Click on the image below to access Lori’s blog.

Authoring Tool

Lori is using UBC Blogs as an authoring tool. Her webspace is full of subtle design decisions that express her personality and unique approach to the learning process. 

Starting with the cover image and the quote she selected to repsent her mission, the logo that she designed, and the About page with a video introduction – all of these elements convey Lori’s work ethics, her energy, and commitment to excellence in everything she does.

Literacies

Lori’s understanding of UDL (CAST, 2018) and multimodalities (New London Group, 1996) comes through in the way she developed her About page. Her introduction is represented in a variety of forms – video, textual, and audio. 

In fact, throughout the website, Lori consistently leverages the affordances of hypertext to add multiple of pathways for her readers to explore (Bolter, 2001). Her writing is thorough and scholarly, yet engaging and fun. Almost all of her posts are supplemented with youtube videos on related topics. I am not sure if she has seen some of these clips before or if she takes extra time to research and find just the right pieces for each of her posts, but I really admire this added depth and a variery of topics that I, as her reader, can move on to. I also feel inspired to embed more videos to my blogs now. Lori’s students are lucky to have such a committed and fun teacher! 

Mode-Bending Assignment

It is not surprising then that Lori chose to make a video as a means of her re-imaged What’s In Your Bag assignment. A variety of video-making and editing skills come though in the film. Her skillfully-written script and and the artfulness and liveliness of the presentation reveal the many layers of Lori’s personality.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.

CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org

The New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u 

I’ll be honest, for my last Linking Assignment post, I was set to look for a coursemate in either of the course streams who selected the same or similar song criteria for Task 8 – Golden Record Curation. Having spent quite a bit of time on that task in week 8, I became somewhat biased to the criteria that I had selected, and I felt quite surprised to learn that the people in my subgroup did not follow the same or similar criteria (not even close!). So I started searching for a ‘soulmate’ by looking at the blogs, one by one, with not much luck. That is until I saw the magnificent cover image on Meipsy’s blog! The deep green of the trees, the wind in the hair of Meipsy and her children up on the mountain slope – all told me I did not have to search any longer! As we’ve learned in the course, images are also technologies of meaning, able to create immediacy between the author and the reader (Bolter, 2001), and I think Meipsy uses the pictures on the Home and About pages very effectively to tell a story about the person behind the blog.

Click on the image below to access Meipsy’s blog.

Golden Record Curation

When reading Meipsy’s Task 8 post, she also found curating the list of 10 songs to be challenging. While my approach was to save the music of underrepresented cultures, Meipsy prioritized making a “good first impression of Earth”. Meipsy also listened to the podcast about the process of selection of the original Goldern Record songs and came to the conclusion that while the process of the debate was probably intense and lively, the resulting list is still biased to western songs. Further, something that we both have in common is that we were touched by the speech of Dr. Rumsey and her question ‘What can we afford to lose?’. Influenced by the music, the course readings, and Dr. Rumsey’s talk, Meipsy decided to choose the 10 songs to represent “a global diversity of music from around the world while also trying to show the various temporal diversities of sound of voice and types of instrumentation.” In contrast, I focused my selection on the songs of the Global South while also keeping in mind the distribution of the songs on the map.

To sum up, both of us seemed to have enjoyed the task and the process of searching for optimal and not-too-biased selection criteria, resulting in 5 songs in common – maybe not the most impressive quantitative closeness, but well-supported with the thoughtful approach to WHY.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). The Breakout of the Visual. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Click on the image below to access Marwa’s blog.

I’ve known Marwa since winter 2020 when we studied in ETEC 524 together. Later, in the fall of 2020, we collaborated on the final project in another course. Being one of a small number of ESL learners in the program, I can relate to Marwa’s journey as a student at many levels. One obvious connection is that we are both immigrant women, bringing linguistic and cultural diversity to our learning community. On the other hand, precisely due to these differences, we at times might feel marginalized.

Authoring Tool

Marwa and I are both using UBC Blogs to host our content.

The first thing that I noticed about Marwa’s webspace is that she designed her own logo, which speaks to her literacy as a coder/web designer, and also the willingness to take time to make things look polished and put together.

Next, she creates an organized, well-designed space for her reader by using different design elements, such as text boxes and icons. She also added the ‘About’ page to introduce her reader to the blog and herself, the author – something I haven’t included in my blog due to time constraints.

Taking into consideration the course limitations, such as the inability to talk with the classmates, or the lack of weekly forums (so grateful for that!), Marwa communicates with others by leaving comments on their blogs. She also takes time to revisit the blogs and add to the discussions started in the comment boxes – something that is hard to keep track of, in my opinion, but Marwa is doing it masterfully.

To sum up, I feel grateful and honored to be studying alongside Marwa. Her commitment to lifelong learning is contagious, and I have learned a lot from her.

References:

Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., Kalantzis, M., Kress, G., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S. and Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), pp.60-92.

Click on the image below to access Chelan’s blog.

I chose to write about Chelan’s webspace because it differs from mine in a number of ways.

Authoring Tool

The most important difference is that Chelan chose to host the site on Google Sites, not UBC blogs. My experience with blogging is very limited, but I found WordPress to be not the most intuitive technology. While I do not know if the lack of WordPress literacy was part of Chelan’s decision to choose Google Sites, I can see how that gives her certain advantages. For once, Google Sites are easy to use, and the result is a clean and easy-to-navigate webspace. It also offers unlimited storage and is free to use (Steele, 2020). Also, should Chelan decide to keep adding other pages for other courses that she takes in MET program, she will end up with a good ePortfolio containing samples of her intellectual productions.

Affordances of the Authoring Tool

One limitation of the Google sites is that they do not have a blog engine, and so do not afford comments. While not impossible, adding a comment box would require some coding knowledge, and they are either not free or contain ads. At the same time, with our course not offering weekly discussion forums on Canvas, leaving comments on each other’s blog spaces is pretty much the only way to communicate with each other. For example, I really wanted to comment with my guess for Task 6, but I could not (Is it The Lion King?).

References

Steele, H. (2020, July 8). Google Sites vs WordPress: Which is Better? Superbwebsitebuilders. https://superbwebsitebuilders.com/google-sites-vs-wordpress/