Category Archives: Tasks

The point made in Innis (2007) about the drastic increase in speed of the printing press can be applied to mechanical writing versus typing. I am a fast typer; according to monkeytype.com I can type at a speed of 113 words per minute with 99% accuracy. Because of this, I vastly prefer typing over writing. That said, going through most of my elementary school in Canada during the mid to late 90s, I learned to write cursive, which is far faster than printing, and going through high school in the early 2000s prior to the spread of laptops, handwriting was what I relied on to take notes, and this continued throughout the mid ’00s when laptops were just beginning to be popularized, but issues such as the lack of touchscreens and styluses meant that I still took most of my notes by hand, especially in my subject area of chemistry that required a lot of formulas and diagrams.

This task was for the most part easy: even though it’s been two decades since I wrote so much by hand (and at one point my hand was sore), my pen flowed quickly (though slower than 113 words per minute). There was at least one instance where I had an additional thought, but because of my writing pace, by the time I finished writing the current sentence I lost the new thought for a bit. This almost never happens when I type due my typing speed allowing me to quickly getting my current thought down before quickly moving on to the next.

Out of habit from my high school days in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, I double spaced my work and wrote in pen (pencil is not permitted on official IB submissions). The additional spacing allowed room for edits, and any mistakes made with pen had one line crossed out and replaced by subsequent words. This too differed greatly than digital, where edits end up invisible in the final document.

Reference

Innis, H. (2007). Empire and communications. Dundurn Press.

Li, Y. (2024, June 4). As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory.’ New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/business/china-internet-censorship.html

Text From “yating” Voice to Text Application

00:01
so this is quite a busy we can for me i friday i took，teachers, my school include myself

00:11
took, most of our great tens and some great li in students on a field trip to play that it was a long，field trip，it was quite stressful planning it on one point we are considering canceling those few just because many students were not paying the fees and we were sure how it actually, wanted to go and if we had castle that we were lost about money because of the deposit we put on buses but eventually students submit the man near the dead line，and then vast

00:56
works to its when mass of our great tends students when we have a three hundred fifty

01:04
stewards going and teacher supervise her about even with all that stress

01:11
of the pi process and the law of us were joking by now if we effort we commit the rest of our department to say if we to talk us out, of it if we ever said

01:25
again, but yes i friday the weather was great

01:30
fine we had a, lot of, fun i just lining up to very different brides and going off very different rides i would i went on with the coaster for exampleit\’sbeen a while since i did that last, time was probably six years ago cot

01:47
when i was doing this exact future with a different school ah it was so interesting，see how the changes that to play some old red sky taken out some new roads got added

02:02
no fortune but he was right though her, vaults not be available was not available apparentlyit\’llbe available

02:12
other changes include how the wooden coaster now has sea belts

02:17
which takes a little of the far away because part of the thrill of the war coster was the feeling of you ah feel like you are out of your seats and those kind of that process，i have said that i am pretty sure they seewhat\’smade right safer

02:40
that was my f o and all the stuff iwasn\’ttrying to one thus with the teacher all, the students will have us were early gave there they were all time try to, leave so over i was a very strange experience and there, was very little traffic on the road everything worked outthat\’squite happy that trip

03:02
if you if youdon\’tif, you know the kind of process

03:07
as for saturday i had a few friends for to a certain to p m and by another from\. games we played is something called spirit island the premise of it is that we are spirit and sling

03:33
and the goal is for us to reel ah colonizers and settlers from another from, a european basically see and kind fits with a spirit so think about

03:53
that\’squite different\. than the young theme of other board games

03:58
that i played in the past where

04:02
ah usually you play as the color exploring their a game called for exploration can the other three but basically there are four e words out there that alone，and that exploration and settling is another one，and that was my saturday so nowlet\’ssunday here i am working on the ass the whetherisn\’tit nice out so i did have some place to go for, it

Analysis

Oh boy, what a mess. Let’s first tackle the “what’s ‘wrong’ in the text?” question because there are a lot of errors. While preparing for this task and thinking about my reading reflections (especially on Chinese and Taiwanese) during this module, I thought that a Mandarin voice-to-text app would work not as well as an English one simply because there are far more homophones in Mandarin than English (remember, each character is one syllable, and there’s only a limited combinations of sounds). I found a Mandarin speech-to-text app (the aforementioned yating) and was surprised that it had several options such as English+Mandarin to text, English to text, and an even bigger surprise, Taiwanese to text. I’ll do a separate write-up for the Taiwanese to text option because I was quite excited to try it.

At any rate, my text above was from the English only option of the yating speech-to-text app, and one reason for the numerous errors may be due to the fact that this was a app made by Taiwanese developers, and they may have more difficulties getting the correct words than native English speaking developers. Some instances of outright errors include “grade tens” becoming “great tens” or “great tends,” “weekend” becoming “we can,” “money” becoming “man,” “canceled” into “castle,” “I” becoming “on,” “rides” becoming “brides,” “red sky,” or “roads,” and so on.

Another potential cause for error is that English is not my mother tongue, and whenever I listen to recordings of myself I know that I have several quirks such as barely annunciating my t’s. That said, colleagues and friends were always surprised to hear that I was born in Taiwan, claiming that “I have no accent.” Numerous errors to seem to arise on my lack of annunciating t’s, such as “a bit” turning into “about,” and “field trip” turning into “future.”

All errors aside, there were a few ways in which the text deviates from written English. First off, the voice-to-text application does not capitalize or follow other grammatical rules, and rather than spaced paragraphs, it starts a new timestamped section whenever there is a period of silence. Because of this, ideas and topics are jumbled together rather than nicely spaced in written form.

At one point during the five minutes, I was discussing 4x board games, and here I felt the same limitation of speech that was discussed by Ong during his lecture posted by Abe Aboud on Youtube in 2014. With text, I can pause my writing or typing, look up what each of 4 x’s stand for (exploration, expand, exploit, exterminate), and make it seem seamless, while with speech, I had to either pause for a long time to look it up, or move on to a different topic (I chose the latter during this assignment).

Similarly, any mistakes in digital text can be easily erased, while for speech, because it’s live rather than a document that has been checked and proofread, contains errors that are unerasable. This point is somewhat connected to Gnanadesikan’s opening chapter that points out that writing transcends time while speech is only current.

Many of these differences would be less apparent or would be gone completely if I was reading off of a typed script. With a script, visually I would be able to determine appropriate times to pause, potentially allowing the voice-to-text application to space out its output better. My sudden lapse in memory of what three of the four x’s in 4x stand for would not be apparent with a written script, and while mistakes could still happen while reading off of a script, it is less likely when compared to talking unscripted.

Through this exercise, I have demonstrated a few ways in which oral storytelling is different than written storytelling. A storyteller using writing can take years, if not decades (George R. R. Martin for instance) to work on and refine their story, allowing one to plan out various plot points and allow for foreshadowing, while an oral storyteller, if crafting a story on the spot, is more prone to errors and has no opportunity for revision and storyline planning. Despite my initial skepticism on various readings in this module, this exercise supports several of their arguments about writing such as it transcending time, it providing means for cultures to become more developed in certain ideas and concepts, and it easing dissemination of knowledge.

References

Abe Aboud. (2014, September 8). Walter Ong – Oral cultures and early writing [Video]. YouTube.

Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons.

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 on knowledge. While a lot of the examples overlap between the two mediums, there are far more details and examples in the hour-long lecture. In this task I will point out 6 different parts of the hour-long lecture that resonated with me.

At 1:46 Boroditsky mentioned that there are over 7000 languages in the world, with many more in the past. This was actually one point that I felt was better communicated in the TED Talk rather than the lecture, as at the end of the TED Talk Boroditsky lamented that half of the languages in the world may be gone in the next century. This point resonated with me as a speaker of a dying language, Taiwanese (also known as Taigi, Hokkien, and Min Nan). With each language being unique in some way, such as gendered nouns and verbs, numerous words for one thing while another language only has one word for it, terms that are essentially untranslatable, and unique sounds, as we lose a language we lose an unique way to think and view the world. While I do my best to maintain my Taiwanese use, the reality is that while 66% of Taiwanese people ages 65 and older uses Taiwanese as their main language, that number is reduced to 7.4% for people ages 6-14 (Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics 2021). One can find more of my thoughts on Taiwanese, the political and historical reasons behind this decline, (though at one point turned into a rant), on my 2.2 reading reflection.

At 6:17, Boroditsky provided examples of Navajo verb stems for consumption, and how the word differs depending on the texture of the food. The presence of something extremely specific that isn’t present in English reminds me of Chinese counting words/units. While some words in English require counting words, such as two pieces of paper, often times we can put a number in front of the plural form of the noun (three pages, four dogs, etc.). In Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), there is a need to place counting word/unit in front of every noun. Paper, photos, cards, and other flat objects uses the counting word 張 (zhang), although interestingly faces uses this same counting word. 台 (tai) can be a counting word for mechanical objects such as motorcycles and computers, though flying transportation objects such as planes and helicopters use the counting word 架 (jia). In a way, these counting words are similar to how English group certain things (a murder of crows, a school of fish), but while one can get away with saying “three fish” in English, in Chinese one needs to add a counting word, 隻 (zhi) between the number and the noun. This difference in language could potentially lead to different kinds of associations and categorizations: while an English speaker may not group a computer with a motorcycle, one can understand why a Chinese speaker would group them together when given this insight about their language.

At 7:42, Boroditsky brought up an interesting counterargument to the idea that language affects how one thinks. Rather than the difference of languages affecting cognitive processes, the potential argument is that speakers of different languages are paying attention to the same things but are expressing it differently. This counterargument was quickly debunked in my head; from my dabbling of undergraduate psychology courses, priming is a method to affect how one perceives something. An example would be if I were to just play a Youtube video in class to introduce a topic without any introduction, versus me saying a few things about the topic with words such as “pay attention to…” prior to playing the video. Rather than everyone paying attention to everything, language primes its speakers to pay attention to certain things that would be lost on a speaker of a different language.

At 11:16, Boroditsky discusses how speakers of different languages express time differently. A few years ago I was actually a volunteer for a similar research, where after filling out a questionnaire about what languages I am fluent in, the researcher (over Zoom) spoke a word or a phrase (such as past, future, yesterday, etc.) and asked me to point in a direction. They were specifically looking for polyglots, and now in reflection I wonder if I would have pointed in different directions if I was given the words in English versus words in Chinese. Certain Chinese documents orient up and down first, then right to left, while English goes left to right first then up and down. There’s also the potential that despite spending the first eight years of my life in Taiwan, the majority of the  subsequent thirty years in Canada has led me to follow the English orientation regardless of the language cues.

At 40:38, Boroditsky discusses the importance of what a thing is called, using examples such as patriot vs activist vs terrorist. This is particular relevant in TOK as we discuss various things such as bias and spin, analyzing the lean of certain media sources that, for example, call it “pro-life” as opposed to “pro-choice” or “anti-abortion.” Interestingly, this section was not in the TED Talk. One thing related to this topic that was present in the TOK textbook is how, without even a phrase or word in the popular vernacular to describe something, it becomes difficult to put that idea into words. The TOK textbook uses the example of sexual harassment: prior to 1975 when the term was coined, it was difficult to describe the horrible experience that many women suffered through.  By coining and spreading the term, “no longer did they have to explain to their friends and family that ‘he hit on me and wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I had to quit.’ What he did had a name” (Blakemore 2018).

At 51:45, Boroditsky answered a question about universality of languages. While this isn’t universal but just common, but one example that came to mind is kiki vs bouba. In many studies, participants were given two images: one of a spiky object and the other with rounded edges, and were asked to name one “kiki” and the other “bouba.” Most participants across cultures and languages named the spiky one kiki and the rounded one bouba, and I observed the same trend with myself and my students.

As a side note, it’s interesting that there was a large section of the lecture that did not resonate with me. My experiences with gendered nouns were the years in elementary and secondary that I had to study French, and I did not have enough proficiency and familiarity with French to let the gendered nouns affect my perception of certain objects. In Chinese, while pronouns are gendered in written form (他 vs 她, the second one is the female form; the radical on the left is 女 meaning woman), they have the same pronunciation (ta). The discussion on differentiating between purposeful action and accidental action also did not resonate with me.

Finally, another side note is that while Boroditsky’s 2011 article mentions syllables of numbers for counting, this example was not part of either the TED Talk or the lecture. In my 2.1 reading response post I have shared my thoughts about this.

References

Blakemore, E. (2018, January 8). Until 1975, ‘Sexual Harassment’ Was the Menace With No Name. History. https://www.history.com/news/until-1975-sexual-harassment-was-the-menace-with-no-name

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, 304(2), 62-65.

Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. (2021, September). 2020 Population and Residence Preliminary Census Results. Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics of the Republic of China. https://www.stat.gov.tw/public/Attachment/1112143117MKFOK1MR.pdf

SAR School for Advanced Research. (2017, June 7). Lera Boroditsky, how the languages we speak shape the way we think [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg

TED. (2018, May 2). How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky | TED [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

I’m Matt (he/him), a first generation Taiwanese-Canadian who’s at the end of his MET journey; ETEC 540 is my final course. Throughout the nine previous courses I have gained a fair number of tools, philosophies, and ideas to apply to my practice. While on the one hand I’m sad that this particular learning journey is almost over, on the other hand I’m looking forward to the extra free time (and let’s be honest, the pay bump). You can find more details about myself at the About Matt page.

I actually spent a fair amount of time selecting a bag for this assignment. Depending on the time of year and/or day of the week, my backpack can go through any of the following configurations:

• a measuring tape and a to-buy list as I’m constantly stopping by various stores to pick up items for the new townhouse I just moved into at the start of the month
• a mosquito face net, bug repellents, sun screen, snacks, hiking shoes, hiking poles, and a giant water bottle if I’m able to go on a hike
• a power-bar, two to three days worth of clothing, and some of items shown below if I’m travelling out of town for a BCTF conference

At the end of a bit of deliberation, I went with the “typical” configuration pictured below. This is what’s typically in my bag on a weekday up until a few weeks ago when I moved in to my new home. Going from top left to top right and then bottom left to bottom right, items include an umbrella, an accordion folder of student work I need to mark, laptop adapter, laptop, Compass card holder, foldable reusable grocery bag from T&T (an Asian grocery store chain), a Vancouver Canucks Demko mask, earplugs, wireless headphones, a Steam Deck (a portable gaming device), my BCTF Local Representative nametag, various coloured pens, my key ring (keys to four different buildings, a Health Canada bottle opener, T&T reward point card, and a bubble tea keychain accessory), and my wallet.

Prior to moving to my new home which is walking distance from work, most of these items, barring the umbrella, the mask, the earplugs, and the nametag would have been used on a daily basis. I commuted to work via public transportation, so the Compass card (Metro Vancouver’s public transportation payment system) holder, the headphones, and the Steam Deck were used to and back from work. I opted for a card holder rather than putting the Compass card in my wallet in order to have quick access rather than constantly fumbling with opening and closing my wallet. The Compass card is linked to my credit card and is set to recharge every time it is below a certain threshold of stored monetary value.

The accordion folder, different coloured pens, the laptop charger, and the laptop itself are for my job as a secondary teacher which was needed essentially every weekday. The reusable grocery bag helped whenever I needed to stop by a grocery story on my way home from work, and there is of course my wallet, filled to the brim with Starbucks gift cards in addition to the typical identification, credit cards, and some cash.

The name tag is kept in a zipped inner bag of my backpack and is used whenever I attend BCTF events. In a year I attend approximately eight different BCTF events such as Representative Assemblies where elected teachers from across the province propose, debate, and vote on various policies and recommendations. The Canucks mask is left-over from the COVID days when there was a mask mandate, though every now and then it’s still useful, such as me visiting my clinic or a Lifelabs location where there is still a social expectation to wear a mask.

Finally, the earplugs are for the occasional instances when I attend concerts, Canucks games, or supervise dances at my school. I’m at the age where I better protect my ears against further damage.

The contents of my bag gives a quick, accurate glimpse of my self-image. My bag and its contents show an array of interests and cultures I engage with such as the mask showing that I’m a Canucks fan or a sticker on my laptop revealing one of my pastime being anime. In addition, going with the latest definition of text being strictly something that is written, then there are several texts on these objects that allow people to infer various literacies (in the knowledge definition, rather than the read/write definition) I may have. My BCTF Local Representative nametag demonstrates that I’m an union activist, and therefore, should have some degree of familiarity with Robert’s Rules of Order. The video game stickers on my laptop allows one to correctly assume that I am familiar with video game jargon. The bilingual text of the reusable grocery bag states the name of an East Asian grocery store chain suggests that I should have some ability in identifying various Asian foods sold there that other Canadians may not be familiar with.

The Steam Deck is one of two items that allow me to access text technology in my bag. It allows me to access the various games on my account on the digital video games distribution service Steam. Most of my favorite game genres feature copious text: strategy games in which one navigates menus and read descriptions of buildings and units, story-rich roleplaying games in which characters engage in lengthy voice-acted dialogue, and visual novels which are essentially voice-acted choose-your-own-adventure stories that include background music and images. The Steam Deck illustrates my engagement with text in leisure activities.

My laptop is the other text technology item, and illustrates my engagement with text as a part of my profession. Used almost extensively for work and/or my union responsibilities (other than the occasional browsing of Reddit or engaging in games such as Wordle or Connections), my laptop contains all the texts I use in my lessons, whether they’re discussion prompts, handouts for students, videos that highlight certain concepts, and digital versions of quizzes and exams. In the past decade or so of my teaching career, I experienced the transition of teachers using whiteboards and overhead projectors as their main method of showing text to students to now where teachers find it extremely difficult to teach without a computer.

There are several points of interest that an archeologist studying the contents of my bag can note, which may allow them to infer more details about our society. One is the discrepancy between most of my teaching resources being digital, while students’ work are still mostly on paper. This may lead an archeologist to conclude that we as a society are still in the midst of transitioning from paper to digital, and through studying other artefacts of this time period, an archeologist may hypothesize that one key reason is the digital divide between different socioeconomic groups resulting in not everyone having a digital device.

Another point of interest is the mobility of devices: with my laptop and Steam Deck, I can conduct 95% of work related to my career, my union responsibilities, and my leisure activities anywhere. Though I have a desktop computer at home which I prefer to use over my laptop and Steam Deck for various reasons such as being connected to speakers and accessories such as keyboard and mice, I can perform the exact same task on the laptop and Steam Deck. This is further enhanced by cloud technology which allows for a a seamless transition of files across devices; on days when I decide to leave my laptop at work I can still create a handout on my home desktop computer and upload the file to a server so that I could access it at work, and the Steam Deck also has cloud servers so that progress on one device is automatically sent to the other.

The final point of interest an archeologist may note is that unlike most people, the bag I carry to work contains a device dedicated to leisure (the Steam Deck), potentially allowing them to reach a wrong conclusion that there is sufficient downtime as a teacher for me to use that device. Perhaps by studying it alongside the Compass card they would deduce that it’s for my commute on public transportation, which allows them to perform further analysis on the pros and cons of public transportation during this time period. If they had the ability to access the account associated with my Compass card they would obtain insight to my daily travels: what stops do I get on and off, and at what times. Studying that and contrasting it to artefacts from other bags could allow to reach conclusions about our society such as the fact that time is a precious commodity; most people prefer to get to work quicker by driving a personal vehicle, despite the monetary and environmental benefits that comes with choosing public transportation. Although the contents of my bag for almost the entirety of the past decade shows that I opted for the additional downtime and the monetary and environmental benefits of public transportation, if they were to study my bag now and managed to access the account associated with the bank card in my wallet as well as identification cards with a new address, they’ll see that I eventually opted to live within a walking distance from work.