to make meaning in communication with others or to make meaning for ourselves (p. 17).  These articles helped me realize that this task wasn’t about changing the sensory mode—something I had initially fixated on—but rather about shifting the semiotic mode, which is different from sensory.  When I decided to use Humy.ai to create an interview-like dialogue about what was in my bag, I was worried because it was still visual. You look at the picture, and you need to look at the words of an interview, but I now understand that it changes the semiotic mode because it is a different genre. In Humy.ai, I chose Clio the Cultural Anthropologist as the chatbot to interact with as it seemed like the best fit for the task of analyzing what is in the bag. After creating the interview, I also used Kukarella to create a podcast-style audio interview, both to explore new tools and to enhance accessibility. It was important for me to find a tool that would change text to audio with two different voice so that it became an interview.

In terms of meaning-making, this new mode is beneficial. It was interesting for me to complete the activity; even though it was AI-generated, I found the responses intriguing.  On the other hand, the picture is much less time-consuming both for me to produce and for the audience to examine. A picture provides an instant overview, while an interview unfolds over time, segmenting the information into distinct pieces.

References:

Danielsson, K., Selander, S. (2021). Semiotic Modes and Representations of Knowledge. In: Multimodal Texts in Disciplinary Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63960-0_3

Peña, E., & James, K. (2024). A framework of transmediation. Convergence, 30(5), 1610-1624. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220325

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

Decodable Twine Story – Click here to play online

The Twine platform allows users to fully explore the art of hyperlinking. Just as the transition from typewriters to word processors revolutionized how writers could edit text and make changes on the fly, Twine facilitates the development of complex works by leveraging hyperlinks.

For task 5, I aimed to create an interactive Twine activity for my beginning readers. These students are currently focusing on mastering digraphs and heart words.  Heart words contain irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences for some part of the word, and thus, that part needs to be learned “by heart.” Some heart words are temporary until specific spelling patterns are taught; these are indicated with an asterisk (*) on my word list.

To build this Twine, I compiled a list of all the heart words covered in class this year (see photo). I then created word lists for each digraph we have worked on (-ck, -sh, -th, -ch, -wh, -ph, ng and the -nk combination). The words were selected using the UFLI Foundations manual, an explicit and systematic phonics program developed by Holly Lane and Valentina Contesse (2022). My goal for the Twine was to offer students more opportunities to decode words featuring the specific patterns they’ve been taught. By allowing them to interact with the text through decision-making within the story, I hope to give them a purposeful reading experience that will engage even my most reluctant learners.

 After explicitly teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences, I want my students to repeatedly decode words with these patterns to activate orthographic mapping, ultimately supporting automatic word recognition and reading fluency. Ehri (2014) notes, “with repeated readings that activate orthographic mapping, written words are retained in memory to support reading and spelling” (p. 7).

In constructing the Twine activity, I carefully matched my word list to multiple storylines, and highlighted words as I used them (see below). Each story was completed one branch at a time. I found this process more challenging than anticipated, as I needed to ensure that the stories were both accessible for my students and made sense with the available words. I intentionally avoided including any audio-visual elements in the activity. By removing graphics and sound effects, I aim to encourage my students to focus on strengthening their decoding skills while minimizing distractions, eliminating the need for headphones and discouraging less effective ‘reading strategies” such as looking at the picture. 

Finally, to assess comprehension and promote accountability, I plan to ask my students to illustrate their path through the story.

References:

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Lane, H, & Contesse, V. (2022). UFLI foundations: An explicit and systematic phonics program. Ventral Learning.

I’m glad to be back at my keyboard after handwriting the first part of this activity.  In my everyday life, I both write by hand and use my laptop for typing, depending on the task. For any written work that needs to be submitted or read by others, I turn to my laptop and type it.  For lesson planning and note taking, I use my iPad and Apple pencil to write by hand with the advantage that it is already digitalized and easy to manipulate.  I enjoy that Goodnotes, the app I use on my iPad for lesson planning, spell-checks my handwritten notes and allows me to copy and paste and move chunks of my printing around.    

Although I didn’t find this task difficult, I noticed that I needed to exercise a lot of focus, which was a lot slower than typing 500 words.  It took me about an hour to complete the writing.  It was considerably slower because I was not only thinking about what I would write but also concentrating more on the spelling, grammar and the actual act of forming the letters.  When I type, I quickly get my thoughts out and then go back to fix spelling and grammar, usually with the assistance of the program I am typing in.  There is no concern about making a mistake and being unable to fix it.  Being out of practice with cursive, I found my hand cramping up, and by the end, I really needed to concentrate on fine motor movements.  

In terms of editing, I’ll admit I did have a draft to organize my thoughts and ensure I had everything the way I wanted. The most common mistake I made for this copy was the formation of letters, particularly n and m. To fix mistakes, I used a blue pen eraser (a tool that lifts ink from the page) to correct errors before rewriting over them. 

After completing this task, I started questioning how the means of producing text influence thought processes and learning.  With handwriting, I think before I write, but with typing, it almost happens simultaneously, and when I am done typing, I go back and refine my thinking.  I am not sure which is better, but perhaps it depends on the purpose of the activity. There is something to be said about how writing legibility with pen and paper slows down the process. It could be argued that this is beneficial for thinking, forcing the writer to take the time and be more careful with their thinking.  However, at the same time, typing, if you are proficient at it, allows for a fast, non-stop flow of thought that can later be easily edited. 

As I reflected on the cognitive aspects of handwriting vs. typing, I came across some interesting research that sheds light on how these two processes engage the brain differently. The experiment used EEG data from 36 university students under two conditions – writing words in cursive or typing the words.  It was found “that whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity. It appears that the movements related to typewriting do not activate these connectivity networks the same way that handwriting does” (Weel et al., 2023, p. 7). As a primary teacher interested in the science of learning, these findings are incredibly relevant to my teaching practices.   

References:
Van der Weel, F R Ruud, & Van der Meer, Audrey L H. (2023). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945-1219945. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945