Scott Richmond @ UBC MET

This was a LOT of fun to work on. Chris and I had a big plan on topics we wanted to cover, but ultimately ended up discussing browser-based and desktop software-based word processors for most of it.

Apologies for not staying within the given time limit. Obviously there is no obligation to listen beyond the 20 minutes.

Hear the podcast on SoundCloud here. 

References:

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

McLuhan, M (1977). Laws of the Media. ETC: A Review of General Semantics (34) 2., 173-150. 

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York; London: Routledge.

My first scenario is one where I took the idea of Yuval Noah Harari’s useless class (2017) and tried to imagine what life might be like for this large subset of people. The scope of this is enormous and my mind goes in fifteen different directions. I tried to keep it tidy and focused but that proved to be impossible. The implications are hard to ignore; the economic, political, financial, ethical, and moral effects would be difficult to adjust to. 

Needless to say, I envisioned an interaction between a member of this group, and an automated bot meant to provide all kinds of services to those without gainful employment. It takes place at some point in our future where much of our current ideas have come to fruition. Artificial Intelligence has advanced to become less narrow, automation has displaced a massive amount of workers, Universal Basic Income is in place due to soaring unemployment, the lack of meaningful work has exacerbated the mental health crisis, human motivation and incentive have been undercut, and privacy in the tech sector is still not well-regulated (notice the asterisk on the data deletion comment). 

This was of course not meant to be a comprehensive narrative that allows for the full depth of these ideas to be explored, but rather a quick skim of what might be should the values of certain folks be followed through with. There are many ways to poke holes in this quick interaction, and it’s my hope that it at the least keeps the conversation going. 

Personally, I can’t help but think about how the speed with which our world is changing in front of us is antithetical to our design constraints. The kind of world we evolved in resembles modern life less and less, and it’s irresponsible to ignore that. Even an idea like employment and work as we know it is relatively recent given our evolutionary journey. 

In the spirit of Dune and Raby (2013, p.2), I avoided trying to predict exactly what it will look like (or when), but rather tried to entertain concepts that are already in the pipeline. As they say in their first chapter, “the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, one’s people do not want.”

The kinds of questions this sort of speculative narrative would ideally generate would be:

• Where does this leave the underskilled/undereducated people?
• To what extent are human beings entitled to meaningful employment?
• Is it possible to design broad AI systems that reflect the values that are beneficial long term?
• Without military or economic power, will the useless class have political clout?
• Given some of these potential futures, what are the implications for education and curriculum?
• What will be the competencies that are sought after in this kind of society? (analysis, synthesis, creativity, adaptability, mental flexibility?)

The character in this short video is a member of the useless class. They have never held a job due to a lack of education and skills and have quickly become bored and uninspired.

In the second scenario, teachers have been reduced to care for students and deal with any discrepant issues that arise that go beyond what the teaching algorithm is expecting. It also imagines a world where the robot/AI/automation revolution is in full swing and the focus for education is almost entirely on competencies (creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, information/media literacy, adaptability, leadership, initiative, executive functioning, emotional intelligence, etc). Therefore, I thought it would be helpful and fun to write TTOC plans from the year 2043. 

For this, I had imagined several possibilities where the central focus of education shifted from what it is now. Given the context of my first scenario, I wanted to continue this idea of automation and artificial intelligence changing the nature of work, which in turn alters what we value. It is conceivable that the nature of work changes so much so, that it has a profound impact on what we teach students in school. Some have advocated that education should be teaching strictly skills that translate well into work life, essentially relegating education to a means to an economic end. I decided not to entertain that idea, because I’m not sure that’s a very likely scenario (at least I hope it isn’t). Instead, I went the other way, where the ultimate pillar of education is competency-based. I don’t think this concept is bullet-proof, but if nothing else it’s entertaining and brings up a lot of ideas worth considering…

See TTOC Plans here

References

Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Retrieved August 30, 2019, from Project MUSE database.

Harari, Y. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, 550(7676), 324-327.

I attempted to play the User Inyerface without wearing my typical critical hat. Knowing it was a game about dark patterns and deception, I tried to get into the mind space of visiting any other site, but that proved to be too challenging. It’s kind of like watching a magician but expecting me not to try and figure out how it’s really being done. No chance. 

Why are you looking at this caption? It literally has no purpose.

A couple of pieces that stuck out to me during the game:

• The giant green “NO” button took me a second to hold off clicking it. The use of the colour green, and I actually read it as “GO” the first time through. This set the tone for what to expect and was the exact moment my critical thinking hat went on for good. 
• Filling out the email form was an exercise in fastidiousness. There were so many subtle functionalities that were missing and frustrating. Having to select the placeholder text? Excruciating! The age and date of birth not matching? This prevents the classic January 1st birthday entry. 
• The captcha pictures were my downfall. The opaque categories were impossible to navigate, and I just couldn’t guess what the designers had in mind when they said “circles” or “checks”. I also had selected the images that weren’t lined up with the right pictures. The spacing between the image and the radio button was very deceptive. After four rounds I gave up as I didn’t see a way out of this infinite loop. 
• Having to select a box number by clicking through each number until you get to the one you need? Considering my box number is in the upper three-digits that would take way too long.
  

  Select all pictures with a bow? CMON!!!

This really makes one think about how UI and UX design is made to steer behaviour and leverage human biases for the designer’s benefit (and often customer detriment). Much of these dark patterns are so ingrained in the lives of digital citizens that we don’t even notice them. It’s only when we are presented with something so contrary that we pay attention. The only reason I had any degree of success is precisely because I was keenly aware of how web UX typically looks like, and I actively rejected those intuitions. 

Our life is what we pay attention to. The totality of what constitutes what we are and who we will become is the amalgamation of individual moments that are strung together to compile the passing of time as conscious creatures. So how then does attention divert? As Trystan Harris says in his Ted Talk, it is to know how the mind works through persuasion, and marketers have this tune dialled in. 

Richard Thaler, the author of the best-selling book Nudge (2009), won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Behavioural Science, choice architecture, and decision research. The book is about how no choice is presented in a value-neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases. He discusses how the default choice in anything, namely when humans aren’t required to do anything, is so often the choice that is made. I connected this with what Harry Brignull outlines in his article on deceptive UI design, specifically on forced continuity (2011). When a freemium service automatically rolls into a paid service, the action is required to cancel. Businesses understand how busy people are these days and rely on this inaction as revenue. When I think of the number of digital services that I currently subscribe to, it is easy to see how these can become hard to keep track of. 

It has become an arms race for attention with increasingly nefarious techniques. How about the fact that the default video player in Canvas, the name of which I can’t determine, has a giant play button in the middle of the viewer when a video is not actively playing, yet when the video is being viewed there is no equivalent pause button? One can interpret, then, that the basis for this is to encourage playing a video but to discourage stopping it. A subtle move to hold my attention. This is a classic example of a Thalean nudge that seems minor or innocuous but has implications when scaled up to millions of daily users. 

Finally, I want to briefly touch on emotional manipulation like fear, outrage, disgust. These feelings are not a choice that we make, as Harris points out but occur to us through circumstance. This might be why there is a perception of increasing polarization in politics, thanks to the combination of politics, social media, and evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, the goals of the persuaders seldom align with those of the persuadees. The ultimate goal of marketers is to get customers to both literally and/or figuratively buy into an idea, and the scary part is they largely understand how consumers make decisions better than consumers do. 

References

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved fromhttps://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness (Rev. and expand ed.). Penguin Books.

This post is the result of the two authors having a phone conversation while trying to digest the network data on Palladio. After some frustrations, we were able to understand what we were looking at and quickly turned toward analysis. 

The way the data is presented in Palladio gives very little context on the underlying reasons why individuals chose what they chose. The co-authors of this post came to our curation decisions from very different places. One of us chose based on purely auditory aesthetics or pleasingness, whereas the other chose based on an attempt at a maximally diversified spectrum of human musical representation and auditory modes. This makes it very difficult to create any kind of groupings or communities based on common interests or ways of thinking. Based on this kind of selection, how would any algorithm be able to make sense of anything beyond the music selection themselves? 

Google contextualizes searches on two levels:

• 1 – not signed in – uses location data, session search history, device, operating system, etc. feeding into a set of assumptions which direct the algorithm. 
• 2 – signed into a google account – uses, basically, your entire life.

We were unable to find a way to group classmates connecting them by what they did NOT choose in common (null commonalities)

This activity was less an activity in choosing the “best,” but rather eliminating options. All of the music is worth including – we could have either chosen our favourites OR eliminated options for various reasons. Just as the sort/web is not able to show WHY we chose our choices, it is unable to resolve why we didn’t choose the ones we omitted. 

How could one go about trying to suss out motives or commonalities among classmates? 

1. We could attempt to categorize the songs by genre and look at commonalities or diversions. 

• folk, classical, etc.
• vocal, instrumental, etc. 
• major or minor keys 
• Beats per minute or cadence
• “civilized” vs. “ethnic” or high vs. low technology (I intentionally used obviously massively politically charged language to exemplify that arguably all attempts at genrefication will oversimplify, overgeneralize, and stereotype.)

…Did classmates tend towards selecting within or among common genres or did they share in common the goal of attempting to represent diversity in genres?

1. We could also layer in demographic information on the classmates (self-provided or mined from UBC’s student records)

• Sex or gender could yield interesting data
• Age – was age a significant factor in choice? What if there is a young student in the class who felt that all of the musical choices were terrible?
• Location – different places in the world appreciate wildly different types of music, e.g to Westerners, the minor scale sounds sad or mysterious, but in southeast Asia, it is the preferred traditional scale. 
• Ethnicity
• Education

Final Thoughts:

We were both surprised at how few songs we chose in common. Upon discovering this, we immediately engaged in the process of accusing the other of flawed selection reasoning. This highlights that the personal differences in choice were not just due to sociocultural differences but also due to potential interpretations of the assignment (the selection criteria themselves).

At the end of the day, no matter how we treat the data, the question remains: What does the data actually mean? For instance, is there any relevance to the fact that Chris is one of the only classmates that didn’t choose Johnny B Goode? Perhaps, the quiz could be reconstructed to ask classmates to score songs on a weighted scale, in which students must rate every song on a continuum but only 10 songs allowed the top weighting. There could also be a checkbox for a null choice or songs that classmates explicitly did not want to be included on the Golden Record. While we wouldn’t know why without a text box (and even so, can we ensure honesty or self-knowledge?), it would yield useful data.

Link 1 –

A reply to Ian’s post on speech-to-text…

Ian, 

Great post here. I appreciate your mention of how oral language differs from written via tempo/rhythm, silence, and filler words. I think of a verbal conversation like a tennis match where two or more people are hitting a ball back and forth. If one person hits the ball “hard” or “with force”, the other player can do the same or lob it back, metaphorically. There seem to be so many more ways to do this with oral speech as opposed to the written word. 

When I read about your elementary report card, this reminded me of trying to teach students to write with voice, something that is much easier to do verbally. Oftentimes students don’t even have to try to speak with voice – it just happens. Sounds like your teacher was actively discouraging you from developing this!!

Silence is something I didn’t consider but really should have. When I read to my students, I will often pause to build tension or ensure they are cognitively prepared for the next passage. During the voice-to-text task, I felt as though I needed to continually churn out something regardless of value, which obviously changes the output. 

Your task forced me to think about oral/written work through a lens of control; the means by which the idea is presented changes who holds the agency in terms of reception.

Link 2

Reflection on Greg Patton’s task 4 post:

Greg talks about how the major difference between manual writing and typing is speed, and for that reason he prefers to write by hand. Inversely, speed is a major factor for me when it comes to comparing these two styles, except that I am a fairly quick typist. Because of this, I find that when I am writing my hand can’t keep up to what my brain is wanting it to do, and this is a big reason why I miss letters and frequently misspell words; The brain is four or five words ahead and my hand is constantly having to play catchup. In his third chapter, Jay David Bolton points out that word processors can revise much easier than the typewriter could. Furthermore, and I think this relates to my intuition around efficiency with digital production, he elaborates on the idea of writers being able to think globally about their texts, especially with the help of an outline processor. From my context, the speed and organizational capacity of these tools is irreplaceable. 

Additionally, the muscle memory I have with a keyboard affords me to be able to keep up and ride almost parallel with my thoughts, resulting in less errors and more production. My brain works in a very peculiar way, as far as I can tell. Let’s just say that I get distracted very easily, can be impulsive, and require a fairly narrow set of conditions to be able to reliably produce academic work. Because of this, the keyboard can awaken a state of flow that is really helpful, but on the other hand the keyboard doesn’t exist in a vacuum and comes along with a massive host of other distractions (I’m looking at you Safari). 

Link 3

Some thoughts on Anne’s post on Mode-bending

I thought it would be worthwhile to touch on how impressed I am with Anne’s post here. To be honest, as soon as I saw what she had composed I thought I should turn around, rubbish my own post, and start again. Not only did she do an incredible and thoughtful job on the work itself, but the way in which she has presented it is admirable. Let’s take her infographics mode: she has figured out a way to communicate SO MUCH with a simple graph. Additionally, her pre/post COVID graph was brilliant in communicating how her life (by virtue of her bag) changed in the course of the last year. I think what I’m ultimately impressed by, and ultimately envious of, is her use of aesthetics to make it all so easy to digest. Don’t get me wrong, the actual information is solid, but how she presents it on a page is so well done. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that she is literally a professional graphic designer. 

And then there’s the music. Not only is the way she changes modes here very creative (and something I wouldn’t have thought of given infinite time), but it’s presented, again, in an aesthetically beautiful way. Her video playlist is an excellent example of the London Group’s “new language of work”. Her post is a level that I’ll strive to meet in the coming assignments…

Link 4

In the absence of any physical f2f interactions (collaborate ultra just doesn’t really cut it), I’ve chosen to engage with a quote from one of my peers. Lori Jones posted a fascinating task for week 10 about the attention economy. My response is attempting to mimic the interactivity I’m missing out on with in-person learning; the kind of collision and construction of ideas that happen when folks can literally sit around a table and pose questions and attempt to make meaning together. I miss those days. 

“Technology has become more about convenience than innovation”. The distinction I would add to Lori’s comment here is that it very much depends on who we are talking about. To think of the variety of technologies we have right now is astounding; individual technologies compound to result in some amazing tools. But the target of so much technology is designed for ultimate consumer use where innovation is not really the point. When I look to the four rules of UI design (Adobe, 2019) three out of the four rules outline how tech usage must be comfortable and simple. This flies in the face of an innovative outlook. I see a divergent trend in technology writ large: those who make and design the tech are trailblazers, and those who consume are just that. Looking at UI design like that of the iPhone, it has largely remained simple, recognizable, and easy to use. The perfect recipe for consistent consumption.

Link 5 

I really enjoyed reading Kristen McKinnon’s post on Speculative Futures. Her second narrative depicts a world where people are “matched” using a patented technology that eats data and spits out virtual reality dates. I was immediately reminded of Cambridge Analytica, the company that harvests massive amounts of data in order to categorize people into personality profiles, among other things, in order to reliably predict future behaviour, like purchasing or willingness to be persuaded to change your vote to another party. 2016 Election, anyone? 

Ok, I digress…I’ll stay away from any Make Analysis Great Again (MAGA) references. 

Back to Kirsten’s speculative future. The technology seeks to reflect not only who Zela is, but who she aspires to be.  This echoes one of the frustrations and fundamental issues with digital representation: persona crafting. When participating in digital activity, there is ultimately some level of disconnect between who a person truly is and who they are purporting to be, whether it’s carefully shaped posts, avatars, or otherwise. I guess this is where the power of large data sets and advanced algorithms lay. They can crunch a huge number of data points that can effectively cut right through some of the misleading “stray” points. Even though there is so much power and potential, someone or at least some people have the power to turn the dials according to their own views of the world and ideals. Push this far enough and the ideology is inextricably linked. 

The fact that Zela was able to “experience” so many dates virtually is evidence of the power of predictive behaviour models. If I ignore some of the major ethical issues with this kind of technology, we can talk about the business model of matching people. Ideally, a company like this would aim for customers, but it’s not particularly helpful to have single-instance customers. Repeat business is where the long-term profit margins are. As Kirsten says, “mating for life just isn’t good business”. You want to match people that are a good fit, but they can’t be too good of a fit. So what’s the ideal length of a relationship from a profit margin perspective? Maybe VRAI can be the Apple of matchmaking. Planned obsolescence makes the technological world go ‘round.

Link 6

For my last link, I thought it would be appropriate to tackle a topic that both looks forward and touches close to home. In her speculative futures task, Ravneet S (couldn’t find a last name) touches on a potential future where teachers are wholesale replaced with humanoid robots. 

I love the idea of this. Not because it’s a future I want, nor a future that is likely anytime soon. Rather, it whets our ideological appetite for meaningful conversations about the role of education, teachers, pedagogy, and learning. 

Most would react to such a future with expressions like “there is no way robots can replace teachers”, or “they just can’t connect to the variability of a real-life classroom”. Those reactions aren’t necessarily incorrect, at least for now. Without getting too determinist here, it would be fair to say that given the advances over the last several years in computing and algorithmic capacities, it’s not too difficult of a thought experiment to imagine a technological entity that is in fact capable of computing the complexities of teaching in real-time. It’s simply a matter of programming. Whether it’s a good idea or not is another matter. 

Probabilistically speaking that kind of future is likely to have existed somewhere, at some point (in my humble, non-astronomer opinion) Tragically we’ll never know. 

We can break down just what it is a teacher does to explore this further. Here are some tasks that come to mind:

• Deliver curriculum through lessons/units. 
• Assess student work through formative and summative assessments. 
• Build relationships and trust with students.
• Be pedagogically responsive to the needs of students (emotional, physical, cognitive, etc)

This list is obviously not exhaustive but is a typical overview of what teachers do. I truly don’t see anything on this list that automatically excludes artificial intelligence or machine learning. The first two items are well on their way to being automated. Not a finished product, but the development is happening and is improving all the time. The next two are much more difficult, these will be major barriers to incorporating automated teaching down the road. Once neural networks are viable, the “soft skills” of a teacher will be much less exclusive to humans. 

There is a subtle tension I hold while writing this. This kind of future has obvious economic ramifications for myself. My partner and I are both full-time teachers, so naturally, I should be arguing against this kind of idea. The thing is, my personal situation shouldn’t have any bearing on what I believe might happen. The cognitive dissonance is rich, but I still believe this is not a future that is totally out of the question. I wonder what the world will do in those first years with so many teachers out of work. Just add them to the heap of those in Harari’s useless class, I guess.

How does one decide what are the appropriate sounds to communicate to another species? I have a hard time believing that what we find “tasteful, pleasing, and entertaining” will be enjoyable for other life forms. Do whales, beetles, baboons, or macaws enjoy these sounds? Are there elements that they find threatening or otherwise? Predictably the music is earth-centric, but there were a LOT of assumptions made in what was to be represented. Unless of course, that was the goal, which it was. A survey of earth sounds. I connected when the Twenty-thousand-hertz” podcast discusses the likelihood of the frequencies on the record being audible to whatever listens to it. They may not be able to hear it at all but could cause pain the way a dog whistle gives people a headache. 

I also find it difficult to determine which songs, which are inherently value-laden, important enough to keep and unimportant enough to lose. Media in a variety of forms, however innocuous it may seem, is coupled with what the creators (or curators) feel is important, and this is why it’s difficult to pick ten songs. I have my own conscious and unconscious biases that obstruct my objective pics. 

Dr. Smith Rumsey mentions in her lecture at Brown in 2017 that “we need to be mindful about how we control the flow of information…we have to think about users not just in the here and now but in the distant future.” In this way, I guess it would be preferable to send something rather than nothing. Aesthetically, I think harmony is an important element that ought to be included, but that flows from my upbringing and culture. Even the instrumentals have a melody that brings with it their own culture and sense of place. If I try to stay as neutral as possible, then in the end you don’t really have anything at all. The most neutral thing is, well, nothing. 

Here it goes. 

1. Bach – WTK 2, no 1, Glenn Gould
2. Morning Star and Devil Bird- Australia
3. Dark was the night-Blind Willie Johnson
4. Bach – Gavotte en Rondo – A Grumiaux
5. Tchenhoukoumen, percussion Senegal
6. Beethoven 5th, part 1, Otto Klemperer
7. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow
8. “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry.
9. Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska
10. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México

References

Brown University. (2017). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”

The original image from task 1. The intention was to introduce myself using an image of what I carry with me.

The readings this week on how we think about literacy, literacy pedagogy, and how technologies impact what it means to be literate had me think a lot about my students. In education, I will often hear phrases that resemble “kids today are different than they were when I was younger”, or “kids these days!”, “back in the day when I was a kid, I had to…*insert invariably difficult thing here*”. My response is usually in the realm of “well of course they are different! Their upbringing is nothing like ours!”

Mabrito and Medley discuss this gap that many are intuitively aware of. They propose that we as educators not think of the places where our students create, consume, and reshape text not strictly as entertainment or just social gatherings but as alternate classrooms (2008, p.62). They also go on to say that in order for us to better understand our students we must go to those very places and experience what they experience. 

I have only been teaching for seven years, but one commonality that transcends the majority of my students is their love for YouTube. Granted, I think much of their time is spent passively consuming, but there are those that spend time trying to build up a channel that has followers with creative and engaging content. Even just yesterday, my children built a space habitat out of cardboard, a small tent, and a bunch of blankets. Instead of asking me to come and see it, they grabbed a cellphone and proceeded to give a “tour” of the habitat in the exact same way a YouTuber might give a review. It had a lot of the key phrases you’d hear such as “but enough of that, let’s get right into it”, and “thanks for watching”. All it was missing was the “don’t forget to like and subscribe”.

A YouTube-style review is, at its core, a multimodal persuasion piece about something that cuts through what a traditional language text might not. The New London Group discusses the increasing multiplicity and integration of meaning-making where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial…[and that]…new communications media are reshaping the way we use language (1996, p. 64).

As such, I decided to rework my first task into a review of this sort. Enjoy!

References

Mabrito, M. & Medley, R. (2008). Why professor johnny can’t read: Understanding the net generation’s texts. Innovate: Journal of Online Education: Vol. 4:6, Article 2.

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

Winter Outing

Twine…what an incredible learning resource! I am going to work on getting my students to work with Twine. 

Honesty time: This was difficult for me. I typically find it hard to come up with creative works. Just not something that I have had much practice in. 

I started by taking a blank piece of paper and started flowcharting some potential storylines. It’s easy to see how a “choose your own adventure” type game can get very complicated very quickly. 

I chose to go with a survival game. Choices and actions have consequences and this seems like something I would enjoy writing. 

For the process of actually writing up the game, I was essentially flipping back and forth between Twine documentation and the software itself. Aside from this referencing, I found it challenging to try and develop different storylines, and in the end, my story lines are anything but robust; however, I can appreciate the work that goes into making something like this. 

This reminded me of how we have been reading and thinking about how the medium impacts the creation of a message. After scribbling down my rough flow chart, I had a basic outline, not much different from a traditional outline. Twine allowed me to rearrange the nodes of my network in order to match the order and positioning on my paper. Had I tried to compose a story with different branches and plot lines on paper, this would have been trying to say the least. Doug Engelbart touches on this idea in his 1963 paper about computers augmenting human intellect and ability. 

“If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft became too complex you would compile the reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs. You can integrate your new ideas more easily and thus harness your creativity more continuously if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record” (Engelbart, 1963, pp. 13-14)

Admittedly this kind of notion can be applied to almost any contemporary computing application, but Twine offers a unique perspective as it reads similarly to paper (on a basic Twine level), but can be organized and arranged physically so as to see the flow of the story and branches. I find myself questioning the extent to which the tool that we use influences, or even completely determines the product of human creativity, much in the same way that the linguistic relativity hypothesis would suggest a link between language and thought. 

Engelbart also makes the case for an appropriate scope and sequence of learning, and that in order to solve complex problems humans take small steps toward that problem. He called them process hierarchies. A high-order process like writing a story requires a huge amount of sub-processes, and I see Twine as a tool that, as Engelbert would say, effectively augments the human ability to write a better story. Because Twine can be non-linear, this software affords the mind to wander down a given path without losing its previous place. Not only can it be ordered on a page, but it can be reflected in a virtual physical space that mimics the story’s neurological organization. 

References

Englebart, Douglas. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds.), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books.

I chose to carve out the word canoe because at this time of the year, in this particular year, I am longing for warmer weather and the recreational activities that come along with it. We own a red canoe and I think of it as a signal of summer and leisure. 

This was MUCH harder than I anticipated. Listening to the podcast on the printed book by Ben Harris(2018), he discusses the process of monks having to scribe copies of books day after day, specifically using the word “drudgery”. Scribing like this would have no doubt been fatally mundane, which makes me all the more grateful that we have the mechanized press. I had set aside about 30 minutes to carve my potato letters but found myself still staring at my five potato cross-sections ten minutes into it. I took a marker and outlined a rough idea of the letters, and then had to flip a few of the letters over because I had forgotten to mirror them. Easily the hardest part was the carving of the letters. For some reason I made them quite shallow, maybe a few millimetres or so, and that took quite a lot of time to work around and inside the letters. One advantage of having such a thin depth is that I could see the knife through the flesh which made it easier to know when I had met a vertical cut line. Ultimately this took me about an hour, and my back was fatigued in the end from being so absorbed in the task. While that seems like a lot of work to print a single word, I could theoretically print this word over and over for hours at a time now that my stamps have been made. I could mount these on a rod and align them perfectly, and I’d be able to print this word until the potato started to degrade. If I were to do this again I would find a way to secure them to each other rather than hand pressing each letter. 

The letters E, A, and N were actually quite straight forward. Straight lines were a breeze with a sharp, thin paring knife. The curved letters like O and C were difficult, and if I’m being honest I look at my work and am a bit embarrassed. Not thrilled with how they turned out. 

In sum, this was not an easy task but pales in comparison with the conditions of the early press. My home is heated, with bright artificial lights, and I can use materials that are safe and non-toxic. I used an oil paint that was actually hard to get off of my hands. While I was washing up afterward, trying to get the paint off, I was reminded of the permanence of the paint, which brought me back to Ong. In Orality and Literacy (2002), he discusses how words are grounded in oral speech, but that writing grounds them forever. I can shout the word “CANOE” out into the air and it dies as soon as my vocal cords stop vibrating. Now I can leave it there and be reminded of it every time I look at it – and every time I look at it I can be reminded of what I am looking forward to. 

References

Harris, B. (2018, February 4). The printed Book: Opening the floodgates of knowledge. [Audio podcast episode]. In How it Began: A History of the Modern World. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://howitbegan.com/episodes/the-printed-book/

Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge. https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Literacy_2nd_ed.pdf

Hi my name is Scott Richmond and I’m going to tell you about the different ways that I like to exercise and relax and be outside in the summer months when I have more free time I’d love to go for a midday runs canoe in the lake that we live beside paddleboard hike the mountains fish the rivers when I first started running about three years ago I was doing it because the people that I spent a lot of time with at work we’re all runners and never stop talking about how much they loved to run outside the sun and crazy to me because running just sounds hard and I don’t like doing hard things but ultimately decided that it was probably a good idea to try and make an attempt at this since I wasn’t getting any older I just turned 35 at the time and was starting to think more and more about about my own mortality as I started to gain a base level of fitness from running I noticed that not only did I enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something but that my mental health was reaping the benefits from exercise and being outside it has been abundantly clear that I have underestimated the importance of being outside up until this point paddle boarding is similar in that there is a strong emphasis on being outside so I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside and that it is peaceful and serene I value time alone or I can think and wonder and reflect just as much as I value conversations about ideas and society in the last four years my family and I have really started hiking more and more as we have found that it’s an activity that all of us can do and enjoy we find that whenever the kids start arguing a little more or there’s some kind of tension in the home that getting outside really solves a lot of those problems on its own being in the forest and in the mountains near big bodies of water and taking the focus off of the comforts of modern life helps to put things in perspective during the winter months I still enjoy running outside and this year I’ve taken up Cross country skiing as a way to still get cold water exercise and in addition to being with friends in a Covid friendly manner where I live there is a strong culture of Nordic skiing and so I have had the luxury of coaching every time I’m up there just because people want to help I can see Cross country skiing being an activity that my wife and I do for many years to come as we get older normally I would try to wrap up a speech like this but without planning ahead and organizing my thoughts I don’t really know what to say now other than I’m done

• First off, the MacOS dictation tool doesn’t allow for even the dictation of punctuation. This threw me off right away since I’m used to using Siri and dictation my periods and commas. This kind of run-on sentence is then borderline unreadable. 
• A few significant errors that impact the ideas of what I was trying  to convey. It interpreted “the sun and” instead of “which sounded”. There are a few moments where the timing of my speech is clearly missing. To be fair, I found myself speaking quite a bit slower than I normally would had I been literally sitting down with a bunch of friends. At the point where I say “I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside” was meant to be a bit of a sarcastic aside, but instead it was just included without any of the nuanced context of the moment. Seems nonsensical to read it back. Something else that bothered me was my inability to correct for errors. I’m the kind of person who won’t finish a sentence if I see a little red squiggly underline. MUST FIX NOW!!
• I guess I should give the MacOS software team (or whatever dictation startup they bought) credit for getting something right: spelling. 
• I don’t see any mistakes from the technological perspective; the tool did exactly what it was designed to do. There is certainly a long way to go to effectively capture all the peripheral subtleties of speech beyond the words. This makes me think of literature in a way that I didn’t think about during the readings; that literature can capture the ideas and details, but can miss out all the other things going on during verbal communication. Cadence, tone, pitch, volume, facial expression, etc all have the capacity to alter a story. 
• While reading Walter Ong this last week, I felt a strong pull toward a lot of his ideas. To be fair, I think I was experiencing a bit of confirmation bias. His research validated my intuitions on oral and literate societies. As a humanist I believe in the potential of our species to push and progress forward, and to a large degree writing has been foundational to this effort. Records, accuracy, details, permanence, and visual representations will ultimately take humans to Mars. What orality has over writing is the ability to communicate beyond the words. Writing can be beautiful and organized, but it is up to the reader to interpret the intentions of the author unless they are specifically stated. When someone tells a story they can do an almost unlimited number of things to change how the story is told and internalized. I keep coming back to my quiet little aside where I mention out of the side of my mouth that I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside. If I imagine watching or listening to a top comedian do their bit, they have a strong sense of delivery and timing. Hard to imagine that reading that very same bit would be nearly as funny.