Task 8: Golden Record – Write the Other Way (wordpress.com) (Anneke Nussbaum)
My first impression of this site was, quite simply, wow. Anneke is clearly much more comfortable in the blogging style space than I am, and was able to pay as much attention to the appearance of the page as to the excellent content. I connected with her approach to use geography as a guiding principle in narrowing down her list and her acknowledgement that by necessity something that should probably be there won’t be due to the nature of this assignment. I find myself wishing I had her skills at creating pages! ????
What’s In Your Bag? – Terri-Lynn McLeod ETEC 540 (ubc.ca) (Terry-Lynn McLeod)
I think I stopped at Terry-Lynn’s page because of the calculator in her bag. This made me instantly feel connected to her world. As I looked more carefully at the contents of her bag the connections grew. Writing utensils, candy, and a medium for taking notes were also things in my bag, suggesting we share some priorities in terms of our understanding of our place in the world. Once again, however, I have been schooled in blog design. Although using the same tool as me, Terry-Lynn has made her space so much more inviting than mine. She is clearly far more literate in this form of communication than myself.
Attention Economy – Chowey@ (ubc.ca) (Chris Howey)
It seems that Chris and I shared a similar experience during this activity. It is helpful to know that Chris also thought that there was a primitiveness to this exercise – I was afraid I was a little too jaded in my opinion on this. Great job on the “attention getting” image at the top of this page – it certainly worked on me.
Task 4: Manual Scripts | Richard’s Webspace for ETEC 540 (ubc.ca) (Richard Wong)
I chose Richard’s post for this task because it was largely opposite from my own. Although Richard admits to having been a hand writer in his past, he has now embraced digital technologies. I was interested to learn that he found his hand cramping during what I considered to be short writing exercise – it’s easy to forget how even the smallest muscles in our body are toned and conditioned by our everyday activities. The annoyance of running out of ink must have been particularly frustrating while working with such a primitive tool, but perhaps it might also be seen as being akin to having your battery die while working on your laptop? This was one of the easiest tasks for me, but it is obvious that this was not the case for everyone.
Task 11: Predictive Text – ETEC 540 Eduardo Rebagliati (ubc.ca) (Eduardo Rebagliati)
I chose Eduardo’s page for this largely based on its elegant look. His experience with his cell phone also proved an interesting counterpoint to my own. While for myself my restricted options demonstrated my lack of use of my phone, in Eduardo’s case his phone reflected the fact that English is not the language he uses on his phone, although it appears that the vocabulary available was considerably more robust than my own.
Task 12: Speculative Futures | etec540 (ubc.ca) (Nick)
I chose Nick’s page because I was fascinated with the idea of turning to an external service to help in the construction of the story. This is not something that had even been on my radar as a possibility for this assignment. The result of the exercise is here is extremely impressive. I never imagined that anyone would create a full story book with illustrations for this task. It has served to remind me that although I am technically savvy about using and programming computers, much of the world wide web is still unknown territory to me, and likely will forever remain so.