Task Reflection

I chose to summarise something recent rather than something that would be easy to visualise. The next choice I made was to start with the title because it felt like a manageable and logical first step. Initially, I tried to turn each syllable into an emoji, but then I asked myself, whose rules am I using? Some languages don’t have articles like the, yet they are able to convey complex and poignant messages. As Bolter (2001) noted, designers can have the freedom to break rules which create trends in typography and visuals, thus pushing printing to “remake” itself in order to stay competitive (p. 49).  I found that once I decided to prioritise meaning, it became much easier to find and choose emojis. Kress (2005) describes words as “(relatively) empty entities—in a semiotic account they are signifiers to be filled with meaning rather than signs full of meaning, and the task of the reader is to fill these relatively vacant entities with her or his meaning” (p. 8). While this made it easier for me to depict my meanings, I question whether or not the emoji summary will be understandable since many emojis were chosen based on my role as a viewer of the show’s characters. Is there room for the reader to imbue their own meanings into this emoji text? I don’t agree with Bolter (2001) that typography and design have to compete with each other, but using multiple modes of meaning should keep the audience and trends of thinking in mind. To make the emoji summary easier to decipher, I added some indicator emojis to different types of nouns. Looking back on the task, I wonder if I should have tried to add some repetition to the sentences because lower-primary texts often use repetition to help children learn to read. If I did that, I could have used simpler subject-verb-object sentences and removed extras such as adverbs or sequencers.

References

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

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004

Instructions

1. Right-click on the link posted: Link–>Please right-click here:What do you like to do?

2. Save link as and choose a location.

3. Click save.

4. If the download bar pops up in the bottom corner saying it is not safe, click on the little up arrow on the download bar and select “keep”.

5. It will start downloading. Right-click and choose open.

6. It will open a file folder. Double-click the index file and it should open in a web browser.

Reflection on Creating a Twine Story

To create this Twine story, I chose my Year 1/2 EAL pullout class as my audience. I found it fascinating how text was described to have a hierarchy like a tree or could be accessible to all as a network (Bolter, 2001). It made me think how I usually plan lesson activities so that they increase in complexity, which is a hierarchy of sorts. What would a lesson look like if it could be accessible from any point of the lesson? I considered how alphabetic written language is exclusive (Bolter, 2001), so I tried to construct this so there are multiple means of representation, but I found it difficult to find and create symbols to make it accessible to my students. In the end I remembered that I could read the story aloud to them. Reading and speaking are both ways to communicate; there is no reason why they could not be combined together. While Twine provided me with a canvas that I could easily rework and add new ideas to, it was only extended to traditional usages of typed text. If I wanted to add images and sound effects to my Twine story that took more time and due to copyrights and my own limitations in my current knowledge, what I visualized did not materialize. Initially I wanted to dismiss Twine and hypertext as an inferior method of communicating, but then I remembered my Year 1 and 2 students. Right now, they’re learning to recognise the letters of the alphabet and the phonetic sounds they make so they can read and write words. I’m at a similar stage with Twine, and if I continue working on it, just as I expect my own students to continue with their progress, I’ll gain the fluency to manipulate the text to communicate what I visualize.

References

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Hypertext and the remediation of print. Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. (pp. 77-98). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

->T4.Manual.Scripts.Sheena.Chan<-

Please click the above link to read my reflection on the task.

Or Read it below.

Manual Scripts Commentary

I have a work journal and a personal journal that I write by hand in every day. This
task was a bit difficult because I knew it might be read by others, so I put more effort
than I normally would into writing legibly. Usually, I do not write this much by hand in
one sitting, so I did find my hand becoming a bit tired and it showed up in my
penmanship. If I make a wording mistake, I crossed out the word and rewrote the correct
word above or beside the cross out. If I made a spelling mistake or wrote illegibly, I would
either cross it out or write the correct letters over the incorrect letters. Just as Gutenberg
could have argued that the printing press’ accuracy, economy and speed makes it better
(Ewart, 2021), this process made me appreciate the efficiency of my laptop, but when I
choose to write by hand in my personal life, the intended audience is myself, so I appreciate the segment when Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick (2021, 6:35) spoke of the
written word’s ability to “freeze” a moment of the mind books’ ability to retain and
reclaim lost knowledge. I saw a correspondence between this and my belief that mistakes
can be viewed as “lost thoughts.” When rereading my hand written work, I also look at
the words I crossed out and try to pick up the train of thought that brought me to that
word. Sometimes these words lead to a new idea or entry. During writing I encourage my
students to cross out their mistakes with a single line so their mistakes are still legible. I
believe it was the scientist Richard Feynman who developed a new theory from discarded
notes that he’d kept. Just like Feynman, I perceive my mistakes to be memory crystals
waiting to be distilled and refined at the right moment.

My typed work is used to interact with others, but I seldom directly interact with my
typed work after it has been sent out. Professionally I do have to write many things by
hand, but unlike what I hand write in my personal life, they are short-lived and often
disappear with the swipe of a board eraser. While these writings exist on the board, I and
my students interact with this text. If the purpose of a text is to be interacted with,
perhaps these temporary texts meet this definition better than the others I create due to
the number of people who interact with them and how they can be changed and added
to almost instantly. On the other hand, while the written words may disappear, these
texts often transform into oral knowledge because most students will lose their notes or
throw them out at the end of the school year. At the beginning of this task, I considered
oral texts to have little place within my life, but actually most of the texts I create
professionally are transformed into oral texts that students share in discussions at school
and home. While text technologies will transform how we view and use texts, humans’
need for face-to-face communication make it impossible to remove the oral component of texts.

References

Ewart, K. (2021). Economies of writing-or-writing about writing [Course reading]. Canvas. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/89383/pages/4-dot-3-economies-of-writing-orwriting-about-writing?module_item_id=3341898

Lamb, R. & McCormick J. (Hosts). (2021, May 26). The invention of the book, part 1 [Audio podcast
episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeartRadio. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-toblow-your-mind-21123915/episode/the-invention-of-the-book-part-63031174/