Can you guess my movie?

I relied mostly on words and ideas when typing out my summary. I think the first line of the story might give it away with the assumption that you have a pretty good knowledge of western movies for kids. I started with the title, subconsciously, because it has been drilled in my head that most pieces of writing start with a title. The first thing I type into this blogpost is a title. When I get my students to take math notes, I always start with the title of the chapter.

I chose this work because it is one of my favourite movies. As well, I thought it would be the easiest to convey my ideas across. After all, not many movies are centred around . Had I picked an Avengers movie, not only is the plot complicated (as it links to a variety of other movies in the franchise, and trying to chase down all those plot lines might end up in me going down another Twine rabbit-hole), but the emojis available are limiting. A “man” emoji could represent so many things, so many movies! Bolter (2001) identifies this challenge with pictures: they “extend over a broad range of verbal meanings: each element means too much rather than too little” (p. 59). However, this movie wasn’t as straightforward as I assumed and I had to resort to being a little creative with some of my emoji use (e.g., there’s only one type of lion available!).

Bolter considers picture writing to be “constructed culturally [even today] as closer to the reader, because it does not depend upon the intermediary of spoken language and seems to reproduce places and events directly” (p. 59). Extending this to the use of emojis, as discussed in last week’s readings, Zaltzman’s (2019) podcast succinctly touches on the culture surrounding emojis. There needs to be a mutual interpretation of specific emojis in order for its intended meaning to be understood (7:48). As such, this type of picture writing does depend on the spoken language. The way emojis are used differ depending on your relationship to the internet and how you use it. For my parents, emojis are quite simple and they use probably 10% of the entire emoji keyboard, sticking to the obvious ones. So yes, Bolter is right on the money on that one. But what about these?

I have to rely on text to provide the context. I have to rely on my friend understanding that those eyes are saying, “side-eyeing” and “I’m judging you” and not “look over there”. These emojis arose out of internet meme use and conversations, and their meanings and usage will fade as others will come to replace it.

In the 1970’s, ‘kawaii printing’ rose to popularity in Japan, eventually paving the way for kawaii culture. Kinsella (1995) describes this ‘cute’ new style as using round characters, little cartoon hearts, stars, and faces randomly inserted into texts (p. 222).

From ‘Cuties in Japan’ by Kinsella (1995)

Kawaii printing seems harmless, but through this young girls have taken the written language—something Kinsella considers to be the “lynch pin of Japanese culture”—made it their own, and fostered their own relationship with text (p. 222). Surely it wasn’t harmless. At least not to adults and authority figures in school, who had to take extreme measures to ban an entire writing style because it rendered printing nearly impossible to read. Instead of its functional use, text became decorative and personal. Back to Bolter, he states that “picture writing lacks narrative power” (p. 59). While ‘kawaii printing’ isn’t strictly considered picture writing as it is based on katakana and hiragana, its cutesy decorations have transformed text into picture, one that is powerful and certainly has the power to tell its own narrative.

Instead of “text [gathering] around the image and [supervising] its reading,” it has become the other way around (Bolter, 2001, p. 49). As someone who has an extensive meme folder on her phone, had entire conversations with just .gifs, and certainly am very liberal with emojis in every day texts, picture writing seems to be my spoken language these days.

References
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 47-76.

Kinsella, S. (1995). Cuties in Japan. In B. Moeran & L. Skov (Eds.), Women, media and consumption in Japan (pp. 230-264). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315026312-13

Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New rules (No. 102) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Allusionist. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules

Twine: Ms. Li’s Morning (.zip file, right click + open in new tab to download)

This Twine will lead you through a typical morning in my life. All aboard the struggle bus (ꐦ ಠ皿ಠ ). Making this Twine was a lot of fun and I can see myself getting very carried away with it. I wish I knew about this resource when I did my fractured “choose your own adventure” fairytales unit two years ago (I manually created PowerPoint slides to get them to link to different outcomes. It was so laborious and didn’t fully capture the ‘choose your own’ spirit).

At first, I tried to develop the different level of branches all at the same time, but quickly realized it was really difficult to keep track of the story. Later on, I fully developed one storyline (e.g., went to Starbucks–>sneaking off to do photocopying) before completing the other (e.g., went to Starbucks–>cancel the math test). If I were to do this again, or teach my students to use Twine, I would get them to map it out on paper first. I felt like I didn’t fully take advantage of the different functions Twine allowed. In the game, the temple of No, I could see how certain paths looped back or connected to other plot points (e.g., when having to select between three doors), or how certain texts would only appear after I clicked certain words. If I had more time, I would explore the various assets to create a more interactive experience.

In chapter 3 of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Bolter (2001) posits that though texts are muted in the printed book and the web “offers us the experience of moving through a visual and conceptual space different from the space of the book,” much of our knowledge of hypertexts depend on our previous understanding of print (p. 45). This is true when designing this Twine as I frequently referred back to my own experiences with Choose Your Own Adventure chapter books. Even more so, when hypertexts reference things related to the page I’m currently reading, I am reminded of the footnotes that would’ve appeared in printed texts. What is different is that I mostly ignore the footnotes but am willing to open links in a ‘new tab’ for viewing after. Lately, I’ve been using the haptic touch on my phone for the “look up” function for even more immediate information. I like the way Bolter describes this as the webpages “coming” to me, because this is true (p. 29)! I am sitting at my desk, on my laptop, and am frequently presented with all these links I could choose to open (this brings to mind wikipedia spirals I have gone on).

Connected to this week’s ideas on the reinvention of writing, it is interesting to compare Twine with these published CYOA novels. The temple of No has text, auditory, and visual components that add to the overall product. Not only that, creators can always go back and edit the Twine to make it “more current” or to extend the story, if desired. Compare that to CYOA novels that feel dated after a decade. When information is published and printed, their stories become static. Even the Bolter chapter, published in 2001, feels dated with its spelling of the World Wide Web, a phrase we seldom use anymore when referring to the internet.

In the podcast The Allusionist, McCulloch mentions how Internet language shifts rapidly so there is no reason to enshrine it. Emojis, which can alter the sentence that comes before them, also depend on context and a mutual interpretation of the code in order for both parties to understand its linguistic context (8:31). A purple heart means one thing to a BTS fan, but another to someone who doesn’t understand the code. Has anyone used with you? This has also led me to reflect how I type on Microsoft Teams with my students. I admit, I go full on lowercase when replying to them because that is how I write on social media. It requires intentional effort to put back the capitals and punctuation, as well, intentionally adding in an emoji or two to not come across as too stiff or overly formal.

References
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 27-46.

Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New rules (No. 102) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Allusionist. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules

[Edited on February 17, fixing the incorrect URL under the Zaltzman reference]

I have selected a 6-letter word with one repeated character, I hope that is alright!

I had a lot of fun making these five potato stamps. I haven’t done this in so many years (last time I made this, it was with shapes for some homemade wrapping paper). I had to redo a few letters after seeing how some ended up much smaller than others. I’m pretty happy with how the block letters turned out! They’re all roughly the same size and the letters have roughly the same thickness. Since I’ve done this before, I knew that the C had to be reversed (only to realize at the end, it didn’t really matter if I just turned it upside down). It took me about an hour in total to craft them. I also let the potatoes dry out for a day before inking.

I tried to avoid letters that were round (aside from the C, where the natural shape of the potato definitely helped). I also chose to carve them all in capitals because I felt they might be easier to read. Letters with straight lines, like the H and I were the easiest to create.

Despite my best efforts to replicate the word exactly like the first, it was quite challenging because the pressure of my stamping varied, the paint distribution was uneven, and the slippery nature of the potatoes made the final product ‘unique’ from the first. In the podcast, “The Printed Book: Opening the Floodgates of Knowledge,” Harris (2018) notes that Gutenberg’s moveable type printing relied on metal alloy that yielded letters that were precise, took ink well, and durable against the compression of the press (36:36). Of course, my potatoes were unable to do any of that. Even if I had perfectly crafted potatoes, the manual labour involved in setting the letters, inking, and printing—not to mention the likely possibility of me making mistakes—make me appreciate the mechanization of writing.

On this episode’s site page, Harris identifies the privilege, prestige, and worship-nature of texts because of how expensive it would cost to produce one book (para. 3). With the moveable type, the increase in production of books, the rise of secular authors, block picture printing that allowed semi-literate people to ‘read,’ gave way to increased access to books. In turn, this democratization of knowledge allowed more people to educate themselves and thereby stripping down the sacredness of the written word (both what was written but also the actual object of the book itself). All this makes me think of the many textbooks that I have purchased in my years of higher education. Physical textbooks are so expensive. I remember bringing around 12 of them to sell back to the UBC bookstore, only for every single book to be turned away because their editions were ‘too old.’ I was three years too late! But the fact that knowledge changes so rapidly, makes me question why we still use printed textbooks, why value is placed in these physical items, and why they are so expensive? What is lost from making textbooks more financially accessible to all people? Have we, or should we, be moving towards open access textbooks and journals?

References
Harris, B. (Host). (2018, February 5). The printed book: Opening the floodgates of knowledge (No. 17) [Audio podcast episode]. In How it Began: A History of the Modern World. https://howitbegan.com/episodes/the-printed-book/

Conventions of Written English

This was such an interesting activity because when I re-read it, it reminded me of some of my students’ work! Just streams of consciousness, put into visible words. There are quite a few “and so…” and other placeholder words that would’ve otherwise been edited out in written work. There is no punctuation at the end of my sentences, no matter how long I paused after each thought (although an extra long pause will create a new paragraph). Usually, paragraphs contain one central idea with a beginning and an end but there’s no organization here. The tenses are also all over the place (though I must admit, tenses are only marginally better in written work. I attribute this to English being my second language as conversational Chinese does not have tenses).

“Right” and “Wrong”

What this text gets right is the overall idea of how to cook this recipe. It also conveys tone well, as it reads exactly as I sound. I created this text for the purposes of completing this task, so for that, it got it “right,” errors and all! However, in addition to the grammatical errors mentioned, this text itself, in my opinion, isn’t particularly useful. If I’ve never made curry before and tried to cook using this, I would be frustrated at the out of order steps and imprecise measurements. The recipe is quite confusing to follow because I jump around, filling in gaps I forgot previously (e.g., marinating the chicken should come first, but I only remembered after sautéing the onions). I would also repeat myself, forgetting that I’ve already gone over a part. I wouldn’t send this to anyone asking me for a curry recipe!

Common Mistakes

The most common mistakes are punctuation errors, and the speech-to-text not picking what I’m trying to say and replacing words with ones that sound close (e.g., instead of cloves of garlic, it became clothes). This sometimes changes the overall meaning of the sentence. I can only imagine how difficult this would be for someone who has a thick accented English to use this technology. I consider them mistakes as the lack of punctuation makes it difficult to understand what I am trying to say (my brain overcompensates and works double time trying to figure out where the punctuation should’ve been). Seeing all of these mistakes also makes me a little self-conscious about how I sound day-to-day! Are there really that many mistakes?!

Scripted?

If I had jotted down a list of what I plan to say, or even transcribed the recipe my mom told me down on paper, reading it out loud would’ve resulted in a much more coherent story. I tend to get distracted when I talk (my students can attest) because my mind makes all these connections to memories or related stories, and I often chase these tangents. Furthermore, a script will enable me to include more content in my five-minute story. I found myself pausing, running out of things to say, or trying to figure out what to say next. This ‘dead space’ in turn, took up some time in my five minutes.

Oral Storytelling vs. Written Storytelling

Gnanadesikan (2009) posits that the written word’s worth is elevated as it is more deliberate and precise, surpassing the worth of speech (p. 5). This activity has made me reflect on my own classroom and the value I put in written output. My students carefully researched a person of colour to write a biography on. This essay project spanned over two months, resulting in a five paragraph essay that had been tirelessly edited by both themselves and their peers. They were so proud of their work as they handed in their typed essays, neatly stapled at the top. After this essay, I assigned an oral presentation on their person where they had to curate ten important facts to tell a story about them. This task was met with much less enthusiasm. Whereas the written essay gave them the chance to edit their work so that they sound intelligent and thoughtful, an oral presentation did not afford the same opportunities. Even my most confident public speakers were afraid of “messing up.”  And this is with ample time to prepare the speech plus given the option to use a cue card (which many of them opted not to use!).

In my curry recipe above, I spoke with the expectation of having someone reply back. That is generally the expectation when one speaks! Thus, to have my speech dictated back into text, it reads awkwardly because I know there are parts where I am gesturing with my hand (body language) or parts where normally, I would pause and the other person would ask me a question that would help fill in these gaps. There also isn’t the expectation for my story to be perfect as it is normal in everyday speech to correct oneself!

Lastly, I think back to my ability to communicate in Chinese. When I came to Canada in kindergarten, my parents wanted me to focus on mastering English so they did not enrol me in Chinese school. Thus, I can only speak it (sometimes awkwardly and always informally) but cannot read or write it. However, I have vivid memories of my mom reading stories to me in Chinese when I was young. I would often ask her what it meant, because written Chinese is so different from conversational Chinese. It is much more formal, with characters that I wouldn’t use in my speech. And so, when my mom reads out loud what is written, there is a disconnect for me and it impedes my understanding.

The bag I have chosen for this task is the backpack I carry to work every day. I’m a grade 7 teacher and though I drive to work, I still prefer to cram everything inside my bag instead of carrying things to my vehicle. I’ve received a few comments on how oversized it looks!

Inside my bag are assignments to mark, planner, lunch bag, laptop, folders, wallet, eyedrops, hand sanitizer, and keys. It’s an interesting question, whether my bag would’ve looked like this 15 years ago because. . .it did. While a few things have replaced items since high school/first year university (e.g., my student’s homework instead of my own, car keys instead of my parents’ house keys, coffee thermos instead of water bottle), much of it has remained the same. I think this speaks to ways in which my “work life” has remained consistent as I haven’t really left school. It is my role in school that has changed, from student to teacher.

While this is just a “work bag,” these items, texts, represent me in ways that are unique to me. We build our identities in many ways, but I’ve noticed that for myself, I often do it through the items I own. The stickers on my laptop are texts about my interests and what I want to be associated with. Ask my students, and many of them will be able to tell you the meaning behind each BTS sticker. The decorated folder, that I have intentionally left out of the photo, reveals my interest in kpop. The coffee thermos is a souvenir I got from Hawaii last year when my friend had a destination wedding. It was also the last trip I took before COVID-19 happened. The Nintendo Switch was a huge part of my quarantine life, as I played hours and hours of Animal Crossing (again, my students can attest to just how much I talk about it). There are stories held within each item, and as such I consider these items extensions of myself. Because of that, I think the narrative of these contents in my bag is consistent with the “teacher image” I have of myself.

There are two items in particular I want to focus on: my laptop and my planner. My coworker has commented on why I rely on my paper schedule instead of going digital, since I have done that with most aspects of my classroom. There is something about the “old technology” of the large 11×17″ weekly calendars many teachers use for lesson planning that I just cannot part with. My teacher life is kept inside the pages of that planner and as such, the act of penning things down onto my paper calendar as opposed to adding items onto my Microsoft Teams calendar is so important to me.

On the other hand, the laptop has replaced a lot of the paper that I used to rely on when I first became a teacher. Most of my worksheets are PDFs and a third of my students prefer digital copies so that they can type their work. I rely heavily on “technology” (as most commonly used, referring to devices like iPads and computers while acknowledging that textbooks themselves are also technology.) in my teaching as I don’t use textbooks anymore outside of math. (Interesting discussions with students on the authority of textbooks and in what ways they are antiquated sources). The internet, databases, YouTube, and podcasts are all valuable text technologies that my students and I rely on. (In fact, it’s a challenge getting them to “research from a book”). Assignments are also slowly changing: I ask my students to learn various programs (e.g., Mindomo, Venngage, Genial.ly, Powtoon) so that they have more flexibility with what kind of work they submit. As noted in our course modules, Scholes states that “text can be thought of as creation” and as such, my laptop holds multitudes of texts that are informative, creative, and ways to disseminate said creations.