This is also a re-link to What’s in Your Bag, because I’m going to re-explore Shaun’s task and comment on the new changes to his blog.
How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know?
Shaun used Adobe Captivate again. He appears to have layered a speech to text speaker and other sound effects on top of his original task. I’m no longer able to access his original task, but there are some new features to his re-design:
- Applause and music when you start and finish the exploration
- Click on specific items in his bag and hear more about why it’s in his bag
- This appears to have been a way to chunk some of the content that used to be just text
- Verbal instructions on how to navigate through his discussion responses
According to one of his linking posts, Shaun chose to use a text-to-speech voice because he doesn’t like doing narration and avoids it when he can. While I can sympathize with this, his use of a computerized voice made the experience more impersonal. Perhaps because his original task was already interactive, the mode-bending didn’t seem like a re-design. In some ways, I felt cheated because I was expecting something different, but Shaun’s Tasks 1 and 7 feel identical.
In contrast, my mode-bending task is a reflective deep dive of my original What’s In Your Bag. Switching modes requires a re-think of the original task because the audio medium has different affordances. I didn’t think that simply narrating the original task would accomplish this. My approach was based on targeting the purpose of What’s In Your Bag and then re-designing an experience based on this. For me, this task was about exposing and exploring our hidden identities.
My process work included podcasts which served their purpose, but I didn’t think they truly leveraged the affordances of audio. The excitement of audio comes from layering pitches, volumes, colours, tones, and other dynamics. I re-listened to this Lorde mash up several times to examine how the creator achieved an aural experience.
My end product also uses a digital voice, but this is done to juxtapose my voice. By layering audible and less audible sounds, I created an aural experience that emphasizes the my emotions and perceptions of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan cards.
What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?
I wonder if Shaun’s use of Adobe Captivate and re-use of his original task led him to just layer narration on top. Perhaps Adobe Captivate dictated how he could mode bend.
Now that Shaun’s blog is more populated, I can understand that he isn’t using WordPress as his tool. Instead, WordPress is the container for our class to access his tasks. His tools are Adobe Captivate and Adobe Spark.
How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authouring and end-user interface?
Adobe Captivate and Adobe Spark can definitely leverage more interactivity as compared to WordPress. These tools can more easily chunk content, present them in different ways, allow you to layer sounds on top, and force users to reveal content through scrolling or clicking.
This isn’t the case with the native WordPress editor. Chunking content and adding interactive elements would require HTML coding and embedding material created from another tool (e.g., H5P).
What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?
Shaun’s blog is an easter egg hunt. If you start from the blog’s home page and try navigating from the menu, you’re forced to click around. “Assignment #” has no meaning to anyone outside of our course. I didn’t know what “Blog” was, but it is the real container for Assignments 1 and 2.
On the WordPress end, Shaun’s blog is more stable and predictable now. Usually his entry is:
Please see my task here.
- Drop cap
- On a coloured background
- “here” is hyperlinked
From a user perspective, this is frustrating because I have more forced interactions to get to where I want. Removing the “click here” type experience by embedding the content in an iframe would be less frustrating for the user.
In some tasks, the colour contrast is poor so it’s hard to find the “here”. Also, the lack of descriptive hyperlinks is not accessible and often makes me wonder what I’m investing my click in.
On the task end, things are more unpredictable. Although Shaun premises his blog as his way to explore WordPress’s affordances, I don’t think he’s actually exploring WordPress. Instead, it looks like he’s exploring Adobe Captivate and Adobe Spark, hosting this content on a different website, and then linking it into his WordPress blog. What we’re really experiencing is Shaun’s experimentation of these tools. He’s creating for him rather than for the user.
What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?
When you get to Shaun’s actual tasks, they’re nicely chunked and very different from what you would expect from a text based blog. I appreciate the interactions because they’re different.
However, in some cases, I find the forced wait for animations and forced clicking to be very frustrating. Sometimes I just wish I could scroll through his work to read it instead. In the posts where he has to explicitly give instructions on how to access his task, I feel anxious and unsure about what I’m getting myself into.
The linking assignment was particularly frustrating because of how I was forced to access the information.
Knowing that the linking assignment was Assignment 2, I used these steps:
- Click on Assignment 2 in the menu
- Read instructions that I should have clicked Blogs in the menu and then Assignment 2
- Click “here”
- Press play
- Wait 5 seconds before I can click on “Begin” as I watch the button crawl up and I frantically try to click it
- Click Next button
- Choose from different links (arranged left to right in decreasing order)
- Clicking the number has a sound and appears to refresh the page, but the screen is mostly stationary
- Click “Click here for Connection #” which is just text floating on a background image, has no expected cues that it’s a link
- Opens a PDF in a new tab
These forced interactions are inappropriate for the user, but I know he’s probably just experimenting. Every task is so unpredictable that I don’t know how to behave.
How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?
In re-examining my blog, I haven’t made huge changes to the architecture.
From reading Shaun’s linking assignment and recognizing that he’s doing as much as he can to explore affordances, I notice that we are both still constrained to the course and how courses tend to progress.
In more recent posts, I am trying to include multimedia as needed. I will embed iframes so that the user doesn’t have to leave my page. However, I still communicate mostly through text. In all my past courses, writing is the primary method of communication and this continues.
A self-imposed constraint is my desire to increase the accessibility of my blog. I always label the alt text (even though it was so hard for the emoji story!!!), use heading architecture, and type directly into the rich content editor. Sometimes this constraint is limiting because I’m not sure how to explore my options and my blog theme doesn’t lend itself to visual chunking.