Category Archives: Reading Reflections

As I began reading this chapter, I thought of the saying “a picture of worth a thousand words.” As we shift to a more visual heavy medium (for example, moving from radio whodunit broadcast shows to television, descriptive narratives that paint a picture are replaced with, well, just the painted picture, I can’t help but feel that words as an artform will be changed and inevitably lost. Are comic books, manga, light novels, and visual novels, where images replace descriptive prose, relacing full on novels? Or is it like in our previous readings where the new mediums support the old? I think back to my IB English days two decades ago, where the Journals of Susanna Moody combined poetry with images.

While originally I also thought about the universality of images, I came to disagree with myself. When I first introduce Theory of Knowledge, one introductory task is New York Time’s “What is going on in this picture” task. To support constructivism, students with different cultural backgrounds and experiences are able to gleam different information from the text. If we go back to Boroditsky’s idea that language affects thought, perhaps, more importantly, culture affects the interpretation of information (both words and images), which affects thought.

My point made in the manual printing task seem to echo some of the points made in this chapter. In the mid 00’s when I got my first laptop, I still primarily used paper notes due to the difficulty in drawing diagrams, something that’s essentially for a degree is Chemistry. It was only in the late ’10s when, from memory, touch screens and stylus technology took off that I began to fully replace paper with electronics.

As mentioned previously, I still argue that written Chinese has numerous logograms embedded in their written symbols, due to the uniqueness of written Chinese not having a technical alphabet system. The characters for one, two, and three, are essentially number of sticks somewhat similar to Roman numerals (一,二,三). Field is 田, showing sectioned off rice patties, while the character for mountain, 山, showcases peaks. Door/gate, 門, looks like old saloon doors, and river looks like 川.

At this point I pause, reflect, and prepare myself for this week’s task. I argued that written Chinese lends itself to being logograms partially due to a lack of a written alphabet (it gets a bit more complicated than that if we consider Chinese radicals, various sections that can make up a written Chinese character), then wouldn’t that imply that emojis would have less usage in countries that use Chinese? Indeed, I find that my conversations with family members and friends, “stamps,” rather than emojis, are used instead. Stamps are popular emoji-like images that one can send in, for example, Line, the top instant messaging app in Taiwan. Stamps are similar to stock GIFs within Line that are frequently animated and contain more than just an image, for example, a drawn figure giving a thumbs up and saying “thanks.” Contrastly, emojis are less frequently used in conversation.

That said, perhaps this is an age thing. I consider myself one of the early users of the internet as it was being widespread (~1997), and being bilingual, from memory I can attest to a difference in emoticon (the precursors to emojis) styles. While English emoticons are typically limited to punctuation, leading to faces such as ;), emoticons I’ve seen used in Chinese websites (which are often inspired by Japanese emojis), have different emphasis, such as =) using lines for eyes, or ^_^ to denote smiley faces. There’s also the fact that Chinese/Japanese allows more variety in characters that can lend itself to emojis, such as
(凸ಠ益ಠ)凸 showing an angry person giving the finger to someone. To reiterate my original point about logographs, 囧 itself is a Chinese word turned emoticon, its original meaning replaced by its semblance to a face in distress. Another non-English emoticon, orz, comes to mind, showing a person kneeing on the ground in despair, further illustrating the focus less on just the face, but various other body gestures in Eastern emoticons.

Memex Demo

Being familiar with Twine and seeing the Memex demo in action made me realize how much Twine is inspired by it. Twine could create new links, jump around paths, and return to the very start, just like the Memex.

Engelbert

Engelbert (1963) reminds me of an assignment in ETEC 511 where we read up on various pioneers of artificial intelligence, summarize their definition of intelligence, and compare our research output to what ChatGPT outputs. Engelbert’s 1963 discussion that the focus should not be on “isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations” parallels Chollet (2018), one of our readings, who defines intelligence and generalizability of skills from one task to another. It also reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005), in which Gladwell argues that hunches and snap decisions arise from various evolutionary processes that enable us to make quick, mostly accurate decisions.

We can also view Engelbert’s arguments through a pedagogical lens, with Engelbert suggesting that although operating a car can be incomprehensible to someone who has never interacted with a car before, we can scaffold and train that person to be able to do it.

Engelbert’s point on us adapting the movement and copying of text into our repertoires also led to some reflection. This article was written six decades ago, and from my impressions of 5.2’s video on the evolution of word processors, things haven’t advanced to that point yet. Engelbert was able to predict the usage of word pressors quite accurately; in my case many times with the help of digital word processors it’s far easier to jump around, insert paragraphs, rather than writing something linearly from start to finish with only room for minor edits. Even when writing this reading reflection there have been times where I typed a paragraph and/or a sentence, and then hit the enter key a few times to push it to the bottom while I returned to elaborate on previous ideas and thought. This links back to task 4, as well as the evolution from scrolls to pages, to now hypertext and other tools to produce text in a non-linear manner.

Engelbert’s point on augmentation also links back to another 511 reading, Woolgar (1993), which discusses how users can be “configured” by factors such as a machine in order to act a certain way, similar to how Engelbert (and other readings of this course) argue that the evolution of text has altered the way we think and process information.

Intelligence amplification is another example of how Engelbert is still applicable six decades later. While machines were designed to amplify human intelligence, what we’re seeing with ChatGPT, or even the point made in 5.2 about how autocorrect/autofill is replacing intelligence. While on the one hand, as Engelbert argues, tools such as ChatGPT, autocorrect, and autofill can be used to save time and/or mental processes to free us up for more complex operations, they can also lead to the decrease usage of practicing the basics. The argument of the calculator comes to mind: while I allow calculators in my senior chemistry courses, if I were an elementary teacher, I don’t foresee myself allowing calculators at all due to my belief that children must learn arithmetic. Otherwise, there ends up being a blind trust in technology that would lead to less critical thinking and more errors.

Engelbert’s point about rapid information search is yet another example of the reading’s applicability, as we currently have the devices they hypothesized. Interestingly, I feel that unlike what Engelbert suggested, there hasn’t been a major shift in education policies to accommodate the availability of these tools. How the students at my school learn in IB Chemistry seems relatively similar to how I learned IB Chemistry two decades ago.

Engelbert’s discussion of Bush’s Memex added more context. In addition to the association with Twine that I have made from watching the video, Bush’s Memex is essentially Wikipedia, with various ‘trails” how Wikipedia links articles together. Related to this is a game called “Wikipedia Racing” where participants are given a starting article and an ending article on Wikipedia, and they race through the hyperlinks to ty and reach the end article the fastest.

Ultimately, Engelbert (1963) highlights ways in which computers support human thought processes, mostly around organizing, processing, analyzing, storing, and easing retrieval of information, and a lot of their arguments are still relevant six decades afterwards.

Bush

Ironically, this article was behind an account wall and was not freely accessible, reminding me of Willinsky at the start of the course. I ended up looking up a tool I use from time to time that allows one to bypass these walls.

In lines with previous discussions in Module 4 about time, efficiency, and economics, Bush also points out how economic constraints prevented sound ideas such as Babbage and Leibnitz. Replaceable parts, one of the main technologies in the 4x game Civilization VI, allows machines to be constructed at a fraction of the cost. Rather than remaking the machine completely if it breaks, by having interchangeable parts, one allows a minor switch of components in order to keep the machine functioning.

Bush’s points about how an advanced mathematician not being able to perform simple arithmetic or even calculus directly goes against the points I made above about the need for development and practice of basic skills. While Bush argues that great minds should not be bogged down by the details and allow computers to worry about them, which although has merit, is not fully inline with my self-perceived purpose as a secondary teacher. The ideas behind Bloom’s Taxonomy, although apparently falling out of favour in teacher education programs, still guides a lot of my science pedagogical practices.

Nelson

At first read, Xanadu sounds similar to Google Doc’s version history feature, providing a display in which one can see the changes made to a document, though Google Docs only highlight differences. Wikipedia’s history feature does something similar. Also similar to Excel, where we can set up tables to reference another sheet/book.

The bit about recommendation links goes back to my point about 5.1, and how it can lead to societal issues.

Finally, the transcopyright discussions relate back to Willinsky at the start of the course again.

Bolter

Using encyclopedias to discuss the evolution of categorization of knowledge drives home the point. With linear scrolls, it’s difficult to find a specific section of a text. With the codex, it become far easier (table of contents, alphabetizing). With something like Wikipedia, it’s even more straight forward, with connects made constantly.

The section on alphabetizing itself was interesting; and my interpretation/takeaway is that an encyclopedia contains general knowledge and needs to be alphabetized rather than categorized. This is in contrast to modern day academic journals, which are still categorized by discipline. Due to textual overload as a result of the printing press, speed of retrieving information became an important factor as well, which alphabetizing, table contents, indexes, and other systems allowed.

“Coleridge’s encyclopedia was clearly a product for the industrial age of print, in which the text is laid out in one ideal order” (Bolter 2000). This statement stuck out to me, reminiscent of a connect I made in the first task where a colleague was discussing CDs. Artists arranged songs in specific orders on their albums, and certain artists told a story through the order of songs on the CD.

Interesting too that the Britannica’s Propaedia was ahead of its time, limited by public opinions of the printed book and its linear fashion, as opposed to modern feels of text in which a circle of hyperlinks can be common.

“Texts that appeal to small or economically disadvantaged groups may still be neglected” (Bolter 2000). Here’s another issue, similar to how for whatever reason the vast majority of psychology studies are done on western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations. Both of these issues can trace roots back to socioeconomic roots: it being easier to use North American undergraduates for psychological studies, or that the demand of the larger cultural groups should be fulfilled first. As a result of this, marginalized groups are pushed to the wayside due to lower demand. This parallels the issue with dying languages, and how speakers of a dying language typically needed a new, more popular language in order to access the same amount of knowledge as the rest of the world, and end up neglecting the dying language because of it.

Exploring chapter three, many of the authors in this module believed that hypertext is a natural evolution to work in conjunction with how we think. Humanity constant makes links between words and concepts, and hypertext is an extension of that. Free from the constraints of paper, perhaps hypertext, allowed only due to its presence in digital space, allowed for humanity to devise a system that’s far more “natural” rather than being configured by things such as the scroll or the codex.

Lewis (2011) – I never saw the older typewriter designs before, so seeing their evolution was extremely interesting. The early computer model, Pegasus, was also interesting. To connect it to the course and the module, it seems to be the transition point between paper and digital, with the code on rolls of narrow paper strips in the forms of punched holes. That said, prior to this “writing,” that is, the storage of information, is already stored on non-paper devices such as vinyl records. Similar concepts are used for magnetic storage later. Reminds me of various articles I read previously of engineers exploring the idea of DNA as a storage medium.

Seeing the process of a typewriter-like device punching the code onto the paper stripes connects back to my previous task about the permanency of manual writing as opposed to digital typing.

To briefly connect the bit about freezing computers and people losing progress on a word processor, I recall back to my days as a secondary student working at my school’s computer lab. The computer froze, so I went to the power bar to unplug the computer to restart it. Unfortunately, what I unplugged wasn’t the computer I was working on, but the computer next to me, which had someone working on an essay. It’s been two decades and I’m still apologetic about that. Compare that to modern technology that I just experienced this morning, where although I have a tendency to leave my computer running (with word documents unsaved), even if my computer restarts itself to install an update, progress isn’t lost through various forms of storage.

Zaltzman (2019) – The initial conversation of how our writing reflects our oral habits, using the period as an example (“we don’t talk in full sentences,”) reminds me of various personal experiences of when writing does, and does not, reflect speech. I watched the movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 in Hong Kong with English audio and Chinese subtitles. Cantonese used to be the predominant language in Hong Kong, which is orally intellectually unintelligible from Mandarin, though both use the same writing system. While I mostly relied on listening for the movie, the person I went to see the movie with, a Mandarin speaker, wasn’t fully fluent in English and relied on subtitles. She pointed out that the subtitles for the protagonists were done with Cantonese syntax and is difficult for a Mandarin speaker to understand, while the other characters followed Mandarin syntax. Similar to this experience, when I venture to message boards based in Hong Kong, I can read approximately 50% of the posts, but going to a Hong Kong based news website I’m able to read 90% of the text.

That discussion of utterances, specially evolution from emails where it wasn’t socially acceptable to constantly send a separate message for each utterance, highlight how as technology constraints shift, both how we write, as well as the culture of writing, also shifts as well. There’s a contrast between formal emails that has a specific structure with various sections, to instant messaging where message lengths, grammar, and spelling reflect how we speak. Looking at my message history on instant messaging devices such as Discord, Signal, and Whatsapp, I noticed that I too have stopped using periods and just send a message when an utterance is complete. All that said, my initially reactions to the idea that adding a period to a sentence is considered rude was surprise as I felt I have not been in a social group that believes it, but the further elaborations and examples such as “fine.” or “good.” drove home the message for me. Personally, exclamation marks and emojis have replaced the period in various contexts to better convey my intentions through text, and lo and behold, emojis were discussed soon afterwards on the podcast.

The second half of the podcast about the shifting of language and that there’s not really a “correct way” of language led to some reflection. In my introductory epistemology class, I often discuss the four truth tests in my introduction: correspondence, coherence, consensus, and pragmatic. While there’s a physical world that we can test various scientific observations and hypotheses (correspondence), or mathematical rules allow one to evaluate of a solution to a math problem is correct (coherence), language is a social construct and requires consensus. That said, consensus doesn’t necessarily mean everyone, and there can be consensus about language use reached about subcultures or other such groups (for some reason secret handshakes come to mind), making changes to a language “legitimate.” These small shifts of language culture can then influence the overall public perceptions, or, remain in their small subgroups for pluralism of “correct” language. This too ties in to the pragmatic truth test, where the emphasis is less on truth, but on usability. The conversation around autocorrect can be tied to this analysis, with autocorrect influencing public perception on “correct language” that essentially overwrote previous notions of correct spelling in British English.

Finally, an anecdote about autocorrect, and people being too lazy to remove what it produces. Five years ago in my teaching career, I received an email addressed to “Mr. Guangdong” from a student. Sure, G and H are right now to each other on a QWERTY keyboard, and I understand the inclusion of Guangdong in autocomplete/autocorrect. While I never pointed out this mistake to the student, years later I still use this incident to discuss email etiquette in my first lesson for each course as I go through my syllabus.

References

Lewis, C. (2011, September 24). Secret life of machines – The word processor (full length). [Video]. YouTube.

Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New rules (No. 102). [Audio podcast episode]. In The allusionist.

My main point of reflection from Wesch’s Youtube video, Information R/evolution, are digital “shelves.” Even here in this blog I find myself sorting information into categories: Activities, Reading Reflections, and Tasks. Although I can (and frequently) provide hyperlinks between categories to link them, fundamentally I still use the category system. This can extend to other places of the internet, such as Reddit with its various subreddits.

That said, I also look at Youtube. Rather than categories/themes of videos, its main page is now uncategorized videos (for example, the most recent version of my front page is a mixture of the following themes: Taiwanese politics, Taiwanese variety shows, anime, video games, science, and videos on the printing press. The last item on the list was most likely due to my recent interactions with videos associated with this course causing the Youtube algorithm to push similar videos to me. The lack of “shelves,” combined with an algorithm designed to maximize engagement that pushes a constant stream of different videos that one might be interested in, is also a major issue, with major negative consequences outlined in documentary videos such as The Great Hack of The Social Dilemma.

One quote in the video at around the 3:24 mark, “together we create more information than the experts,” is also a major issue in the current internet landscape. Previous fringe groups such as flat earthers and moon landing conspiracists are creating content on the internet, gaining more followers that end up with alternative concepts in areas of knowledge such as science and history. As another example with unvetted contributions to the internet, a study done in 2018 shows that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” “it took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people,” and ” falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.”

Along the same vein, having more contributors to things such as Wikipedia is problematic as well. While typically Wikipedia editors are quick to catch and edit falsehoods, there is that instance of a Chinese woman posing as someone with a Ph. D. in world history and created 200 Chinese Wikipedia articles that provided fictional accounts of Russian history over a decade.

Technically, a “listening” reflection, but I digress.

Perhaps due to my recent lesson in Science 10 on the actual scale of the universe, I can see some benefits that a scroll has over discrete pages in writing, which goes against the general sentiment of the podcast in this module. Even with a disclaimer at the bottom right, diagrams such as

give students the wrong impression about distances between objects in our solar system. Discrete pages make a to-scale (both distance and size) diagram of the solar system almost impossible, yet with something that can scroll indefinitely, it is much more easily achieved.

Consider for example one of my teaching tools, Josh Worth’s Pixel Moon in which they created a website with everything to scale. https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Scrolling through this website actually provides students an actual sense of the solar system that’d be almost impossible with discrete pages.

That said, the above example is a very specific (and rare) example of how a scroll outperforms pages. As discussed in the podcast, if the direction of writing is parallel to the scroll, then it could be quite odd to write an entire line all the way to the scroll before having to rewind it back to the start and starting a new line. The need for scribes to section off with columns lends itself to discrete pages being the next logical evolution in writing media. There’s also the additional issues mentioned such as difficulty of tracking where specific sections are in a scroll and requiring hands to hold down to read.

Misc. Notes:

Religion and preference for certain types of writing mediums.

China’s focus on paper, single written text, Chinese history

Marking off columns of text.

Portability of books vs scrolls, ease of transcribing pages.

Though I’ve read and watched several Shakespearean plays, Julius Cesar was not one of them. This was an interesting exercise in reading and then listening to a performance.

For whatever reason, while reading the section, I contrasted it with Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Here Anthony was initially utilizing reverse psychology and/or being contrarian (Brutus is an honourable man, I won’t read the will, etc.) which can be compared to Swift’s piece of satire. Though very different literary devices/methods, Anthony’s rhetoric and the satire in A Modest Proposal intends to provide the opposite effect than what the words on the pages actually state.

Questions to Consider

• What effects has writing had on human thought processes?

Most of the readings, and especially Ong, suggest that switching from predominantly oral to predominantly writing has allowed for more complex thoughts (especially around space time). Writing also ease the dissemination of knowledge; rather than constantly relying on skilled experts to provide answers and or having knowledge being passed down from expert to apprentice, writing allows one to “look something up,” to obtain knowledge individually.

• Does it weaken memory? If so, does this matter?

It’s difficult to provide a 100% certain answer to this question, as as per this section it’s difficult to get accurate measures of a pre-writing society. With globalization and modernization, many oral cultures (such as the indigenous peoples) have incorporated writing. Even those who are illiterate still demonstrate advanced notions of space and time that is attributed to a society adapting the practice of writing.

That said, logically, the process of writing should weaken memory. To provide a personal example, prior to cellular phones, I memorized the phone numbers of close friends and family (and many of those numbers are still in my head right now despite them moving out and/or receiving new phone numbers), potentially through constant repetition/muscle memorial of dialing the number. (side note here, I believe the etymology for “dialing a number” refers to a rotary phone, which I have used in early childhood but did not use by the time I moved to Canada). Fast forward to today where the act of dialing a phone number is to search for a contact in my phone’s address book. The number of people whose phone numbers I know by heart has decreased drastically (although one may argue this is also due to me not calling people as often).

On the other hand, one could also argue that an oral society doesn’t necessarily have a perfect memory either. As one of the readings put it (I believe Ong), oral stories told by two different people won’t be exact copies of each other, similar to a game of telephone.

• Is rote learning of any use in literate cultures with easy and affordable access to various methods of information storage? (i.e., Is there any pedagogical merit in requiring students to memorize information such as mathematical formulas or literary texts?)

This question came up previously in another MET class, and I’ll take a stance that seems to be against the grain of progressive educators. While the BC Ministry of Education is shifting away from standardized exams and rote memorization, and even at the post-secondary level we have discussed professors who allow students access to the internet during final exams, believing in the power of “ungoogleable questions,” I’ll still contend that there’s still a purpose for rote memorization, for two main reasons.

There are some facts that one should know by heart. For instance, at the start of the school year students in science and shop classes have to pass a safety test that requires students to memorize various safety procedures before they can perform experiments or use machinery. Sure, students can look up how long they should use an eyewash station for, but in an actual emergency, every moment matters, and recalling information will be faster than looking something up (even with the aid of Siri).

The other main reason is that memorization of the facts allow us to question various things we look up. According to a recent study (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3613904.3642596), when given programming questions ChatGPT contains inaccurate information 52% of the time, and 39% of the time users overlook the inaccurate information. Though memorization, through knowledge of performing operations that machines can do far faster, we can identify times when machine outputs end up being wrong.

• What form(s) of thinking has writing facilitated? In what ways has this been beneficial or detrimental for humanity?

While the readings mentions advancements in thoughts about space and time, I’m largely unconvinced. I think back to the Kuuk Thaayorre mentioned in Boroditsky, who have better perceptions of space (at least, cardinal directions) than users of written languages. Yet, if I were to accept these readings at face value, then I would argue that this is mostly for the benefit of humanity, as it allows for us to further contemplate the nature of the universe and the various laws and mechanisms in place. That said, I understand my answer to this question is largely influenced by me recently teaching the cosmology unit in Science 10, and I’ve been primed to discuss humanity’s understanding of space-time and how that has affected our knowledge of the universe.

• How has the technology of writing changed the act of teaching?

I’ll bring up Ong’s point about apprenticeship again, and my own point about the dissemination of knowledge. Prior to writing, teaching requires the presence of an expert, and learning is an apprenticeship of seeing how the expert acts. With writing, the presence of an expert isn’t entirely necessary, and while this allows for independent learning, it could also lead to misinterpretation of the written text, and no expert around to correct these alternative conceptions.

Student centered learning wouldn’t be possible without writing; sage on stage and orality seems to go hand in hand, and without writing, how is a student suppose to learn individually, without going to a sage for answers?

Gnanadesikan 

That first sentence reminds me of Boroditsky’s introduction talking about planting images in your mind that you never thought of before. Different topics, but similar concept/arguments.

The conversation about what would happen to civilization without writing had me thinking about literacy rates as well. In 1949, China had a literacy rate of 20% (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneven-march-to-literacy.html), and I think we can link this back to Willinsky in module one with how knowledge is constantly “gatekept” in some way. Related to this, I think to Taiwanese, which I contend is a different language than Mandarin (it’s mutually unintelligible orally), and has no formal writing system due do numerous factors.

Part of me also thinks that Gnanadesikan may have western-biased. Though they provide examples in other ancient civilizations, the words they use to describe the positives of writing and contrasting it the words they describe verbal communication seem to undermine the knowledge and information that can be transmitted through oral traditions and indigenous ways of communication. I’m tempted to contend against their point on how “language conservation efforts must therefore include the development of writing systems and literacy programs,” because to do so would be to change the culture and current ways of thinking for that particular language.

“However, to make a truly different symbol for each word of a language would result in far too many symbols.” I’m reminded of written Chinese, which has thousands of “symbols,” each with a different meaning. Written Chinese technically does not have an alphabet system: unlike English where one can sound out the combination of letters, Chinese relies on pure memorization to determine a character’s sound. Though radicals (the Chinese analogue to morphemes) exist, often times they don’t provide a clue on sound. For example, the character for sun/day is 日 (ri) and 斤(jin) is an unit of mass, but combine them into a new character 昕 (xing) you get a completely different sound (though meaning can be deduced; it means sunrise).

To help with pronunciation, Chinese has different sound systems that visually have nothing to do with the symbol. China for example uses pinyin, which allows one to type Chinese characters using the English alphabet (all the stuff I put in brackets after each Chinese character). Taiwan uses a symbol system (syllablegrams?) where each character represents a sound, and they can also be combined to provide other sounds. Words can be between one to three sound symbols. For example, 昕 (xing) would be ㄒ (xi) 一 (yi) ㄣ(un), and the combination of these three sounds produces the xing sound. I’ll also note that despite being born in Taiwan and having learned all these phonetic symbols, through years of not using it I have completely forgotten them and rely in the Chinese method of pinyin to type Chinese. These sound systems are often on top of written Chinese characters in children’s books so that one can learn the pronunciation of words. In typical written form though, these sound systems are not part of the text.

Finally: last thought: what about methods of preserving thought and information that aren’t necessarily writing? The Incan Quipu is one such method where knots on strings gives various different information.

Schmandt-Besserat & Erard

The section on Mesopotamia was fascinating as I knew nothing about the language and its development.

Interesting that Chinese was far less in length in this chapter compared to the Mesopotamia. Those figures about how many characters one needs to know in order to have high levels of understanding, and I wonder if Simplified vs Traditional Chinese has a factor in that. From what I recall and understand, various different characters in Traditional Chinese got combined into the same character in Simplified Chinese (note also too that Traditional Chinese as a writing system is also used in parts of the world such as Taiwan and Hong Kong).

My first reaction was to also contend against the point they brought up that Chinese characters are not small pictures that represent ideas. I argue that the origin of Chinese characters are pictographic. 山 looks like three different peaks and means mountain, while 人 seems like a stick figure and means person. That said, perhaps these are the exceptions and not the norm in modern written Chinese.

The section on Mesoamerica is also rather short.

The section on writing as a culture was also fascinating. To link it to module two, in addition to language shaping thought, whether or not a language has a written component also influences the development of that culture (I’ll also note here that I found the language towards writing and non-writing to be a lot more neutral, compared to Gnanadesikan).

The section on the spread of writing somewhat addresses my previous question in Gnanadesikan about literacy rates (Chinese is not alphabetic and thus is more difficult learn, leading to low literacy rates as recently as 1949).

The section on the future of writing is also fascinating and related to a lot of my rection on Gnanadesikan (pinyin and bopomofo). In addition, as a bilingual early internet user (~1995) I recall the struggles with various Chinese encodes: there were times when websites and/or software in general in Chinese could not display properly due to not having the proper encoding and/or unicode installed; the codes were not universal. Some programs/websites used Big5 encoding while others were unicode.

The final bit on most of the world’s language will be written down using the alphabet struck a cord with me. In addition to my points brought up in Gnanadesikan, there’s various examples of it happening right now in the lower mainland with indigenous languages. The names of various indigenous groups, their languages, places, are now using the English alphabet in written form (for example, Hunquminum) due to a lack of indigenous writing systems. On the one hand, this helps the dissemination of language and knowledge, but on the other hand, this could also lead to more westernization of indigenous cultures by allowing alphabet systems to shape the development of indigenous cultures. I am now quite curious as to what indigenous peoples’ thoughts on this matter is, and am reaching out to my various contacts to see if I can find out more.

Haas

Socrates’s stance on writing was interesting. Part of me agrees with him in the various issues with writing: writing can be a clutch for memory. For a pedagogical perspective, I’m reminded of various lecturers that talk about universal design for learning: if tools/technology are available (such as writing) to help students succeed, what grounds do we have to bar them from these tools? On the one hand, over-reliance on these tools means we don’t develop some basic skills, but on the other hand, preventing one from using these tools does not reflect real life situations.

The discussion about Ong relating writing to death and “resurrected into limitless living contexts” was interesting, and as I read that I’m reminded of music. Music notation is a form of writing, and though the music itself is lifeless, different musicians will perform the same piece differently with different interpretations, or as Ong would put it, different living contexts.

“Ong readily moves from cognitive claims to cultural ones and back again.” Here, I wonder if there is a need to make a firm distinction between the two, when throughout various MET courses and in TOK, one topic of discussion is how culture affects cognition.

Havelock’s notes on the Greek alphabet relating sound to vision seems similar to my discussions on Chinese under Gnanadesikan (and illiteracy).

The section on Vygotsky was a bit difficult to fully comprehend, but I think I get the general idea behind it. For technological mediation, the analogy with the hoe helped, while for historical-genetic, I’m reminded of various tasks in a previous MET class where we think about the reasoning (the benefits) of cultural practices, and that seems similar to Vygotsky’s approach on genetics.

Scribner and Cole’s work was interesting to me, and I appreciated their points on not a simple dichotomy, as well as how illiterate people in a literate society still understand concepts that, as per Ong, arises from writing. I think to my material grandmother, who grew up poor in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era and was illiterate; yet concepts on space and time was not lost upon her.

Ong

Grapholect – I would argue that Chinese is a grapholect, as its written form allows it to connect various mutually unintelligible “dialects” (or languages) such as Mandarin and Cantonese.

Ong’s argument: writing allows for complex operations such as studying and rhetoric, rather than apprenticeship

“There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living.” Reading this passage reminds me of the concerns I had with other readings of this module as well. Gnanadesikan argues that written form is needed in order for languages to survive. Schmandt-Besserat & Erard discussed the inevitability of the the English alphabet in various languages. Ong discusses how without writing it’s impossible to perform certain complex mental processes. Is there truly “writing-envy” in speakers of languages without writing, and do all these arguments hold up without exception, or are there certain cultures out there without writing but are able to perform more than apprenticeship that Ong claims they’re limited to?

Hadley

This article somewhat addresses my previous questions (especially in Schmandt-Besserat & Erard) about whether “survival through the aid of writing and technology” of a language is preferred of maintaining the “purity” of an oral language.

wakingupojibwe.ca

First video: similar to Hadley. Also noticing similarities between these revitalization efforts and Taiwanese (including the issues around writing Taiwanese).

Second video: brings me back to my discussions on Boroditsky about the issues around the loss of language.

Ong’s Lecture

In oral cultures, if you don’t know something, you ask something else. If they don’t know, find someone else, and so on. Ironically, Ong’s points in audio form drives the point far more than his written texts and alleviates my previous concerns somewhat. I also extended Ong’s point from oral to writing, its evolution since then to Google (and, some argue, ChatGPT) as the new pinnacle(s) of “looking something up.”

A new medium doesn’t wipe out the old, it reinforces it and changes it. You have to know the new medium or you can’t use the old. Interesting point here that bears more reflection. If we treat Tiktok as a new medium, does one need the previous medium (typing?)? I would argue no, but perhaps I’m skipping a few mediums such as social media, emoji reactions, and so on.

About halfway through MacDonald’s TEDx Talk, I was a little bit skeptical because I thought he was contradicting himself. On the one hand, he stated that there’s a lot of cultural background to tap dance, and on the other hand, he suggested that social media/technology is enhancing the art. While I agree that, as he has pointed out, technology enables the learning of tap through the increased accessibility of videos, I felt that learning through this method loses some of that rich cultural background he mentioned before. His story of Bunny Briggs cleared up this supposed contradiction and I was able to see his point of view.

As someone essentially unfamiliar with tap except for a brief segment in one Frasier episode, yet, having dabbled in music and music theory, I feel that I can appreciate the abilities for MacDonald (and tap dancers in general) to keep time and produce a rhythm using only their feet. Someone who experienced tap throughout their life might gain a far more deeper appreciation for it, and this reminds me somewhat of the Dunning-Kruger effect where while beginners may highly underestimate the skill it takes for something, eventually that illusion is shattered and people who are far more versed in something can accurately gauge the difficulty of it. That said, I feel that this applies to all types of knowledge, rather than languages.

At this point I paused and reflected: if we are to define language as a method of communication, then is there something that we can apply the previous premise, Dunning-Kruger/greater appreciation after learning more about it, to something that isn’t necessarily a form of communication? Music instruments, photography, other forms of visual art, even crafting/knitting something can be argued as a form of communication. By “knowing” one of these “languages,” we enrich our view of the world with greater understanding and appreciation of other “speakers” of that language.

As for de Luca’s video, the difference between language and dialect is a topic of discussion for my introductory epistemology course. As an instructor, I provided my students with a list of things such as “Mandarin vs Cantonese,” “Urdu vs Hindi vs Punjabi,” and “Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish,” and “Parisian vs Quebecois,” and asked them to tell me if they’re different languages or different dialects. Mutual intelligibility is one criteria to differentiate them, but it doesn’t apply to all cases.

To bring up a personal example that answer the prompt for each video, one of the languages I speak is Taiwanese, also known as Taigi, Hokkien, and Min-nan. It originated in the Fujian province of China, and  settlers from Fujian (such as my ancestors eight generations ago) brought it to Taiwan ever since the 1600s. It was the main language of Taiwan, alongside Hakka (another Chinese migration group to Taiwan) and the indigenous languages, up until 1895 when Japan colonized Taiwan. Due to draconian language policies of a totalitarian Chinese Nationalist government that took control of Taiwan after World War II, Taiwanese is now a dying language, going from 66% of people ages 65+ using it as their main language, to now only 17% or so of elementary students being able to speak it fluently. It is unintelligible from Mandarin.

I was born in Taiwan near the tail end of its martial law era (38 years, second longest in world history) and the draconian language policies have been mostly lifted. Yet, its oppression took on a different form: rather than outright punishments and/or fines if you were caught speaking Taiwanese in school which my parents experienced, the ostracization of Taiwanese became more subtle: intelligent, posh characters in media were portrayed as speaking Mandarin, while the gangsters and country bumpkins spoke Taiwanese. Because of this, and a whole slew of other reasons, though I communicated with my family in Taiwanese, in public (and at school), it was always Mandarin.

Fast forward to me moving to Canada where there were few other Mandarin speakers (this was in the mid 90’s, most Asian immigrants in Vancouver at the time were from Hong Kong), and I ended up using Taiwanese far more than Mandarin. Decades of that, and finally finding out about real Taiwanese history (I drank the Chinese Nationalist kool-aid when I went through elementary school), made me now quite proud to be a Taiwanese speaker. Whenever I meet another Taiwanese speaker, whether it’s here in Canada, back in Taiwan, or even in Japan, there’s always instant warmth and familiarity that I don’t get with Mandarin or English. This is mainly because hearing another person speak Taiwanese provides a great deal of insight towards a person: their roots in Taiwan began somewhere between 1600-1895, what geographical region in Taiwan they’re likely from, and knowing that there’s a shared history of Japanese colonial rule followed by the world’s second longest martial law under the Chinese Nationalists.

I first encountered Boroditsky’s study on language 3 years ago when I taught an introductory epistemology course, Theory of Knowledge (TOK), for the first time. One “unit” in that course is Knowledge and Language, and the textbook recommended Boroditsky’s TED Talk to get students to start thinking about the effects of language of knowledge. While a lot of the examples overlap, there were some examples in Boroditsky’s article that were not present in the 14 minute TED Talk.

The first one that jumped out at me was base 10 and Mandarin (though Cantonese applies here as well). While like English there are the ones, the tens, the hundreds, and then the thousands, Mandarin has an additional “unit” or “place value” – wan (萬), the equivalent of ten thousand, which is the beginning of what I call “compound units.”

In English, what I call “place values” are every fourth digit: thousand, million, billion, trillion, and so on. “Compound units” are simply tens and hundreds; they get added on to the place value. For example, 10,000,000 has a “place value” of million and a “compound unit” of ten, combining to give ten million. Visually, the English number system lines up with the comma separators, allowing quick and easy identification.

Meanwhile, Mandarin is systematic in a completely different way. The aforementioned “place value” of wan has all possible “compound units” before it: tens, hundreds, and thousands. 100,000 is ten wan. 1,000,000 is a hundred wan. 10,000,000 is a thousand wan. Then, a new “place value” comes next: yi 億, and its compound units has all the place values before it: ten, hundred, thousand, and wan.

Speaking as someone born in Taiwan and moved to Canada at the eight and is multilingual (in terms of proficiency, English > Taiwanese > Mandarin, though I’m fluent in all three), visually I find the English system much easier to work with, and because of this, sometimes I have trouble code switching when discussing numbers with my family members. 100,000 for me is a hundred thousand, but the term “hundred thousand” isn’t used in Taiwanese or Mandarin, the proper way to express it is “ten wan.”

Boroditsky’s comment on syllables and memorizing numbers was one that wasn’t in her TED Talk and was something I thought about as well. Though most single digit English numbers (with the exception of zero and seven) is single syllable, every single digit Mandarin number is single syllable (for that matter, every “word” is a single syllable in Mandarin), and I always code switch to Mandarin whenever I memorize numbers. Curious if this gave me an advantage, I decided to test it out using the Human Benchmark Number Memory activity, and with only a single trial, I successfully memorized 12 digits when thinking in Mandarin while memorizing 11 digits when thinking in English, suggesting not a significant difference. That said, a single trial doesn’t lead to any valid conclusions, and there could have been patterns in certain stages such as repeating digits that made memorization easier.

As for the hour lecture, there are a lot of overlaps between that and the TED Talk, with obvious more detail in the former. For example, the memoirs of a Russian boy who learned French from his grandmother example wasn’t given in the TED Talk. Similarly, the videos of her studies on language and memory of who performed an action accidently is present in the lecture and not the TED Talk. One key thing missing from the TED Talk that was in the lecture was “the importance of what a thing is called.” Though she does not provide many examples there, one that is brought up in the TOK textbook is labelling groups as “pro-life” versus “anti-abortion.”

As a side note, I’ve come across the puzzle at the end of that presentation and never managed to solve it. That hint of needing pencil and paper makes me want to give it another try…

Willinsky’s 2002 article brings up several topics that I discuss in one of the courses I teach, Theory of Knowledge (TOK), an introductory epistemology course for secondary students. Various aspects of the article such as the issue that many academic journals are behind a paywall, the contrast between experts and the public, and arXiv as an example of an open-access database of academic journals have been brought up as topics of discussion in my course. Willingsky’s suggestion of open access to publication could be a potential solution to the rising issues of disinformation spreading on the internet (such as the rise of flat earthers) by making research and the critical comparison of articles commonplace.

That said, I feel that there is large differentiation between making scholarly articles open access and asking students to publish, and after weighing the merits and issues, I’m inclined to shy away from asking students to publish in my own practice. One concern that came to mind is the recent rise in online harassment and other unacceptable behaviour, especially around certain topics such as social justice and LGBTQ2S+ rights. For example, on Twitter/X someone posted images of the classroom of a Surrey secondary Social Justice teacher, highlighting LGBTQ2S+ flags and posters about issues of colonialism, claiming that the Surrey teacher is indoctrinating children and that “she needs to be fired immediately.” When said Surrey teacher pointed this out, she was met with a flood of comments calling her a groomer, pedophile, and other hurtful outlandish messages. I shudder to think about the kind of vitriol that would be flung at educators and students if the students publicly published their thoughts in courses such as Genocide Studies and Social Justice.