ETEC 540: Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing

Mode-bending

To change the semiotic mode of Task 1, I created the above podcast: the audio transmission field notes of Scout 150294, intergalactic explorer visiting Earth in the year 3021. The pandemic’s over by then, surely, but I’m not sure we’re still around, but at least it seems flora and fauna have reclaimed their space.

1000 years into the future, my bag is missing some items of value, but most of them are still there. Scout 150294 describes the objects in the bag in a manner that is somewhat strange but indicates they have some knowledge of Earth’s history, resources, and languages. The field notes are almost purely observational with a bit of interjected comments here and there.

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To create the podcast, I recorded my voice in two takes using Adobe Audition and changed the pitch to create the voice of Scout 150294. I made a grave error in using the year 2021 in the narrative, which meant I had to go back after I had completed everything to fix it so that the recording is set in the future. I then imported the mp3 file into Mac software GarageBand to integrate space transmission/Sci-Fi sound effects into it to add to its authenticity as a futuristic mission to explore the Earth.

The semiotic mode for the original task was an interactive visual with an autobiographical typographic text, and this remix, or semiotic remediation, of the task was a Sci-Fi nonfiction narrative from the perspective of an intergalactic explorer. In my years teaching English Language Learners, I learned the value of asking students to create meaning and demonstrate their understanding of texts by using a mix of mode-bending and genre-bending, which students often did by creating collaborative posters where they drew images, used symbols, and alphabetic text, and through handwritten and digital work creating visual representations of text. Through West Ed’s Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) model, an intense professional development that drove our school’s curriculum and instructional practices, we learned about text re-presentation, or remediation.

When I began my teaching career in 2007, mp3 players were barely iPods, the smartest phones were Blackberries, and we relied on the school computer lab or 2-4 per classroom for students to share. Technology has now become so ubiquitous that most students have access to their own device, more schools have 1:1 device/laptop per student programs, and more than ever students and teachers are well equipped for a new pedagogy that encourages students to transform and remediate text to create meaning and understanding and to have agency over the learning process. (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). While I think ubiquitous access to today’s technologies affords teachers and students teaching and learning opportunities, access alone does not solve the issue of the digital divide or necessarily lead to more (digitally) literate teachers and students.

Members of the New London Group (1996), Dobson & Willinsky (2009), and others were right to be concerned about the widening of disparities, and what this means for literacy pedagogy, particularly in a new global economy and education landscape shaped by neoliberal capitalist forces, in which technology is seen as a panacea for education and upward economic mobility. I am keen on Warschauer, mentioned in Dobson & Willinsky (2009), his and others’ critical analysis (Warschauer et al., 2011) of 1:1 programs that challenges the ideas of Negroponte (also mentioned in this text) and a digital utopia where the world’s poorest children can pull themselves out of poverty by simply having access to technology. My own ideas about the power of ubiquitous technology and access have been challenged by recent reading of digital education scholars at the University of Edinburgh such as Bayne and Ross (featured in this week as they lay down why we must rethink referring to teachers as digital immigrants and students as digital natives), and others such as Williamson and Knox. Collectively their scholarship confronts ed tech and tech companies and their economic power that has an unduly influence and stronghold on where education is headed and warns of diving headlong and naively into believing more technology in education will increase academic and literacy outcomes.

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As a final reflection on the task, I used Adobe Audition, and I pay a $29.99 USD/month fee for Adobe Creative Cloud. I used GarageBand, which is free for iPhone and Mac users, but I had to download a 10gb pack of sounds to be able to get the sound effects I used. If schools, teachers, and students are on limited data plans and budgets, how feasible would it be to license Adobe Creative Cloud or use those precious gb for access to more sound effects? Teachers and students depend on freeware and the exchange of their data privacy and digital security for access to apps that allow them to unlock their creative potential and use technology to re-mediate texts, but they may be unaware of the hidden costs to themselves and the education system as a whole.

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References

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2009). Multiliteracies: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4:3, 164-195, DOI:10.1080/15544800903076044

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, 286-312. Cambridge University Press.

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

Warschauer, M., Cotten, S. R., & Ames, M. G. (2011). One laptop per child Birmingham: Case study of a radical experiment. International Journal of Learning and Media, 3(2), 61-76. http://www.doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00069

An emoji story

This week’s task invited us to explore the perilous world of using the semiotic mode of the emoji to create a narrative text by recreating the plot of a TV show or movie. Below I have created an emoji plot summary of a TV show available on Netflix (in the U.S. and Canada!) The title, which is one word in reality and loosely imagined here, appears on the first line, and the following summary covers the first episode and goes a bit further into the first season.

If you’re curious about what show this is, click here to watch the season 1 trailer.

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An emoji is a pictogram, defined as “a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object,” and though the emoji library continues to gradually expand to represent more words and ideas, it is still fairly limited (Wikipedia, 2021). In his discussion of the breakout of the visual in the late age of print, Bolter refers to the limitation of picture writing, a precursor to emoji as a mode of electronic picture writing, to convey a narrative (2010). In picture writing or depiction through images, as Kress (2005) describes, an author can draw what they like in order to communicate meaning, and the mode is superior to using words whose meanings can be vague. In picture writing, Bolter describes each element existing “between linguistic and pictorial meaning” and that “when the picture text is a narrative, the elements seem to aim for the specificity of language” (2010, p. 63). In my experience, emoji as pictograms function best when they are used to communicate a short message or basic idea quickly and efficiently (such as a thumbs up to represent an affirmative response such as “yes” or a heart to represent “I love you”) or when they supplement alphabetic texts rather than replace them completely. In this attempt to produce a more complex narrative, I found myself struggling to find emoji to communicate specifically what I wanted, even after taking time to scroll through the library and even search emojis by word, as shown below.

Prior to beginning this task, I was somewhat naive in thinking the emoji library would allow me great freedom in communicating my ideas effectively, and I ultimately found it very frustrating and limiting mode to use for an extended period of time. When I found myself struggling, I started adding more and more emojis in the attempt to be more descriptive or specific, and as a result, my sentences become a convoluted mess. Though my attempt to use emojis to create a clear, specific narrative was in earnest, the limitations of the mode may mean the reader will likely be confused and the meaning of my chosen emojis obfuscated.

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I chose a TV show I’ve been binge watching, as it’s fresh on my mind, but I did not choose it for its ease in translating visually through the use of emoji. My mother recommended the show to me, has seen the show in its entirety, and she agreed to read my emoji plot summary to see if it was comprehensible. I sent her the plot summary in a text, and we FaceTimed so I could hear her read it aloud and see how she did.

In Zaltzman’s podcast interview with internet linguist McCulloch, they discuss emoji as a semiotic mode which relies heavily on the reader’s ability to interpret emoji meaningfully as influenced by a number of factors including the reader’s experience, cultural, and linguistic contexts (2019). My emoji plot summary takes a bit of a risqué turn when I begin using common vegetables and fruits, and my mom did not have the same cultural knowledge or experience necessary to interpret those symbols in the way I intended. As someone who has used formerly used dating apps, currently uses social media apps and text messages regularly, the eggplant and peach are used in some contexts to represent sexual connotations. As McCulloch says, “if you’re going to have emoji convey these additional meanings, those can’t be universal because somebody has to tell you that the eggplant is obscene and not just a vegetable.” Awkwardly, that’s what I had to do!

Though we have discussed the show several times in the past week, mom struggled to understand what the heck it all meant and make the leap to realize it’s the same show she knows I’ve been watching and we’ve been talking about. Even when I returned to the emoji plot summary later in the week, I had some difficulty interpreting what it all meant.

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References

Bolter, J. D. (2010). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004

Pictogram. (2021, February 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram

Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). The Allusionist 102. New Rules [Audio podcast]. The Allusionist. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules

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Manual scripts and potato beet printing

I chose the crafty route for this task, and while we didn’t have potatoes at home, I bought a 5 lb. bag of beets last week and had already boiled and peeled a few that had been waiting patiently in the fridge for someone to eat them. Honestly, I couldn’t think of better use for these beets and transformed them into letters; they are self-inking vegetables, after all.

I printed the word tacos, because it’s my favourite food, and Taco is my nickname. I celebrated my birthday earlier this week, and my family sent me one of those round taco/burrito flour tortilla blankets, with the following note written by my niece.

With that introduction, I go full taco(s) mode and present to you a brief 43 second timelapse video of the manual script beet printing process.

The delightful chore of manual beet printing

It didn’t take me long to create the letters, however I do realize cutting cooked, sliced beets is much easier than carving raw potatoes and so creating manual letters with this alternate vegetable was a bit of a shortcut. It took me much longer to piece together a filming setup to hold my iPhone above the cutting board and paper so I could create a timelapse bird’s eye view of the process (details in footnotes).

The curved-tip knife I used wasn’t as easy to maneuver, especially in cutting circular lines in the a, c, o, and s, but I did my best without obsessing over obtaining perfection with each letter. After all, I had more cooked beets to work with. Any error wouldn’t have taken much time or additional resources to recreate. Straight lines were easier to cut, but even my letter t wasn’t proportionally perfect, with a thicker cross stroke than the downward stroke. The letter o had some little devil horns I failed to cut away, so I just made sure to use the other side of the o when printing. I imagine carving these letters in a potato would have been much more labour intensive and any errors would have been difficult to remedy and used up more resources.

I managed to print every letter clearly on the page without smearing anything, but I didn’t drop the letter a exactly where I wished. Still, I don’t think the prints look half bad. This was a fun diversion, but would I want to create letters and print a whole text this way ? Absolutely not.

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The manual printing process made me thankful that we are no longer reliant on handwriting or letterpress printing or even manual typewriters to produce quality works of writing. I felt for the monk in Harris’s (2018) podcast on the history of the printed book and how soul-crushing his job must have been when I heard the following, which he had written in the margins of the book he was hand scripting:

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, twists your stomach and your sides. The book which you now see, was written while I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.

The monk’s experience and job copying books was not a willing task he performed, it was his duty. What did he gain from his careful, diligent hand scripting? What undue stress fell upon him for the monumental task for which he was designated? Did he recognize his unique contribution to knowledge? When we write today do we recognize ours?

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Info about Film setup: I used a 2.5 foot tall drink table, a drafting tool called a t-square that looks like a ruler with a T, and a 7 lb handweight to hold the t-square down. The t-square has a round hole in it, and though I don’t know what its true purpose is, it was perfect for aligning my iPhone’s camera above the cutting board to take a timelapse video.

Voice-to-Text Technology

The premise of this week’s task was to use a voice-to-text technology to transform a story told with oral language into material text and to discuss and analyze the outcome. To complete this task, I selected Google Docs and its Voice Typing feature, was able to practice using the technology after reading this week’s course texts to take notes on what I had highlighted and to see how accurately my speech would be captured and transformed into written text. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised with the results and how well my voice was captured, because I have some issues with enunciation sometimes and can get mumblemouthed; I often have a difficult time with Siri when I send voice-to-text text messages and prefer typing to my language input being misinterpreted and mangled. I was impressed with how some lesson common words such as authors’ last names were captured and processed to accurately come out as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong.

As I spoke, I could see my words appear on the screen in real time and dots to indicate Google was working to transcribe them, but after pausing, I noticed whole lines of the voice-to-text reverting back to dots to indicate a second round of processing was occurring. I assume this is part of the technology’s AI process of matching text against all of Google’s data for a more intelligent transcription, which is why the names Eric Havelock and Walter Ong’s names ended up perfectly spelled, though I didn’t have the same luck with the names Jack Goody and Ian Watt probably because of my poor enunciation, but I digress. The following is my unscripted, unedited personal narrative about gardening told orally and captured with Google Docs’ Voice typing feature. Inspired by Gnanadesikan (2009), I introduce my story with the following quote:

Writing takes words and turns them into objects, visible or tangible. Written down, words remain on the page like butterflies stuck onto boards with pins. They can be examined, analyzed, and dissected. Spoken words, by contrast, are inherently ephemeral.

and an accompanying word cloud image in the shape of a butterfly created at https://www.wordclouds.com/

Enjoy.

I started gardening when I move to Toronto which is a little bit Ironic considering that there’s a lot more land to Garden on in Texas but when I live there I live in Austin with roommates in apartments and really didn’t have my own space where I can grow things I declared myself to have a green thumb because I would kill any indoor plant that was given to me or that I purchased So eventually I just stopped buying them one of the things that it’s funny about growing plants indoors is that everybody over Waters them constantly and that’s what causes their death death by love and overwatering that first year in Toronto I grew tomatoes peppers basil planted some flowers like Marigold and has some peas growing up a trellis in the backyard we didn’t have much space and I had to lay down some cardboard and build a raised bed to make it happen but eventually the second year I used up a lot more space by making more red raised beds I really got into gardening do when we moved from Toronto to Niagara so I can go to school in the greenhouse technician program that’s when they really took off a lot of methods and the science behind growing and so that’s giving me the confidence to do what I do at my own home I’m really into native gardening as well as vegetable gardening and I really like growing weird vegetables but then sometimes it takes an effort to figure out what to do with them in the kitchen but my interest in gardening kind of stems from my interest in eating food and then learning how to cook food I like to eat at home as opposed to going out all the time now the focus has shifted a bit from gardening just for vegetables and herbs to planting a lot more native plants to attract pollinators and birds to the garden I really enjoyed this winter watching all of the birds come to the yard and eat from the feeders but also take away the seeds leftover on the plants that I didn’t clean up when they all died in the fall and early winter things like native Ironwood Woodland sunflowers echinacea and ask her little birds like juntos and sparrows are constantly picking at the ground and flying under the feeder to pick up the scraps of what’s left over that dropped but then they migrate toward those plants it really makes me happy that all these efforts are not being wasted in the summer it’s a particularly enjoyable for me to watch the bees and the butterflies and even lesser-known pollinators such a wise and beetles land on the flowers and is it a wide variety of plants need it or not it’s still pretty cool to see one plant that really kind of shocked me as far as having a lot of different diversity of pollinators visit it was still little native bees wasps swallowtail butterflies that lay their eggs on it visited the dill and I just couldn’t bear 2 remove it from the garden when it was really time to do so so in the spring I think I’ll have a lot of different little tail plants popping out from where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden The spring am starting more native plants by sowing the seeds while it’s still cold so they undergo the cold stratification. They need to pop up in the spring so things like golden Alexander and pearly Everlasting which are two flowers that are native and attract different native butterflies Elsa want to find my peppers and tomatoes this year even though I know how to start them because I really find that greenhouse-grown tomatoes and peppers do a lot better in the garden the ones I try to start indoors myself I’ll probably start some herbs and some brassicas like kale and brussel sprouts so I really haven’t had much success with the brussel sprouts last year when I started spinach and various lettuce says they did pretty well when I transplant them into the garden so I plan on doing that again I’ll direct sow some peas carrots beets radishes and other root vegetables probably a couple weeks before the frost date comes in May so that they give a little bit of a head start and I think I’ll do the same with lettuce as well since there really is a short. Of time in the spring you can grow it before it gets too hot in the summer in the weather starts to bolt or try to flower and become bitterThe other thing I want to do is correct a misstep I made last year when I planted some of my flowering plants on the bottom level of my garden the red plants like red cardinal flower and salvia against which is pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds what was the use of planting them far away in the garden and not being able to actually see the hummingbirds when they come to visit

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The goal of this task is to examine the differences in language patterns between oral and written language, and as an English and Communications instructor, there are a few things that stand out to me.

The spoken story is an unscripted and otherwise unedited work that was composed extemporaneously resulting in a stream-of-consciousness style text. From a writer’s perspective, there’s a lot of room for improvement especially in terms of focus and organization, which can make or break the quality of a written text. The output of my language became one big and heavy block of text, with absolutely no punctuation to frame words into meaningful sentences or separate sentences into organized paragraphs. I’m actually quite perturbed by the result.

In speaking, an author can read the room to adapt storytelling for the audience in ways that can’t occur in written text, and in this case, when the story is being dictated to a device that cannot indicate confusion or boredom or any other emotion that might drive the speaker to adapt their language in real time. And the flow from one sentence to another and cohesiveness may be considered weak in written text but might be more tolerable in the context of orality.

Haas (2013) poses the technology question: “What does it mean for language to become material?” and extends the question with a follow-up: “What is the nature of computer technologies and what is their impact on writing?”

When oral language becomes material such as in this task, the expectations of written text are immediately imposed upon it, and it becomes difficult to ignore the lack of writing conventions, particularly punctuation. The voice-to-text technology does not appropriately capture punctuation unless it is spoken aloud, which would have required me to familiarize myself with proper pronunciation commands, which I did not do. Upon reviewing the story, I see that when I said the word “period” a few times when speaking to indicate a period of time, that commanded the voice-to-text technology to create punctuation instead of the word “period.” The computer technology knows to exclude filler words such as “ummmm,” which I caught myself using a few times, even thought I was moderating my speech and would pause entirely in lieu of using filler words, which would be natural in oral storytelling.

The voice-to-text technology also chose to capitalize certain words that shouldn’t have been capitalized, and I wish I had an audio recording to match up with the voice-to-text writing to compare the two. When I said “where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden” did I put some sort of stress on the words all over the garden to indicate to voice-to-text that those words should be capitalized? I’m not sure.

Schmandt-Besserat & Erard (2009) refer to the advancement of technology and ways of writing, and in 2021, the technology allows for fairly accurate written output of oral input. Most of my grievances with the output are likely due to user error, or at least my unawareness of the language to use or ways of speaking that would produce all of the missing conventions of written English. But if I have to break up my storytelling with punctuation commands, my thinking is disrupted, and I’m not telling the story the same way I would without this type of moderation. With an increasing number of people giving technology more oral input, I foresee natural language processing advancing rapidly and voice-to-text technology creating more written output that mimics the qualities and intentions attached to our spoken language that translate to conventional written language.

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References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The First IT Revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (pp 1-12). John Wiley & Sons. doi: 10.1002/9781444304671

Haas, C. (2013). The Technology Question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy(pp. 3-23). Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203811238

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2009). Origins and Forms of Writing. In Bazerman, C. (Ed.) Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781410616470

I have completed Task 2 in CLAS.

Hello y’all, I’m Mel Drake. To tell you more about myself, I’ve created an interactive image with a wee bit of text using Genially. To interact with the image and learn more about each of the items I carry with me, just mouse over the green icons. If there’s an issue with the image embed and it’s not loading for you, please click the link below. *Thanks to Deirdre for letting me know there was an issue!

https://view.genial.ly/5ffc8f00a2847a0da0f1ff33/interactive-image-whats-in-my-bag

Full disclosure, I haven’t carried a daily bag since before lockdown last March, and so I’ve curated these personal belongings to represent who I am and what I want to share with others. The items as a collection become a text that shares a version of my daily life which revolves mostly around my interests and free time instead of my life as a full-time graduate student in an online program. This version of my daily bag is also shaped by the pandemic which has canceled hanging out in public spaces like coffee shops or libraries for long periods of time to work or study, and so the items I use when studying such as a laptop and notebooks are notably absent. Also absent are the loose scrap pieces of paper, notes, and receipts and little found mementos I collect when I come across them.

I’m an American living in Canada and an educator addicted to Burt’s Bees who loves travel, music, card games, photography, the outdoors, observing and identifying bird and insect life, and collecting coins. Further explanation and inspection to connect these objects together are required to create a more complex narrative.

I find joy in the discovery of new things, and the real-life version of Pokémon I play to collect all the coins, insects, birds, and other fauna and flora is my way of connecting to and learning about my new home and the places I visit.

The text technologies – the writing devices (pencil, pen, highlighter, dry erase markers), the bird ID book, travel documents (passport, travel/immigration cards in protective sleeve), mobile phone, and mirrorless DSLR camera – show that I communicate using traditional text mediums and computer-based and image-based mediums. From reading these belongings, it can be inferred that I have literacies that involve technology, photography, and the natural environment.

Though some of the objects curated (loupe, birds book) are becoming increasingly obsolete to me, they represent an interest or hobby in a more tangible way than the technology that has replaced them (camera lenses, DSLR, apps such as iNaturalist, eBird, and Merlin, and social media affinity groups for insects and birds).

An archaeologist of the future would be able to identify me as a person who lived in Canada and the U.S. in the late 20th century and beginning of the 21st century during a time of technological transition from analog to digital and might be able to identify me as a Gen Xer on the cusp of being a Millenial. Upon inspection of the coins I carry and the contents of my wallet and passport, they would also know I’ve traveled to México, the Dominican Republic, Europe, and the UK. They’d identify me as a student from my student ID, an educator from faculty ID, a reader from my library cards, and further as a person who enjoys flora and fauna from my parks and butterfly conservatory passes.

15 years ago, I was a second-year teacher, and I carried an enormous and bulky district-issued backpack packed with the district-issued laptop, personal laptop, materials I prepped at home to teach for the day, and manila file folders of student work to take home and mark, plus a purse. I would have also been carrying my lunch, snacks, Coke Zeros, and various personal hygiene products, headache medication, and a month’s worth of feminine products to supply me and my students. My car would have also functioned as an extension of my bag for all the things I needed that I couldn’t possibly carry with me – sports and workout gear for extracurriculars, extra clothes and shoes just in case. I would have had a mobile phone but not a smartphone, and I would have needed to carry my DSLR for photography since my little flip phone took horrible photos.

25 years ago, I was a sophomore in high school, and my bag would have only carried textbooks, a big 3 ring binder, and notebooks, with more loose papers crumpled into the bottom of the bag than I probably care to admit.