A couple of weeks ago, I created a post about what you would find in my bag.  This week I’ve re-designed this task.

Below you will find a link to my audio recording.

This week’s task was challenging for me.  When I read the New London Group’s publication on multiliteracies I learned that music, sound effects, voice, etc. are elements that constitute audio design so I started to think about how I could incorporate and redesign this task using audio and representing the contents of my bag.  I created a playlist with a number of songs that have a similar theme.  Once you listen, you might be able to tell me what my bag is used for, however, you may not be able to tell me exactly what was in my bag.  As much as I could, I tried to incorporate lyrics that represented some of the items found in my bag. For me, music is an important part of my being.  Music and lyrics are symbolic and communicate meaning.  When I looked at the contents of my bag, someone may be able to identify a number of literacies or texts that could be used to describe me.  However, the contents of my bag, really speaks to my work and professional life.  And I think that the music I selected speaks to the passion I have for my career and the reason as to why I carry these items in my bag.

References

Bachman, R. (1973). Takin’ Care of Business [Bachman–Turner Overdrive]. Bachman-Turner Overdrive II [Record]. Mercury.

Brown, T., LaRue, P., & Montana, B. (2018). Night Shift [Jon Pardi]. California Sunrise [CD]. Capitol Nashville.

Dean, P., Reno, M., Frenette, M. (1981). Working for the Weekend [Loverboy]. Gey Lucky [Record]. Columbia.

Dunn, R. (1993). Hard Workin’ Man [Brooks and Dunn]. Hard Workin’ Man [CD]. Arista.

Jones, T. (2007). Shiftwork [Kenny Chesney and George Straight]. Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates [CD]. BNA.

Lennon, J. & McCartney, P. (1964). A Hard Day’s Night [The Beattles].  A Hard Day’s Night [Record]. Parlophone.

Lewis, H. & Hayes, C. (1981). Workin’ for a Livin’ [Huey Lewis and the News]. Picture This [Record]. Chrysalis.

Parton, D. (1980). 9 to 5.  9 to 5 and Odd Jobs [Record]. RCA.

Reynolds, A. (1965). Five O’Clock World [The Vogues]. Five O’Clock World [Record]. Co & Ce.

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.)  Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

As we know and was reiterated in our readings this week, Bolter indicates that diagrams, illustrations, and maps have played an important role in the communicative power of printed books. (p. 48)  There’s no doubt in my mind that the communicative power of a picture has played a role in the development and use of emojis in text technology.  A single emoji tells a reader exactly what you are thinking much like a picture and invoke emotion.

I thought this task would be easy as I use emoji’s and bitmoji’s on a daily basis when I send informal text and instant messages.  However, I found I struggled with this task and not being able to use proper spelling and grammar.  I tried spacing out my emoji’s in a line, which didn’t work out so I ended up having to use some punctuation which included a colon, comma, and ampersand.  I also created my emoji story on my iPhone in my Notes app and when I pasted it into my WordPress post, this happened (I ended up taking a screenshot of my emoji story):

????????????????:  ????????

⭐️: ????????‍????????, ????????, ????????‍♂️????, ????????????

⭐️⭐️: ????????, ????????‍???? ????, ????????‍♂️

????????‍????????????????‍♂️???????????? ???????????? ???????? ????????

????????‍????????????????‍♂️????????????????????

6️⃣.1️⃣4️⃣:

????????‍♂️???? ❤️????????‍♂️????????????

????????‍???????? ➡️ ????????????????

????????‍????????, ????????,????????‍???????? ➡️ ????????????????????????

???????? ➡️ ????????

????????‍????& ???????? ➡️ ✈️????????????

????????‍♂️????, ????????‍♂️ ➡️ ???? ????????

???????????? ➡️ ✈️????????

As I created my emoji story, I relied on words and ideas rather than on syllables.  For example, I used a single star emoji to indicate starring characters and 2 star emojis to represent the secondary characters I wrote about.  I also explained the main plot of the TV show and then picked one episode to write about.

I started with the title of the show and as indicated in the example of the assignment, tried to give context to what type of movie, TV show, or book I was describing.  I provided the title first because, as in Pictionary, it always helps to give some reference to my colleagues who may be trying to figure out what I was writing about.

I chose a story that I thought would be easy to interpret.  I didn’t want to use emoji’s to explain a complicated plot.  As I think that when you are choosing something like an emoji to depict text, the more complicated it is, the more your reader will get lost.

References

Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

This week I printed a 5-letter word using potato stamps.  I have been exposed to the art of printmaking, which is very similar to the art of letterpress technology.  Printmaking is the art of etching an image into something and transferring the image to paper or fabric.  I didn’t find the task challenging as I had access to printmaking supplies including ink, ink plate, roller, and knives for cutting and shaping the potatoes.  I actually found using a potato was much easier to manipulate than using lino, which is what I’ve used for etching and transferring images in the past.

It took me about 2 hours from start to finish to cut and etch my potatoes, roll the ink, and transfer the cuts to paper.  As we learned from Paul Collier who runs the printing press at the University of Plymouth this week, letter press technology requires a degree of consideration.  This is because there is no quick way to fix a mistake.   I understood that my letters had to be etched backwards in order for them to transfer so they could be read.  I was careful to plan out my cuts, as again, I knew that once a cut was made, in order to fix it, I would have to start again.

My letters are pretty symmetrical but they are not perfect.  I’m not sure that I would ever pick my “font” when designing the layout of a printed document.  The ink that I rolled on transferred to the paper better on the first stamp compared to the second stamp.

As I was completing this task, I thought how time consuming it would be to prepare a sentence or a paragraph.  The mechanics and engineering involved in mass printing documents 500 years ago is impressive.  Technology has advanced into word processing and design software, that allows us to fix a mistake quicker than ever before.

The unscripted story…

Buckley is my nine year old Shih Tzu poodle. He weighs about 10 pounds. For the past nine years I’ve been travelling with Barkley all over Canada in the United States. When Buckley was just one month old I took my first trip with him so he’s learned to travel in cars and airplanes and he travels well.  When Buckley was just a couple of years old I took him on his first big trip on an airplane. We flew to Arizona.

Buckley in Invermere, BC

Before leaving for Arizona I went to the vet and made sure Buckley‘s vaccinations were up-to-date. During that visit the vet also gave me a spray that I could put on one of his toys to keep him calm during the four hour flight. This spray was a lifesaver because midflight Buckley did start to get a little bit of anxiety on the plane. Travelling through the airport in Canada Buckley had to be in his kennel from the time we got onto the bus in the Jetset parking lot rate until we landed in the Phoenix airport.Once we were in the US Buckley was free to walk around the airport and go through customs. I find travelling in the US with a pet is much easier than travelling through Canada. They allow dogs in stores, restaurants, and in many tourist attractions.

While in Phoenix, Buckley spent a lot of time with my friends husband while I went shopping and toured around. It was a great that Buckley could stay home with my friend Eddie and hang out in his man cave. Each day they visited with neighbours smoked cigars watched hockey and red car magazines in the man cave.

Halfway through my trip, I took Buckley and we travelled to tombstone, Tucson, and desert pines casino. In tombstone and at the casino, Buckley was welcome to visit the shops, Restaurants Buetel Khoma and was even able to go in the casino. On the way back to Phoenix, we went for a hike in cactus Forest.

In cactus forest, Buckley stepped on a cactus. It took about 15 minutes to get all the thorns out of his paw and mouth. Even though he was a bit scared Buckley seemed OK after he stepped on the cactus. That night I noticed Buckley was limping around on the paw where I pulled the thorns out. The next day he was still limping and I decided to take them to see if that in Phoenix. The vet was great, she told me she was from a Mexican family and she had been born in Edmonton which is where I’m from. She didn’t charge me an exam fee to see Buckley and prescribed him and antibiotic to deal with the poison in his body. She also thought he sprained his paw but but assured me that if he rested his paw it would heal on his own. The poison from the thorn in the sprain were causing him to limp. She did tell me that many dogs that come from Canada, often end up in her office because they step on a cactus.

The rest of the trip with Buckley in Phoenix went relatively smoothly. His foot healed up nicely and by the time we came home he had finished taking the antibiotic. Since our trip to Arizona Buckley has travelled to many more places with me in the US including California, Oregon, Washington State, Idaho, Montana,And New Mexico. If you’re thinking about travelling with a small pet to the US, I highly recommend it.

This week I experimented with the voice to text function on my iPhone, known in the Apple community, as the dictation function.  I have used this function in the past to send text messages through my Bluetooth and Sync program in my vehicle or when I don’t necessarily have the hands to text but can send a quick reply to someone using my voice.  Previously, I only used this function to sent short text messages.

The text deviates from conventions of written English in that this function doesn’t pick up on punctuation.  In order for me to put punctuation into my text, I had to say the punctuation that I wanted to add, for example “While in Phoenix (coma)….”  The task was to tell an unscripted story, but other than putting a period at the end of a sentence, adding a coma here and there, and starting a new paragraph, I had a hard time thinking of the punctuation that had to go with my text, as I was speaking.  As the tone in my voice changed through the story, there is nothing in the text to indicate the emotion in my voice.  And had I not asked the to add a coma’s, periods, and new paragraphs, I would have ended up with one really long, monotone sentence.  As it is reads now, my story sounds a bit boring.

The errors in the text seem to come from the tone in my voice changing or my enunciation.  As I was completing this task, I found myself talking slower, in a higher and calmer voice, and enunciating words differently than I normally would when telling an unscripted story so that the function would work better on my phone.  I found that a lot of the proper nouns were picked up by the dictation function and spelled correctly.  If I had to guess, I would say about 80-90% of what I said was translated to the correct word, which is pretty phenomenal, when you think about how the technology has evolved in a relatively short period of time.

In terms of mistakes, I would say the common mistakes came from longer pauses that I made when telling my story and the “Uhhh” or “Umm” that came naturally from me as I was learning to do this for the first time.  I also found the Apple’s voice recorder would automatically turn off and I would have to go back and say something again, which caused a lot of the mistakes in the text.

If I had scripted the story, I think the story would have been a bit more interesting to read.  I could have added some emotion to invoke laughter or excitement, and of course the grammar and punctuation would be fixed.

Oral storytelling is more interactive and unedited.  If you have an audience, you can respond to them by reading their body language and reactions.  An oral story may never told exactly the same way.  Written stories are deliberate and concise.  They are recorded and edited and told the exact same way over and over again.

This is the contents of my work bag.

This is me last year in China. Doing what I do best – travelling around and soaking up culture.

I started my journey with UBC in January of this year. This will be the second course I take in the MET program. It’s been exciting and daunting to return to school, but I’m excited to be here learning about something I’m passionate about.

My work bag is used daily. Without the items in this bag, I wouldn’t be able to do my jobs. Prior to the 3rd week of March when our world turned upside-down due to COVID 19, I would head out of my townhouse everyday and go to work with this bag in tow. I work from anywhere, so the scenery and my work environment tend to change daily. You’ll find me working all over the place, but I can be found most in a few of my favorite spots on the campus where I teach or in my office at the community arts organization I manage.

I feel like the contents of my bag are pretty normal of someone who is somewhat of a digital nomad and has the flexibly to work from anywhere. As I looked at the contents of my bag, I felt like everything had a purpose and may tell others a little bit about me.

In my work bag, you will find:

• Pencil Case with loads of coloured pens, highlighters, notepad, and whiteout (maybe more than I should be carrying around)
• My wallet or sometimes just cash or a debit card and driver’s license (this depends on how full my bag is getting and what my plans are after work)
• Car keys
• Phone
• Lipstick
• Burt’s Bee’s Lip Balm
• Gum
• Hair tie and hair clip
• Dental floss
• Tylenol
• Glasses and glasses case
• Laptop (or sometimes iPad)
• Notebook
• Yeti filled with Ice Water
• Snack
• Swipe card and classroom keys
• USB
• Charger
• Headphones

Certainly, not all of the items are used to perform my jobs. I really only use my laptop, phone, a notepad, stationary supplies in my pencil case, headphones, USB, swipe card/classroom keys, and my glasses to perform both of my jobs. The other items in my bag are personal would probably be carried in my purse or tucked into a desk drawer if I didn’t have multiple jobs that I traveled back and forth to.

I feel like many of the items in my bag may be considered “texts”. My laptop, phone, and notebook are communication tools that I use daily; my laptop and phone can be used to communicate in multiple languages and they allow me to work remotely. I create digital texts on my phone and laptop daily, but I’m a list maker and wouldn’t be able live without a notepad and post it notes. Many of the items in my bag have text on them. Marketing and branding information, text in more than one language especially English and French given Canada is bilingual country, and my glasses case may have translated Spanish text, as the name on my glasses case doesn’t translate to mean anything in English… or maybe, it’s just a brand of glasses that are made in Barcelona.

I’m not sure that anything in my bag speaks to the literacies I have, with the exception of the technology in my bag. This may speak to my digital literacy skills; I’ve created a work environment for my self where I can login to work from anywhere. Based on the contents of my bag, someone looking at the contents may also say I live in an English-speaking country. But I don’t feel my bag speaks to any of the language literacies I’ve been exposed to.

I believe my outward image and the contents of my bag are aligned perfectly. I can be a bit of a workaholic; it’s probably not coincidental that I’m writing about my work bag. I don’t believe that the contents of my work bag show a true picture of me – I also like to have fun.

If someone looked at my bag 25 years ago, I think they would be amazed at how technology has evolved and how a productive work environment can look so different than what the norm was then. If an archaeologist examined the contents of my bag, I think they may conclude it belonged to a student or professional. I believe the contents are pretty standard for any working professional today.