Sandra’a ETEC 540 Work

Artifact 1:

I drew this image of a girl young interacting with a floating translucent screen. With one hand, she is tracing out the word “fish” and with the other she is pointing out the AR fish that appears to jump out of the screen, causing a ripple and leaping over her head. There is no one else in the room with her as she is learning alone. This image was to show the whimsical possibilities of technology, but also the double edges sword of the isolation that technology can bring.

Artifact 2:

Less of an artifact, and more of a view on what I think the future of education will look like. I think that the discussion that is happening in Canada with education is really interesting right now. With Alberta releasing its new draft curriculum, people have started to discuss what is important in education and not just people who are in the industry. BC’s curriculum offers a very different approach. While AB concentrates on very specific learning objectives, BC’s focus is more about skills.

I did my BEd in BC while the new curriculum here was still in draft mode, so I got the chance to play around with both. I also taught in Calgary for a couple of years, so I had to spend a lot of time examining and teaching from their curriculum as well. I think that skills are far more important than content. I can ask my watch a content-related questions, but critical thinking and inquiry skills, for example, have to be learned. These are the things that can’t be replaced by computers and where creativity and innovation are birthed.

What I do see in the future, is far more individualized learning and recognition that a variety of text forms can be reliable and learned from rather than the narrow views of traditional education. I see students designing more of their own authentic tasks and sharing that data and more cooperative, as opposed to siloed learning.

The whole idea of speculative futures is interesting to me. Lately, I’ve been playing Fallout 76 and my husband has been playing Death Stranding. Both of these are images of dystopian apocalyptic futures. I suppose so many games, movies, televisions shows, art, etc that depict the future often have a negative slant or serve as a warning of some kind. I believe that these dystopian views actually help us prevent these futures by examining potential causes of societal collapse, etc and open up dialogues for ways to avoid these futures. (Or it could be an Oedipus thing, I guess only time will tell!)

I see a lot of memes on Facebook that get people to complete sentences with predictive text and it’s always interesting to me how different the responses are. Some of them are great, and some are terrible and make no sense. For this week’s task, I used the prompt “Every time I think about our future.”

Every time I think about our future plans for a new job I have to worry about you doing this for me and it’s not worth it. The waiter has always been friendly and attentive to us ????????. Oh yeah I know I’m going through a lot of stuff. ????

I let myself choose from one of the three options presented to me for each word. I also decided to do more than more sentence to try and max out the characters to get more of an idea of what the generated text would say. The US flag showed up as a suggestion and the crystal ball was the first emoji suggested when I searched “future”. I got the sponge bob image from the gif library looking up “waiter.”

Q: In what textual products have you read statements like the one you generated?
A: I see statements like this mostly on people’s Facebook statuses. The statement is one of a highly personal nature and slightly irrational, without a lot of sense.

Q: How are these generated statements different from how you would normally express yourself and/or your opinions on the matter you wrote about?
A: If I have a major decision to make that’s between my husband and I, I don’t discuss it on the internet. If I really want outside perspective on it. I talk to people that I trust. The internet it polarizing and random strangers wouldn’t have all the details to make a balanced, informed opinion. I also don’t announce to the world if I’m going through a difficult time. I often try to think about what my professional circle would think about what I’m posting or how I’m responding. My humour isn’t always professional though, but I do need some fun in life.

Q: Did the statement you generated speak in your “voice”—did it sound like you? Why or why not?
A: I don’t think this sounds like me at all. It’s irrational, emotional and cryptic. I might have posted like this when I was 15, but there’s a reason why I nuked all my teenage blogs. If a juvie record gets erased when turning of age, I feel like my online presence deserves the same reset.

At this point, it’s hard to see how predictive text algorithms can apply in professional and educational settings. I have only seen it work in humour contexts and I don’t think it’s good enough for much else. Of course this can change in the future; I though YouTube was pointless when it came out and boy was I wrong!

This week we’re all supposed to analyze the data collected from everyone’s choices for the curation of the Golden Record in Task 8.

Here’s the clusterfudge that we were dealt:

If I click on modularity 4, it appears that I am grouped with Ying Gu (can’t find a webspace link) and Megan Cleaveley. (I will analyze this more in the linking assignment.)

I though there would be a lot more commonalities seeing as there were only 27 songs to choose from. Even with only 3 of us, there are 16 songs and each of us only has 10. Ones that we had in common are:
1. Track 6: El Cascabel
2. Track 7: Johnny B. Goode
3. Track 19: Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin
4. Track 21: Fairie Round

This small subset of common tracks got me wondering if there was any one track that everyone in the class had in common. (Spoiler: there isn’t!) I did find that Track 7: Johnny B. Goode was found in every modularity class though, which leads me to believe that almost everyone in the class found this song was culturally significant enough that it should be preserved through time and space and sent off to unknown aliens in a far away land. I myself had this on my list! But, I don’t actually think the song is that important. It’s just not. It does ring of nostalgic 1950’s Americana which seems to be painted as this idillic time period where people were truly living the American Dream; something that Americans seem to think the entire world strives to be. (Sorry America, they don’t!)

I found this excellent video with Bill Nye from the United Nations talking about the Golden Record and it really showed how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Chances are, no alien will find and decipher the record let alone figure out how the map works and contact us. The whole exercise is a power move to show that we can do this, but also a strange exercise in how NASA, an American organization. views what is, and isn’t important on a global scale. It is impossible to capture the entire world and the history of mankind on one disk. How would the record have differed if, say Japan made the list instead. It’s bizarre that the intro message, from the secretary-general of the UN is in English. The official language if the UN is, after all, French!

I don’t think that the Golden Record was useless. It’s still a very interesting and historic piece of music and technology.

The Golden Record has 27 pieces of music and other sound bits to represent the Earth as a whole through time up to 1977. The week for the task I have to distill the list down to 10 and say why. I wanted to still try and capture different cultures from around the world. I wanted to capture the voices of the world through an anthropocentric viewpoint. All are expressions of humanity and allow for certain connection, however speech allows us to express more advanced concepts. I did, however, swap out the Mozart for Bach as the record had 3 Bach songs and I thought I should include at least one. I also took out Blind Willie Johnson for David Munroe as I thought the style was really unique and that time period wasn’t represented at all even though it is rich in our literature.

Wedding song – Peru
Bach – WTK 2, no 1, Glenn Gould
Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia
Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri
Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria
Fairie Round – cond David Munroe
El Cascabel – Lorenzo Barcelata & The Mari
Kinds of Flowers
Greetings from Earth

For the redesign, I wanted to venture out of my comfort zone and create a video. Rather than empty out, arrange, and take a photo of the contents of my bag, I’m going to get my husband to put together a bag and then I’m going to attempt to pull the bag apart blindfolded and describe the contents. At the end, I will pull off the blindfold and say what was in the bag. This changes modes from being more text-based to audio-visual based.

My husband told me that he out together the bag with the idea of it belonging to a travel vlogger. The harmonica is there because he said they typically travel alone and so they would want an easy way to entertain themselves. The book of ethics is because of the potential for ethical problems when travelling. The hardrive is so they have a place to store their videos until they have a chance to edit and upload. A vlogger would be literate in video technologies, new marketing, such as ones like YouTube and Pateron, as well as culture and geography.

I didn’t realize how easy it would be for me to guess the objects, but I was limited because of Covid. I tried to figure out the persona of the person with the bag. My final guess was that this was a commuter bag for a professor.

I often find that text is more thoughtful and reflective, in my own experiences. With text, I can reread, edit, remove, and add as I please. Although this is possible with video, it is significantly more difficult to accomplish. With the video, it’s more about gut reactions and initial thoughts. It is important to examine both first impressions as well as longer term reflections. Do they match? Why not? Is that okay? If not, how should it be changed?

1. Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?

   I used a combination of words and ideas. I didn’t want this to be a rebus puzzle, but a telling of the story. If someone is unable to read traditional text, then they wouldn’t be able to interpret syllables. Some things did not have an emoji equivalent, so I had to use an approximation. I feel like the “back” arrow might be cheating slightly, but even without the text I would still have used the same symbol.

2. Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?

   I started with the title to help situate my movie. I feel like this is hard enough to guess as it is, plus the example showed the title so I followed that.

3. Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?

   I stayed true to the assignment and did the last movie that I watched as opposed to my favourite movie. (Although this one is one of my favourites as well.) I think this movie was very difficult to visualize, but I’m sure I would have had a difficult time in most situations. I do like how this is a kid-friendly movie though so it’s something I could potentially do with my students and use this as an example.

To tackle the Twine project, I first started by writing out a story on a Word document. I’m lucky in that I have created two other Twines before and I used to do some web development about 15 years ago. I don’t have a lot of code memorized anymore, but I understand how it functions and where to find resources.

There was a few new resources that I learned about, the coolest one being Google Fonts. I also used to use the colour picker in Photoshop for hex codes, but I don’t currently have a license for that so I can’t open the program, but I found out that Google has one built into the search function.

I didn’t know what I was going to write about at first, but eventually came up with talking about something important to my childhood. I did try to spend more time on style sheets this time. I also tried the hyperlinking footnotes as described by Bolter (2001). This expansion was not something I thought of before and opened up some fun possibilities.

If I were to evaluate my Twine using the SAMR model (Puentedura, 2014), then I would say that it is currently at the Augmentation stage as I have written a story and added some footnote hyperlinks and images, but I haven’t really challenged the medium in any significant way. It is possible to reach the Modification stage as Twine takes traditional creative writing and adds the ability to have links images, and sound built in.

Twine is something that I would like to be able to improve on and perhaps do a creative writing project with my students one day. (Could make writing in French more fun!)

References
Chapter 3 of Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.

Puentedura, R. (2014). Ruben R. Puentedura’s Weblog. Hippasus.com. Retrieved 20 March 2015, from http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/

Files
ETEC 540 – Twine Task.html
ETEC 540 – Twine Proof Text.htm

I hate purses, but as women’s clothing doesn’t really have pockets, I carry around this “wallet on a string.” I may have to change it though as my phone is too big to stuff in in now.

•  What is your daily need for the items in your bag? 
  The mask and keys are the most important. I typically use cards on my phone, so these exist as backup. I used my Compass card more often, but as I’m on mat leave and with Covid I haven’t been going out much.
• How might these items be considered “texts” and what do they say about you, the places you inhabit, the cultures with which you engage, and/or the activities you take up?
  The items are easy to point out that I live in Vancouver. The pile of postage tags are for items sent out to AB and MB, showing I have ties outside where I am now. The mask probably says something about my personality too.
• Thinking about the title of the course, what are the “text technologies” in your bag, if any? What do these items say about how you engage with language and communication?
  I’m at a loss on this one. I guess I might have more to say about it later on in the course.
• What do the items in your bag say about the literacies you have?
  The library card would say that I have traditional literacy. The tiny metal phone pick thingy would indicate that I have some technical literacy as well. Boat, and bus/train tickets, driver’s licence, bike keys etc would state that I have some multi-modal transportation literacy as well.
• How does the narrative of the (private) contents of your bag compare with the narrative produced by image you have of yourself or the image you outwardly project?
  This small bag makes me look like an organized minimalist. Which is actually hilarious.
• What would this same bag have looked like, say, 15 or 25 years ago?
  15 years ago I was in a digital multimedia college program and doing fine arts, so my regular bag was a wheeled duffle-bag. I had a lot of text books and art supplies as well as some food rations. So, pretty much the exact opposite of this. 25 years ago my bag would have contained a giant binder, my pokemon cards, a pikachu stuffy, sheet music, and a bunch of candy.
• How do you imagine an archeologist aiming to understand this temporal period might view the contents of your bag many years in the future?
  The mask would really help place the bag in a timeline. They might laugh at taking physical books out of a library too.