Take a look as I compile my ideas about how my classmates’ work related and differed to my own. If you like, click the graphic below to see a web of the links considered in the assignment, and for ease, the hyperlinks to each person’s original post. The links can also be found in the section titles below.
Task 4: Manual scripts and potato printing (Delian)
This week, I created the alternative – the written assignment. More specifically, I created a diary entry as an example of a manual text. I toyed around with the idea of potato printing but was a little more interested in exploring private texts we keep to ourselves and the idea of grimoires and other ‘sacred’ texts. So, for this first link I decided to choose a classmate who took the other assignment – the potato printing. I was curious to see whether after reading the same materials but exploring different modes in the assignment, we would explore similar themes in the reflection or come to similar conclusions about some of the reflection prompts.
So, as I rifled through each of this week’s task submissions I stumbled onto Delian Gaskell’s potato printing assignment which was a very clear description of her potato stamp creative process and an amazing reflection on the mechanization of writing. Interestingly, I noted her ‘Digression’ before she delved into the task which briefly explained her affinity for handwriting. That was one of the reasons I chose the ‘diary’ format. I love handwriting and far prefer it to typing things out even if typing makes the process more efficient. It was something I had been thinking about this week and a through-line to her assignment from mine.
I also drew parallels between Delian’s discussion of the difficulty and skill level involved in producing texts before the printing press and my discussion around grimoires. My idea was that diaries are sacred texts because the content is valuable, rendering the object itself valuable. But, Delian’s discussion around the sheer difficulty of producing a text before the printing press brought another idea to mind – that the process of creating the text itself, not just its contents, as well as the design of the container for the text, might also make a text ‘sacred’. It made me think about hand-binding books and creating handcrafted covers while manually folding the paper. The way she described the method she had of creating the potato stamps made me think of ‘crafting’ a text.
Finally, I think I maybe ought to have drawn more references into my assignment to diaries that have become public, for example, or forms of handwritten texts that are official such as signatures. I drew a kind of false comparison in my conclusion between handwriting as private versus public forms of writing which are maybe more often digital. Delian thought of making further references and included a note at the end of her reflection about the Diamond Sutra and asks her readers whether the text would be better suited as a written or oral text since it appears as part of the oldest printed book. I would say she also drew a false comparison though in asking whether the passage would be better spoken aloud or read. I would argue that when we read we are speaking to ourselves, in our heads. I hear my voice speaking the words as I read them and I can linger over them and their shapes in a similar way as my tongue would linger over them if I were speaking them. I wonder how these experiences are different and what different cognitive outcomes we could expect from them as processes.
Task 7: Mode-bending (Richard)
I was so curious to see this week’s assignment and how everyone interpreted the redesign of the first task. It depends on our design of the first task, which was for most of us pretty basic text or video/audio. I wondered with those who had done something different in their first task, how they would interpret the instructions and consider the modes they used in the first versus the second iteration of the task. This was one of my favorite activities so far. I had so much fun redesigning the task (somewhat because I disliked my first try), and playing with the modes. So, I was also looking for a post that seemed like the creator had as much fun as me.
Let me start by saying that I thought I had been pretty clever with my idea to redesign my bag’s contents as a museum exhibit. So, imagine my surprise when I saw that Richard had dome the same! Great minds think alike? Anyway, I really enjoyed what Richard did with his PPT based museum. It was such a different take on my own museum idea which was largely audio based. Richard’s initial task 1 was a PowerPoint and kind of floating head style screen casted video. In his reflection for task 7, he wrote that he was struggling to redesign the task having employed several modes already in his initial task 1. I truly appreciated how he thought to take his bag items and make them into their own characters. It was almost as though rather than bending the mode, he actually bent the perspective of the task. He changed the protagonist from himself, to his objects.
I also felt that the spatial mode was really evident here compared with my version. I felt as if I was travelling through each room in the exhibit and really standing in front of each object. In my museum, listeners were told to go on to the next exhibit so there was a sense of space but one that was fully imaginary. Richard’s space was much more physical and would have potentially worked well as a VR experience.
The only thing I didn’t love was some of the technical distortions used in some of the voices. I couldn’t hear either Gina the Tablet or Perry the Presenter Mouse very well. I think that a design consideration might have been to either swap out those recordings for something a bit more audible, or to perhaps provide an optional script. Though given the amount of work that went into this already, maybe just a quick re-recording might have worked best.
Finally, the writing in the reflection that accompanied the work was extremely clear. We both identified that learners are more engaged when they experience a variety of modes. I also felt that we approached the design part of the process in a similar way, though these designs were ultimately developed quite differently. He spent a long time considering the purpose of the initial task, and like me, wrote about that process in his reflection. Something I did not address, but certainly appreciated was how Richard questioned the impact of changing the mode. He mentioned that designing such interactive content was time consuming and wondered how much benefit it brought to the learner. I wonder about that too sometimes, especially given the lack of paid prep when you’re a sessional or contract instructor in post-secondary.
Overall, this was such a pleasure to discover and interact with.
Task 9: Networking after Golden Curation (Graeme)
I found this particular task to be very challenging but I really enjoyed considering the relationships we have with data. I spent a long time prefacing and leading up to my main point – that I couldn’t see much of interest in the data – in order to justify that opinion. Graeme, on the other hand, got right down to it. He identified in his first paragraph that he couldn’t see much. Maybe that was a better approach? Whenever I can’t find something, or it doesn’t seem right, I tend to over analyze the situation wondering what I’m missing. Graeme spent some time on analysis but came to the same conclusion much more quickly.
His entire second paragraph explored how and why the relationships our groups were based on seemed tenuous. He discussed how the visual was maybe a distraction, showing us relationships that were weak and uninteresting. He also mentioned that the data could be manipulated to show what he wanted to look at and reconfigured to perhaps show results that are misleading. This led to his ultimate conclusion that we need further transparency in understanding how algorithms are using our data. To sum up, Graeme spent far longer discussing the data he was viewing than I did. Since I assumed I had made a mistake or misunderstood something, I researched the actual Palladio tool in order to work out what it was actually used for. What is interesting is that through these different approaches, we came to similar conclusions.
One last thing I want to note is that Graeme didn’t see many positives in the Palladio tool. I pointed out a few in my reflection but I think this is interesting. Palladio is just a tool, like algorithms are just tools. I thought that by understanding the tool, I’d better understand the data represented in the tool. But after all of that, the data still seemed opaque. I can understand why he felt that this opacity reflected other types of algorithms that aren’t transparent. If I could add anything to his observations it would just be to reiterate that data is still only data. How we draw conclusions from it depends on our own hypotheses. I think this might have been why we felt like we were swimming through air. No hypotheses means we’re just staring at spurious correlations, if any.
Task 10: Attention economy (Robyn)
“This was a very annoying activity.” Hah! Robyn’s first line stuck out to me since I had the opposite reaction. I really loved this game. Maybe it’s because I like games generally, or maybe it’s because I thought this was an amazing satire on bad user experience design, either way when I got to the dancing Carlton I felt really accomplished. I chose her post simply because I wanted to see how someone felt coming from such an opposite perspective, and what their observations might be.
In her reflection, Robyn noticed a few of the features that I had also identified as common dark patterns. She identified the timer as having an effect on how she perceived the instructions on each page (I felt very much the same way, as it was likely intended). However, she also drew a parallel that I hadn’t considered in her connection to Tristan Harris’ TED talk and the race for our attention. Her observation that the pop up timer made her heart race was interesting, as was how this was similar to how she felt when receiving notifications on her phone. Her final observation about her feelings when entering her personal information was also appreciated. I had noted in my reflection how the fields’ lack of specificity/allowance for diversity was problematic. Robyn took it a few steps further by prompting me to think about why it was being asked for at all.
Finally, in thinking about Robyn’s last question, “how might I use what I have learned this week about notifications scheduling thoughts to benefit the students in my classroom?” I actually wanted to know what she thought about the answer. She framed the question as a design question (how might we…) which invites the designer to begin ideating on the problem at hand. I was wondering here if she was thinking about the negative impact of notifications or whether she was considering how to harness this information to improve learner motivation or habit-building. I’d have loved to hear some ideas!
Task 11: Detain/Release (Johanna)
Like in task 4, we had two options to choose from this week. I thought about again linking to a post that was done in the way I hadn’t chosen (which is what I did for the earlier linking task for task 4). However, after reading a few of each (shout out to Vera for a great post on the predictive text option), I thought it might be more interesting to compare the same detain/release task especially as I had struggled with it. I wondered how others had evaluated the prosecution’s recommendations and whether they had found any system to help them make their decisions to detain or release the offender. As I was searching for someone who had thoroughly described their process, I found Johanna’s post.
First, Johanna also flagged the lack of information available about the defendants in the simulation. She noted that there wasn’t a whole lot of information substantiating the recommendation made by the prosecution, nor was there any information about how the risk assessment was derived. As I read further, I initially thought Johanna felt a lot like me in how she determined who was detained and released. The first consideration was public safety. But, as I read more I realized she had more layers to her decision-making than I did. While we more or less agreed about the ‘risk’ variables, I didn’t rely very much on either the defendant’s or prosecution’s comments. I did read them, so they might have affected me unknowingly but as I found more and more repeated comments (word for word copies) in the simulation, I came to disregard them. I felt it took away from the simulation as I wasn’t able to continue to ‘suspend my disbelief’.
As the simulation continued to unfold, I grew exasperated with the flight risks and kept on pretty much only detaining a defendant if they were violent. That obviously made me very unpopular in the court of public opinion and resulted in me losing office (I was good with it). However, Johanna continued iterating on her decision making and tried to avoid the flight risks, relying more and more on the prosecution’s recommendations – the very information I had been completely ignoring. I was struck by her description of how her mindset shifted. I kind of gave up, but she was able to pivot with the simulation and reflect on how the simulation played with her perspectives and how her decisions played on her conscience. I think she experienced a more impactful revelation than I did in the end, though I’m not sure I want to have experienced the simulation the same way she did.
Task 12: Speculative futures (Anneke)
I’ll be honest. I’ve been fan-girling over Anneke’s blog since the beginning of the course. I knew she would come up with something amazing for the final task, so I’ve been patiently waiting to see what she created. It was worth the wait. I was also really delighted to see that she chose a technology that I’m deeply curious about – augmented reality. Her idea that AR might remediate the book is one I hadn’t considered so that is also a good reason why I chose this particular post. Given her English teaching background I thought that she’d make great connections between the speculative fiction genre and science fiction as well.
Sure enough, a first glance at her post already yielded a who’s who reading list of texts that explore the future on a variety of themes. Her post smoothly moved from a discussion of key authors through what speculative fiction tries to accomplish and how, until we meet her what if questions. Having looked at how she scaffolded her post, I very much wish I had done something similar. I introduced my topic but it seems glaring now that I didn’t connect my what if questions with a larger theme or idea. my scope was very narrow, comparatively.
Our approaches were very different to this assignment. Anneke focused on character and world-building. Her exploratory narrative reminded me very much of narrative game experiences like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life Is Strange that focus on delivering lore and backstory through dialogue and artifacts rather than a lot of gameplay mechanics. I particularly like the idea of experiencing the story two different ways depending on our character selection, rather than experiencing the story as one character and making branching decisions that affect the story. In a way, the whole thing reminds me of a set of user personas, a user scenario and user journeys. We get the persona descriptions from what she’s designed for her characters, the scenario in the world building (in a way), and the we’d get the user journey through the AR experience. So. Cool.
Okay, let’s try and link this to my approach. Rather than have two different characters experience the same tech differently depending on their background, I had the same character experience her world differently based on the presence of technology in her life. In a way, Anneke and I approached this assignment inversely: Same world -> two characters, same character -> two worlds. I also spent far less time establishing the character and the world, choosing to jump right in to the narrative and hope enough of that came through in the storytelling. I think my script was more successful at establishing pieces of Warren’s life with Weaver but I enjoyed playing with different modes to convey the story.
I digress but here’s my point: the way we approached the task reflected the differences in the way we viewed the tech. Anneke chose to view AR as something inevitable, that would affect everyone though we’d each experience it differently. In my version, the outcome of the future of neural machine translation is not yet fixed. It has a long way to go and has people actively working to reduce its gender bias and help it recognize vocabulary and language that are beyond its current capacity. The way it will affect us as a whole has not yet been determined. Therefore, we each focused on what we felt was most important – the different people interacting with a ubiquitous future technology, versus two very different worlds each stemming from a possible technological outcome.
To Sum Up – The Last Week
How exciting is this!? We did it! We collectively created a set of artifacts for most of our units of learning in 540 and I think we emerged with a great collection of work. Admittedly, some weeks this was harder to keep up with than others and depending on the task, I may have looked a little more eagerly for different approaches to the assignment on my colleagues’ sites than with some other tasks. I found myself a few times wishing that we had an index of who had completed each task so I didn’t have to necessarily go through each site each time, which was a little cumbersome. A quick note about the first half of the term- I did tasks 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7 as we reached the halfway point. I would have liked to ‘link’ to task 2 as it was one of my very favorites to respond to but I found only 1 student who had posted their comments to their site which meant I couldn’t ‘link’ to it. Maybe something to think about is whether there was a way, aside from copying and pasting each comment at its time code, to post the work on our blogs. I was thinking about how this might be done aside from copying and pasting our comments at their time codes, but time wasn’t really on my side. Aside from that, I really enjoyed looking through everyone’s websites given that we all approached even just how we organized and formatted our reflections so differently. Thanks for a wonderful course, everyone!