I chose to link to Isabella’s post because I admire her decision to stop before reaching the end. I wouldn’t call it quitting, as that carries a negative connotation. Instead, I respect her for recognizing that the task was a waste of her time and consciously choosing to use her time more productively.
Isabella mentions that she felt manipulated into making mistakes, and while this was a harmless exercise, it highlights a larger issue. People are often tricked—not just into wasting time and feeling frustrated—but also into wasting or losing money.
Reading Isabella’s response, I realized that I shared many of the same thoughts and feelings. I also appreciate how she compared this task to an escape room—because, in many ways, that’s exactly what it felt like. But navigating the web shouldn’t feel like solving a puzzle. This raises an important question: Who gets to decide what an intuitive interface looks like and why is it considered intuitive?
Additionally, after experiencing this task and exploring the Deceptive Patterns website, I wonder—can these tactics be regulated? And if so, who should be responsible for protecting users from them?
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/
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 felt particularly deceptive.
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.
I connected with Quinn’s reflection on Task 5, especially the final paragraph, because it resonated with my own experience as a grade school student reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. Like Quinn, I find comfort in reading a book from beginning to end, knowing the story will unfold in a predetermined way and that I won’t miss anything..
Reflecting on Choose Your Own Adventure books and exploring the Twine projects led me to think of other video games. After completing ETEC 544 Digital Game and Learning and exploring The Witcher 3 video game, I continued to play it beyond the course. The Witcher 3 is highly narrative-driven, with a complex storyline in which your decisions as Geralt influence the plot, character interactions, and available choices. This mirrors real-life decision-making, where choices shape our paths in ways we can’t always predict, however, I often wonder whether I am missing something in the game due to a path I have taken.
Reflecting further on hypertext and the web, I recognize how often I feel a similar sense of missing out. The sheer volume of available information can be overwhelming when researching a topic. Unless I focus my attention, I struggle to process gathered information, constantly wondering what I might be missing. This illustrates how technology has transformed information-seeking behaviour. As a middle school student, my research process was straightforward—I consulted the World Book Encyclopedia, followed references to related entries, or sought guidance from the school librarian, who would direct me via the Dewey Decimal System to a specific yet small section of books. Today, when my 15-year-old son conducts research, he enters a topic into Google and is confronted with thousands of results. This abundance of links and information presents both opportunities and challenges, making digital literacy an essential skill for today’s students.
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.
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
I chose to link to Tom’s reflection on manual scripts because he had many questions similar to my interests. I was also drawn to reflect on how manual vs mechanical writing is cognitively different. In my response to this assignment, I mention a study where 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” (Weel et al., 2023, p. 7).
Tom mentions that writing his grocery list out by hand helps him remember it better, even if he forgets the list at home. I, too, have experienced this, and it seems there is a scientific explanation. In a 2020 interview with WGN News, Professor Audrey van der Meer from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology points out that when you use a keyboard, it is the same little movement for every letter, but when you write by hand, it is different movements and the senses are more involved (1:56). It is suggested that this puts your brain in a state where it is easier to remember things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l69-_wKYn_Y
I think that depending on the goal, there is an argument to be made that writing by hand is cognitively superior, and I do believe there should be more emphasis on handwriting. That is not to say there is no place for computers in education, but we need to hold on to the value of handwriting as well. Much of the reading I have been doing on best practices in teaching students to read involves multisensory approaches. This is especially important for students with dyslexia. Having students write the words, not just read the word, helps them build the connections in their brain to develop automatic recall of that word.
As an aside, I found this interview with Neal Stephenson, a science fiction author who has been handwriting his work for over 20 years. He is interviewed by Lex Fridman about this and mentions many of the same things that this class did while reflecting on this assignment. You can find the interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liQ1yFx2sX8.
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
I chose to link to Elaine’s Voice to Text post because I think she did an outstanding job exploring the differences between written and oral stories. One point that stood out to me was the mention of pacing. Oral storytellers have the unique advantage of creating suspense and engagement through pauses, varying the volume of their voice, and altering their rhythm. These changes create a dynamic experience that is tailored in real-time to the audience. Essentially, a storyteller can adjust to the audience in real-time in a way that an author of written text can not.
Elaine’s comment, “The characters in oral storytelling can be brought to life through voice, tone, and physical presence, ” reminded me of a trip I took to Barkerville, BC, in May of 2024. Barkerville is a historic town where skilled storytellers make the past come alive. I am 100% sure my 14-year-old son learned more from this trip than he ever could have by just reading a text. While the fact of actually being on location was valuable, the storytellers were key to this experience. Here is a link to a video of a tour of the town so you can see what I mean.
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 chose to link to Navid’s post because when I read the connection with “Reading fiction improves your theory of mind,” my heart dropped. This reminder of how students are reading less for enjoyment made me gasp. In reality, I am not surprised by this anecdotal observation that few high school students are reading for pleasure, but seeing it on the page in black and white made it stand out for me.
I teach grades one and two, and most students are eager to learn to read. They can’t wait to get their hands on chapter books. I have even seen students taking books outside during recess to read. While it’s heartening to see young students still eager to read, it’s difficult not to feel concerned when considering the broader trend. I suspect that the increased use of personal devices and social media is a major contributor to the decline in reading for enjoyment.
Navid poses an interesting question: if reading fiction improves your theory of mind, could a decline in reading weaken this cognitive skill? This is a fair question; in fact, questions regarding the effects of reading fiction have been asked since the time of Aristotle (Fekete et al., 2023). However, in response to this, I would like to question if people are actually becoming more resistant to trying to understand another person’s perspective. Historically, I am not convinced that there has been a time when populations of people were understanding each other.
Despite the concerning decline in reading for enjoyment, there’s some hope. Fekete et al. point out that “current research shows that playing non-violent video games, that focus on storytelling and role-playing, or watching quality TV dramas also improves ToM [theory of mind]” (2023, p. 2). It’s reassuring to know that, in some form, people are still engaging with narratives that may foster empathy and understanding.
References:
Fekete, J., Pótó, Z., Varga, E., Hebling, D., Herold, M., Albert, N., Pethő, B., Tényi, T., & Herold, R. (2023). The effect of reading literary fiction on the theory of mind skills among persons with schizophrenia and normal controls. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1197677-1197677. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1197677
SAR School for Advanced Research. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, how the languages we speak shape the ways we think [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg
