Task #6 Connection to Tyler’s Emoji Story: 

Tyler’s link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540tylers/2020/06/16/task-6-emoji-story/

My link:  https://blogs.ubc.ca/rebeccahydamacka/2020/06/14/task-6-an-emoji-story/

Reasoning: I have chosen to link to Tyler Selini’s emoji story because I felt our tasks connected is many ways. The  main reason I chose  to link to his emoji task is that our titles are for the same story although his story comes from a television series while mine is from the book. We both loved this story and it seemed relatively easy to create as most emojis were available to write it. I think we both really enjoyed this task as well. 

Same title?  Same Story? 

 

One would imagine our emojis titles would be the same but they are very different. And the title seems simple enough. But guessing titles requires prior knowledge of the movie or  book. This is very similar to a hyperlink that works by association.

Tyler  chose to write his title using emojis to represent words while I wrote” an idea: Little Fires Everywhere – emojis of fires all over the top of the page (following the convention for titles of course and labelled to make sure). They looked pretty small to me as well.

At first, I had no idea Tyler had chosen the same title as I “read”  “TV, __________ , fire, world.”  I had no idea that the hand meant “little” until later when I puzzled through the plot. As I started to make out emojis such as “family,” “artist,”  . . . and at the bottom of the plot “house,” “fire!” 

Only reading part of the plot, I guess it was the same story because the image of a house on fire and the people leaving was so vivid in my mind. The book starts and ends with this image. 

We need to have prior knowledge or something familiar to connect to, for emoji stories and to learn almost everything. We learn by building on prior knowledge. This is why we were able to correctly guess each other’s story. It was exciting when this happened!

Another similarity that our tasks share was that we used emoji words but not in complete sentences. It is almost like creating small vignettes or scenes from the plot. I did have to find a way to create flashbacks and forwards for my own story, because I was following the book’s story line which was circular rather than linear.  Tyler’s plot, on the other hand appeared linear but this was probably because it was a portion of the book being one show in a series. 

A final difference was the device: Tyler used his phone and its emoji keyboard while I used an online keyboard for my MacBook which I tried to copy and paste into the blog post (it didn’t translate well). I ended up doing a screenshot of my story as well. I am curious as to how he got a black background for his story. 

Authoring: Tyler’s blog is well laid, using UBC WordPress  and the same theme as I have used, Booklite, which makes it familiar to me and thus easy to navigate within the post. I did take awhile to discover the links to other tasks at the bottom of his post as I was looking for them in a menu at the top of the page. Also, his background image makes the text difficult to read especially for someone with less than perfect vision. The choice of a black background for his emoji story, however, is a great choice as it contrasts the emojis well making them pop on the page.