Category: Tasks

Speculative Narrative Prompt:

Describe or narrate a scenario about a building found a millennium into a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed. Your description should address issues related to disease and elicit feelings of fervor.

It’s Monday, July 31st, 3024. A group of archeologists is exploring an area of what was previously known as North America…

 

Over the last few centuries, sea levels have impacted the area significantly, with many buildings and cities being decimated. Globally, the impact of climate change has been catastrophic. Extreme weather patterns such as droughts and floods have reduced the biodiversity available. The resulting food and resource scarcity has forced the remaining global populations to relocate. A large part of the population was eradicated by viruses and diseases that ravaged human, animals as well as flora and fauna. There was a dark period of wars fought over resources that ultimately resulted in societies and governments being restructured – there is now one global governing body, a singular global crypto currency, and a military group known as the Galba Unit. The Galba have limited human soldiers, but a vast fleet of humanoids, drones, laser weapons, and autonomous military vehicles to help them carry out their intense surveillance of the remaining populations.

 

The building is a vast structure that spans a large area in the center of the former metropolis. The building, once gleaming white, is covered in spray paint and many of the towers have been reduced to rubble in the wars. As the archeologists step inside, they can see on the walls the credo which reads “These principles we uphold: justice and authority. We dedicate this building to bring order and peace to the country. Order and stability will prevail as we work towards a prosperous and secure future for all citizens”.

 

As the archeologists explore the building, they uncover endless surveillance rooms, with some remaining electronic equipment strewn about, badly damaged from the raids. Some of the rooms are great halls, with seats surrounding a central speaking area. None of the rooms have any windows, and they are adorned with several locking and security mechanisms at the doors. The building has wards dedicated to sanitization, full of biomedical equipment, PPE and medication vials, some still intact. There are robotic operated medical equipment machines throughout, and refrigerated rooms for storing what was once a large supply of vaccines. Now, the building tells stories of a time of turmoil and desperation…

 

Reflection: 

I hope you enjoyed my narrative as much as I enjoyed creating it. I opted to let my imagination go a little wild and included a wide variety of possible future social problems and/or challenges. As Petra Lilja (2021) notes “speculative design, or any related design approach oriented towards the future is to use it as a vehicle to approach complex societal and environmental challenges through design” (p.39). The future I envisioned is dystopian, but my goal was to provide some commentary on the issues of contemporary society and how that might pan out. 

 

Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (Eds.). (2021). Beyond speculative design: Past – present – future. SpeculativeEdu.

 

 

Detain Release

This week’s module highlighted the perils of algorithmic decision-making and its implications for public justice systems. During the “detain and release” activity, I noticed that the cases were becoming repetitive, and I wasn’t sure how I had previously responded. As I continued through the module, the added pressure of the glowing red fear index and jail capacity level created extra angst around my decisions. Initially, I was considering the violence level of the accused as an important factor. However, even though a drug trafficker may not have shown indications of violence, there is a level of violence and societal impact associated with the larger criminal enterprise/network. This quickly becomes a very complex issue, and I understand the desire for a system to make analytical choices based on perceived risks. The question is: how accurate is our reporting of these risks? What metrics can we rely on that will accurately describe a person’s violence level, especially when we are making judgments about the likelihood of an event that hasn’t happened yet?

AI models encode personal biases, and their mass deployment amplifies these biases in ways that can be catastrophic. As we saw in previous modules, the use of these systems leads to a variety of unintended consequences, such as an increase in citations being given as a result of the predictive policing machine (Vogt, 2018). I liked the descriptions of these processes termed by O’Neil (2016) as “math-powered applications that encode human prejudice” and “weapons of math destruction” (2017). Unfortunately, once these models are running, it’s quite difficult for us to know how they are making decisions. This lack of transparency is uncomfortable at a minimum and harmful to society, especially when considering the gravity of a situation such as the criminal justice system. How can we increase the human management of a system that many humans don’t fully comprehend? To ensure the accuracy and reliability of AI systems, it’s essential to understand how they are audited. A growing group of people is increasingly becoming concerned about the use of these tools, highlighting the need for enhanced regulation and safety measures.

O’Neil, C. (2017, April 6) Justice in the age of big data. TED. Retrieved August 12, 2022.

Talks at Google. (2016, November 2). Weapons of math destruction | Cathy O’Neil | Talks at Google. [Video]. YouTube

Vogt, P. (2018, October 12a). The Crime Machine, Part I (no. 127) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.

Vogt, P. (2018, October 12b). The Crime Machine, Part II (no. 128) [Audio podcast episode]. In Reply All. Gimlet Media.

Task 10: Attention Economy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a non exhuastive list of some of the dark patterns that I noticed in ‘User Inyerface”:

1. “Click here to go to the next page” – difficult to know where to click due to the imagery, size and location of buttons
2. Ridiculous password settings
3. Double negatives “I do not accept the terms and conditions”
4. A help bar that repeatedly popped up
5. “Hurry up, time is ticking” stressing me out
6. “Select 3 interests” and the location of the ‘deselect all’ button is difficult to find due to the way we read text

It went on like this for a while and I nearly ran out of the patience to complete the game. It’s clear that the motivation behind these deceptive practices is to wear you down a bit and cause you to reduce the amount of attention you are paying to what you are doing. They are also intentionally designed to cause us to take actions that we might not be aware of the consequences of. Since completing this game I have become hyper aware of these ‘dark patterns’ (Brignull, 2011) once during an attempt to cancel my doordash account, and again when attempting to order from the screens at a McDonalds in France. The latter experience made me realize how difficult these tactics are for people with low literacy (digital or print) levels / people who speak another language as we rely so heavily on the way that information is visually organized on the screen.  We are naturally inclined to click on the text that is highlighted in a green (or sometimes red) button. People with low levels of digital literacy are particularly vulnerable to these tactics as they may not be expecting to be deceived, might not understand the implications of their actions or be aware of the potential harms of sharing certain information or granting access levels.

In her TedTalk, Zeynep Tufekci made a compelling argument about the dangers of persuasive technology when she noted that it seems relatively innocuous in the beginning (being inundated with the same product you were searching) until we gain an understanding of the ways that algorithms are shaping and controlling our perceptions of the world around us (Tufekci, 2017). The internet can be a difficult place to regulate, and it is even harder to decide at which point these persuasive architectures shift from being simply persuasive and cross over into manipulative territory. As both Harris (2017) and Tuekci (2017) noted, the intent behind these structures were not to be unethical or cause harm, but there are a variety of unintended consequences. Clearly, we need further regulation of the internet, but I think that change will be a much slower and difficult road than it has been to develop these technologies. This is in part because many people do not yet understand the ethical implications of these attention technologies.

References:

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. A List Apart, 338.

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED.

Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [Video]. TED.

 

 

 

Golden Record Data Set Analysis:

The visual representation of the data set created in Palladio offers up some insights into the connectivity of choices made by students in our class. In the data set below, you can see my choices as well as the two students with which I had the most overlap with.

The data visualization reveals that Robyn, Duncan and myself have 4 overlapping songs, and that I had an additional overlap of 2 songs with Robyn and 1 with Duncan, so 60% and 50% respectively. While the Palladio program was able to group students according to the connectivity of their choices, it fails to offer up any additional data that would be pertinent to offer up a deeper analysis.

Some examples of missing information that may have impacted peoples musical choices are: age, gender identity, race, cultural background, musical taste, languages spoken, and geographical location. Without these pieces of distinguishing information, it’s difficult to discern what the members of my group actually have in common, and why we might have made our choices. The palladio program offers up a quantitative mapping of connectivity, but lacks any qualitative data that would allow us to make meaning of these nodes.

Also lacking from the data set are all of the null choices, which is a much larger group of songs than the choices that were selected. It would be interesting to see which songs were most frequently not chosen, and what those songs might have in common. For example, is there a particular genre that is often left out, or style of music (instrumental etc.) that led people to deselect it more frequently? Within my group, the program was able to offer up the songs that we did not have in common, but as with the connected nodes, it is difficult to make any meaning of the null choices,  particularly as they are all different. Sociocultural factors have a huge impact on how we engage with the world, and without any data on who the people are behind the dataset, the analysis of these musical choices falls flat.

References:

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 18). Graph theory overview. [Video]. YouTube.

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 19). Network connections. [Video]. YouTube.

Here’s my ten chosen songs from the Golden Record..  in ‘visual’ format to help display what was ‘gained and lost’.

10 songs

This was tricky as I navigated the ideas presented by Abby Smith Rumsey -what can we afford to lose? (2017). I wanted to ensure that the musical selection represented various continents and their respective cultures, as well as a variety of languages.  10 songs isn’t quite enough space to represent the entire cultural musical history of Earth. I made it to the 9th song before I realized there wasn’t any English, so chuck Barry got a spot. Attempts were also made to maintain a balance of of genres, so I opted for a variety that included choirs, percussion, orchestras, jazz, as well as an acapella. Many of the songs I omitted were classical as I felt it was a little overrepresented on the golden record.

Something that stuck out to me this week was the fragility of the digital space. With the explosion of cloud computing we have a tendency to think of the digital world as this vast endless space where we can continue to data dump, and believe that this data is eternal. But, just as quickly as we can upload all of our thoughts, memories, images, and sounds, we can lose access to an account, or experience a wi-fi / power shortage. I’ve heard many cautionary tales of people uploading all their files to a hard-drive, only to find the data corrupted. It’s interesting to think about what will happen to all of our image files 50 to 100  or even 1000 years from now. As we move towards an increasingly digital culture, how will our collective memories and cultural artifacts be passed on?

Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?”.[Video]. YouTube.

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize?. Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved August 12, 2022.

Mode-Bending

A journey through audio technologies

While completing this task I found myself struggling to communicate- largely due to navigating technical issues. I opted to utilize twine to create a slightly interactive display of my “What’s in your bag” items. My initial thought was to utilize the 5HP software to create a dictation that the viewer would be able to listen to, type a response, and receive feedback on the response. However, my computer refused to record any audio and 5HP refused an audio file from my phone. The end result is still a twine and still manages to communicate my objects through audio, I’ve linked the Zip file above.

Reflecting on these difficulties, I noticed that my struggles weren’t linked to the mode of communication (audio), but rather with the use of digital technologies itself. Since I am reasonably proficient with using a variety of technologies, I was able to fluently switch between programs and navigate the various mediums, file types, and software that I was utilizing. Dobson & Willinsky (2009) note that “hypermedia extends in significant ways our notions of textuality and literacy” (p.289).  Participating in digital culture requires the development broader set of literacy skills that go beyond the scope of reading and writing.

Affordances of the medium

From the audience/viewer/consumer point of view, I think that it is relatively easy to engage with my final product. Of the objects I still had available (some were eaten) each item has a distinctive sound that people strongly associate with the object. I chose not to add any words or descriptors for the object, but I did rely on the use of the original image file to assist the audience. Consuming media using audio clips is a highly accessible communication tactic for many people, particularly when compared to written texts that are exclusionary for different groups of people. The new London group (1996) write:  “As soon as our sights are set on the objective of creating the learning conditions for full social participation, the issue of differences of culture, language, and gender are not barriers to educational success ” (p.61), highlighting how multimodal communication significantly reduces barriers to effective communication.

References:

Dobson, T. M., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. Cambridge University Press.

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

emojistory

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.

 

 

My story:

I thought that for today’s story we had talk about the field trip. That I went on today with my students. So I found out that our city was hosting a Mayor’s Expo for environmental education and I was really excited for. The opportunity to take my students there and of course it was a free field trip and. That was very enticing for us. No, the Mayors Expo was organizing busing. So they contacted me and let me know that they were going to send a city bus to pick us up. So it is the morning of the field trip. And we go to get on the bus and there is just a very loud beeping noise. We load all the children on and I’m letting the driver know that we can go. And we already a little bit late at this point, of course. Amber still just sitting there. So I go up to the vibe stripper again and I might get we can actually leave. It’s OK. And he was like, I’m not actually sure if I’m able to drive the bus because it’s making this beeping sound, giving me warning signals. So I’m waiting for my supervisor to let me know if we can go. After a little bit. Bus driver starts driving the bus and I’m like, oh great, we’re on our way. We’re about 15 minutes late at this point. An then he pulls over about 5 minutes away from the school. And tells me that he is not able to drive the bus, the bus can’t go over 30 kilometres an hour and that he is calling for another bus to come pick us up. So now we’re only 5 minutes from the school. We were pulled over on the side of a busy Rd. And it is boiling hot with the sun shining into the windows. And we are just waiting on this bus. Obviously this starts turning into chaos as my grade eight students are all over the place, excited, things like that Kids are trying to get off the bus and go walk around on the streets and I’m. Attempting to keep everybody under control. Eventually another bus does show up to come pick us up and takes us. Down to our field trip and we show up about. An hour late at this point. So we have missed the scheduled. Sessions that we were supposed to attend to and then we spent about 15 minutes waiting at the check in desk just trying to figure out what sessions I can take my students through. And how we’re going to manage the schedules, which I spent of course hours making for everyone signing him up for different sessions, but. In the end, we ended up having a wonderful field trip. Despite showing up an hour and a half late.

Story Analysis:

To complete this task, I utilized the speech to text feature (Office dictate) on Microsoft word. The most notable deviations from written conventions of English is the amount of times that I started a sentence with “so”, something I’m now hyper aware of. I can’t fault the program for that, but it is interesting to note the differences in the way that I would speak and how I would type out a story.

There are a significant amount of errors throughout the text. I found that every time I paused when speaking, the program finished the sentence and started a new one. The result is a rather choppy read with numerous sentence fragments. There are quite a few word substitutions, my personal favorite being the rebranding of the “bus driver” to a “vibe stripper” which actually still fit with the narrative. In several places the sentences start with the word “And” which deeply irks my teacher heart, but a common mistake found in students writing. Stylistically, if I was typing out a story I would likely add some spaces between paragraphs to group ideas together and help the reader digest the information. As a SPED teacher, this assignment really resonated with me. We are constantly being inundated with the directive to have the students use speech to text for their writing. While it does have some benefits for students, the written work comes out disjointed, full of errors, word substitutions and poor punctuation. I wonder about the effect this has on my students understanding of the English language.  Often when we read back through their writing, they are unsure of what it says / is supposed to say/ or mistakenly believe a word to be another substituted word.

Aside from the disastrous punctuation and a few word substitutions, the text manages to convey the story well. There is only one area where I got a little lost reading it, but the key information is articulated well. The program I used functioned better than Google Read and Write (often used by my students) and I was quite impressed with the result. There are no spelling mistakes and the program rarely missed any of the words that I was speaking. The story I chose wasn’t particularly exciting and I found that towards the end I wasn’t entirely sure what point I was making. Had I chosen to script or write the story out, I likely would’ve edited it and made sure that there was a strong ending rather than a loose trail of thoughts.

A key difference in oral storytelling and written story telling is the relaxation of grammar rules and enhanced stylistic choices that the speaker might make. In my story, this came to fruition in the form of me saying “so” about every 3 seconds. The most obvious difference between print and oral texts is the absence of any tone or tempo that add meaning to a message. On paper, my story is incredibly boring, but if articulated verbally, the addition of dramatic pauses, tone and sound effects add another dimension to the message.  When stories are told in person, there is an added bonus of facial expressions, body language and hand gestures that add a depth to the information being communicated.  I think that my take away from this exercise is a strong preference for oral storytelling, and the hindrances of speech to text software.

Hello! My name is Katy Richards and these are the contents of a bag I had on my the other day during a workshop. Currently, I work as a Junior High teacher in the LEAD program for students with learning disabilities. I feel that my work is immediately reflected in my bag contents- evidenced by the pencils and fidgets that I keep with me.

When I am not working, I love going to the gym, riding my bike, running, hiking and coaching sports. I find exercise really helpful in managing my stress, especially during May/June when we are so busy with year end tasks and MET courses. Naturally, my bag is always stocked with healthy snacks or whatever I have meal prepped to get me through the week. I LOVE all things cooking, baking, going to restaurants and trying new foods.

I think that some of the most telling items in my bag are the makeup, starbucks coffee & tumbler, and the disney pin. These items are inherently cultural and probably do a better job of representing my personality than anything else in the bag. Although different people may read them differently, the items showcase my feminine side and penchant for consumerism of pop culture. Other items are perhaps misleading, as the umbrella would imply that I live in a rainy/ wet place, but I am actually located in Calgary, Alberta. The hand lotion is in fact, more representative of the climate in which I live.

The contents of my bag are fairly typical- reading glasses, snacks, writing utensil, money/wallet, keys. These contents could represent any time period over the last 10-25 years. However, the packaging/ containers for these items would look different- particularly the tupperware for the snacks, water bottle tumbler, and coffee cup material. These items reflect the evolution of material use (or re-use) that is a prominent issue in society today. Other items have evolved less over time, the umbrella, pencil, glasses container could all likely date back 40-50 years.

Thanks for checking out my bag!