Linking Assignment 4 – Task 7: Mode Bending

I decided to do a linking assignment on Rania’s mode bending task because I felt a connection when I listened to her audio clip.

Rania Ismail’s Blog – Task 7: https://blogs.ubc.ca/met2020/2020/06/26/task-7-mode-bending/

Task 1: Rania’s Bag

 

My Blog – Task 7: https://blogs.ubc.ca/course9fa832d3ed5e9bc0e2a4b9d769b3ff09f6e98b71/2020/06/24/task-7-mode-bending/

Task 1: Melody’s Bag

 

After I listened to Rania’s audio clip, I looked into her bag from task 1.  In her audio clip, Rania mentions that you can’t really know a person from the outside of the bag and that this can be misleading.  In order to identify who a person is such as their personality or interests, one must look inside the bag at the items.  Our dark colored functional bag shows that we are often on the move and therefore carry items that are essential.  This is true as we are both teachers and live in Vancouver.  Other items we have in common are a wallet, cream, pen, cell phone, car keys, and an emergency bar to eat.  A person looking at our items can say that a personality trait is being practical since we carry emergency bars to eat, we have hand creams, and we prepare for different types of weather.

Rania mentions that the items in your bag can tell who you are and I am going to add to this that it can also show smaller specific groups that you belong to within your community.  For my post, I used a playlist consisting of brand names for the items in my bag.  Just the type of cell you have can communicate if you’re an Apple person or Microsoft. Items can also share specific items you like such as the brand of hand cream you use.

This task was quite open ended and led to various forms of creativity and individuality.  From the New London Group’s idea on multiliteracies, I think this is an area that is still evolving.  Classrooms in the past relied heavily on traditional ways of teaching and output is usually in the form of a paper.  Technology opened a new dialogue of communicating, learning, and options for the final product (video, audio, emoji, text).  Unlike hand stamping which was time consuming, labour intensive, and output was minimal, technology opened up multiple forms of communication where each of us can be authors.

I found Rania’s website easy to use as she was using UBC’s WordPress.  I am still a novice in creating a website and therefore find it helpful that some of my colleagues were using the same UBC WordPress as I was.  I like looking at the different ways people customized the architecture of their WordPress site.  Rania had her recent posts and comments at the right bar which was the same as mine.  The additional home and sample page were slightly changed from mine in that they had a black background which made the heading show up more clearly.