NAME AND REASON FOR LINKING:

1) Chris – developing my guessing skills with emojis

I admit it was fun and a pure pleasure for me to check out Chris’s choice of the TV show and actually recognize it. I also understood this Linking task better after I saw how Chris interpreted it.

An Emoji Story

My comment: Dear Chris, Thank you for choosing this show! I really loved it though it is not new, and that is why I recognized it just looking at the title. The plot is a fairy tale with the brightest colours possible. There is a lot of platonic love there and a happy dog Digby. I won’t give its name here for someone else to think it over. Again, I really appreciate your choice. Come and try to guess my show, will you? It’s quite modern. With best regards, Anna

2) Elizabeth – pointing out my technical weaknesses (networks of curation)

Pedagogy is easy for me – I have two degrees in Education, after all – PhD and Post-PhD. But anything technical makes me feel at awe. And though MET is not a technical training program, and they basically do not teach you how to use any particular application, here and there, from the teacher or the groupmates, you can get some technical advice to broaden your mind and improve your confidence.

Elizabeth’s post is teaching to me both in form and content. I frankly have no idea how to make my blog so complicated, with citations and pictures all skillfully integrated into a text. I have recently changed the background of my site to tender green and was proud of that for several days. So, some things are just not for tomorrow. At the same time, the analytics presented in the text is also worth considering. I probably haven’t studied what Elizabeth studied, and that is why it was hard for me to understand her logic. I am planning to return to her post in the future too if it is possible. So, I chose this post of Elizabeth because it is challenging for me.

Networks of Golden Record Curations

My comment: Thank you so much, Elizabeth! This is the most thoughtful network interpretation I have come across so far. And this mixture of theory and practical application is truly impressive. Congratulations on a very nice and useful blog! Best regards, Anna

3) Lexie – making me bolder (mode-bending)

I really liked her relaxed way of recording videos and some technical advice shared. She is finishing MET, so her video felt like a Good-luck! from someone more experienced. I actually felt encouraged. Thank you so much, Lexie, for your kindness!

My comment: Dear Lexie, I checked out your video, and it was absolutely amazing! I liked both form and content of it. First of all, YouTube?!!! I wouldn’t dare to post my vid there for sure. Very courageous of you, my fearless classmate! And of course, I noticed your lovely and telling t-shirt! It suits you! Secondly, thank you for recommending TikTok; it’s actually wise to use the apps that are available. I just employed Zoom because I taught ESL with the help of it, but I should definitely broaden my horizons after your video. I think you were lucky to have this course at the end, Lexie. I’m in the middle of my MET road, and “Text Technologies” is the best that has happened to me so far. It is very modern, informative, and eye-opening. I wish there were more courses like this one. Whenever I did the practical part, I was like, “Constructivism, sweet constructivism!” I am really good with all those pedagogical theories, but I seldom enjoyed them as much as in this course. So, thank you very much for getting in touch, Lexie! I wish you all the best in your professional activities and life in general and remain, Sincerely yours, Anna from Toronto

4) Nataliia – redirecting my attention to the text and linguistics (voice-to-text)

Nataliia got in touch with me first and left a thought-provoking comment under my post about Dr. Bandura. When I reached her blog for this linking assignment, I was amazed by her productivity, easiness of writing and a lot of methodological and linguistic ideas in the texts. I am really sorry that her Twine story did not open. Again, Nataliia is an example for me how to combine knowledges from different courses and life experiences into one writing task. Way to go, Nataliia!

Task 3: Voice to Text

My comment: I commend you on a very nice analysis, Nataliia! Not bad from the point of view of linguistics and methods for teaching English. I am also impressed by your resources. I am not familiar with the secondary schools here in Canada, but in modern colleges they seem to ignore writing almost completely. And I once helped a student to prepare for his IELTS exam while this student was actually a Canadian university graduate. Yet he knew nothing about writing essays or any syntactic features he was supposed to demonstrate during the language test. He told me that his professors routinely utilized multiple-choice tests as a convenient assessment tool.
It felt a bit surreal to me, but I guess it’s life in all its diversity. I hope that your students will never have problems with writing though. I was secretly worried myself that as a MET student I would not write enough, and I am happy that it is not the case.
Again, thank you for the detailed review, Nataliia! It was a pleasure to read. Best regards, Anna

5) Richard – showing me how to use a Twine properly (Twine story)

Richard was the first classmate to create a Twine story for real. I enjoyed it a lot.

Task 5: Twine Task

My comment: Fantastic! Richard, you’re the first person I have come across who actually created a Twine story. I myself took an alternative path while several Twine stories of our classmates cannot be opened. And your casual tone of writing is warm and welcoming! I also have to say that from my experience, for some students “no choice” is the best option possible. So, you didn’t create an illusion, you truly helped someone there. And I won’t even start on your successful integration of images and audio files into Twine – it is still a rocket science for me. Again, very well done and explained! Thank you very much, Richard!

6) Jacob – showing me different ways of mode-bending

I am grateful to Jacob for showing me how to be creative with just an audio tape. What we hear can produce images as impressive, colourful and detailed as any visual pictures.

Task 7 – Mode Changing

My comment: Dear Jacob, I really like the way you changed the mode of your self-presentation. It’s funny, informative and meaningful at the same time. I wish I were as creative as you, but I just made a video instead of a photo. Again, kudos to your imagination! Best regards, Anna

Well, this course definitely influenced my position on communication, literacy, and writing.
At its beginning, I asked a question in hopes to understand a popular university term “medium”. I first thought it stood for a part, a component. Now it seems to me that medium can mean a mode, a form, or a transition phase depending on the context.
According to Wikipedia, “infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly” (“Infographics,” n.d.). My first acquaintance with this approach happened before “Text Technologies”, when some worried parents of a Torontonian high schooler called and asked for my help with infographic. I googled the thing and together with those enthusiastic and a bit desperate people we created something to satisfy their high school teacher. So, it seems safe to say that infographic is quite popular in modern secondary schools.
Then I considered the technique funny, but later I changed my mind. Infographic can help a kid and an adult remember the important information better: to learn how to find the essential pieces of any text and make only them noticeable by changing their original mode of presentation.
Of course, it takes time to do that, and that is why it is advisable to use this method only with something truly valuable – thick classic books, for example, which brief content can be read in Wikipedia to save time and memorized in a short-term memory. But if this plot summary is changed into a sequence of pictures afterwards, a reader will not be able to forget the content any time soon.
After all, it works according to the laws of language acquisition which follow the laws of physics – the longer you manipulate the word (or the plot of a story), the better you remember it.
Besides literature, infographic might be good for history – to remember the events and their dates, for psychology, medicine, and even sports – anywhere where it is necessary to memorize the sequence of different actions.
As an English teacher for international students, I am thinking about using it for literature first of all. Not many English courses consist of this literature part, but something of a small genre can be easily inserted into a curriculum for reading purposes.
When it comes to literature, there is always a question of content – what to consider worth of studying?
Most of my international students come from India – motherland of Upanishads, Vedas and Ramayana. We can potentially give them best literary works of Western culture to deal with, but again, this stuff should not be too big lest it overloads the ESL curriculum.
I have been thinking about something truly Canadian and simple, to practice this mode-bending first. What if we have some narratives to work with? They can be described with 3-5 pictures from Internet and bring a lot of fun.
After this “creation” stage it is possible to make students work in pairs to try to understand the plot of the narrative – was there a happy end or a sad end? Who was the main hero of the story? Which problem was he trying to solve? Who helped him (if applicable).
Basically, this activity will teach them how to generalize a small story, ask and answer questions, and make predictions, but these techniques are also transferrable and appropriate for the bigger literary forms too.
To practice it, I remembered the author who wrote a lot about Canadian nature – Ernest Thompson Seton, a pioneer of animal fiction whose stories I adored in my childhood. This writer was born in Great Britain, raised in Canada, and spent the rest of his life in the States.
I tried to find his works online and was lucky to come across Fadepage.com where Seton’s book “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898) was “in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it”. I sincerely liked those encouraging words and the book itself, and I am sure that students will appreciate those texts about Canada too in spite of them being written more than a hundred years ago.
Below there will be my infographic of “Domino” or “Biography of a Silver Fox” written by Seton in 1909 as an example. I used just 5 pictures found on Internet to introduce the story.
I am sorry that I cannot create a poster, Ernesto. I am not a designer and couldn’t become one in three months. I can copy pictures from Internet, save and edit them a bit. I am still not able to make up a really nice collage. But I am doing my best, and I am really proud of my UBC blog now that it became more colourful and, hopefully, thoughtful.
I am an educator instead, and I am going to try infographic with my ESL students in the different creative ways that I have already mentioned above:
1) Reading.
2) Generalization.
3) 3-5 key pictures.
4) Discussion / Guessing game / Writing an essay etc.
Infographic should not be overused though, not to lose its attraction. Again, it takes a lot of time, and it demands some editorial skills, but at the same time the technique is refreshing, good for relaxation and remembering something well. It is definitely worth a try!

Domino or Biography of the Silver Fox