Task Reflection:
This task was much more difficult that I initially believed it would be. [Edit: none of my emojis came through in the post- did other people struggle in this way?] The plot of my movie relies heavily on relationships, trust, and involves several twists and turns that were beyond what I would be able to communicate using emojis. I found that during this task I relied heavily on nouns, with a few symbols (arrows) mixed in, and utilized repetition to help convey meaning. To convey an idea (bank transfer) I utilized a series of related emojis, but I found it difficult to rely on simply one or two emojis. When I have my students writing notes, I often rely on the website https://thenounproject.com/ to help them come up with symbols to represent their ideas using a visual notetaking / sketch noting format. We run into the same challenges I found completing this task, which is that we rely heavily on nouns and that it is sometimes difficult to communicate bigger meanings such as ideas or relationships. However, I do find that utilizing symbols for communicating to have great benefits, especially when working with students who are learning English or who have learning disorders/communication disorders etc. It is also often much faster than writing out entire pages of notes, and I find that it is more meaningful and easier for students to understand. This is the entire premise of the Kress article, that all communication is inherently multi-modal, and that distinctive modes carry with them both potentials and limitations (Kress, 2005).
I started with the title because I felt that it was a natural starting point, and if someone had seen the movie they might be able to guess the title and have a better understanding of the plot. In order to further assist the ‘reader’ I opted to use additional spatial cues such as extra lines between scenes and gaps between chunks of ideas or events within scenes. I put effort into organizing ideas and details for the reader, because I was hyper aware of the fact that “two readers could explain the same message in different words” (Bolter, 2001, p.54). The use of emojis or symbols to convey a movie title is a common ‘game’ or challenge seen on TV shows or internet media sites, the entire premise being that humans associate the same emojis with so many different words.
Unfortunately, I am not an avid consumer of TV or movies so I struggled a little bit coming up with a plot for this task. I felt that the title would be easy to communicate, but failed to anticipate how difficult it would be to relay the complexities of the dynamics within the movie. If I were to re-do the task, I might pick a more popular/famous movie that people would easily recognize and relate to. Genre also played an important role here, and I’m not sure that a spy/action movie was the best choice for this activity. Harry Potter, Star wars, lord of the rings would have been much more ideal.
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.