1. Sophia Bullock Morrison – Task 4: Manual Scripts
Summary:
Sophia explores the intentionality of handwriting by using a pencil and eraser, noting that the physical act of writing is a more deliberate process than typing. She reflects on how handwriting allows for a more organic and honest expression of thought, particularly for personal or reflective writing.
Reflection:
Sophia’s and my experiences converge on the idea that handwriting requires deeper conceptual planning. While I used a pen, which forced me into a high-stakes “think before I ink” mindset, Sophia used a pencil to allow for easier revision. Despite this difference in tool, both our reflections align with Haas (1996), who argued that digital word processing often bypasses the deep conceptual planning inherent in pen-and-paper writing.
In terms of WordPress architecture, Sophia’s site exhibits immediate visuality. By embedding her handwriting as a large, prominent image, she forces the reader to encounter her script immediately upon entering the post. In contrast, my site treats images as secondary attachments that require a click to enlarge. Her layout emphasizes the visual affordance of the image, making the artifact the focal point, whereas my site prioritizes a clean, text-heavy linguistic design.
2. Rosemary Harris – Task 5: Twine Story
Summary:
Rosemary uses Twine to create an atmospheric, immersive narrative based on the song “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” She integrates a soundscape to set the tone and provides a meta-analysis of student reactions to Twine using ChatGPT to synthesize common frustrations and successes.
Reflection:
Rosemary’s decision to incorporate sound at the very beginning of her Twine story was a brilliant move that I hadn’t considered. This multimodal element immediately established an immersive atmosphere.
Beyond her personal experience, Rosemary provided a profound lens by sharing a synthesis of student reactions generated via ChatGPT. It was fascinating to see how students who had negative experiences including Rosemary herself, struggled with maintaining a sustained tone and rhythm. They found that constructing multiple pathways often made the writing feel fragmented. While I had a positive experience with Twine, I realized that I was approaching it more as a “system designer” than a “linguistic composer.” I took a well-known linear narrative (Hansel and Gretel) and focused on reshaping its trajectory, investing more in the node architecture than in the sustained, rhythmic flow of the prose. These divergent approaches—one prioritizing atmospheric tone and the other exploring structural experimentation—resulted in vastly different experiences with the same tool.
Architecturally, Rosemary’s WordPress site emphasizes a persistent authorial presence. Her layout keeps her name and blog title visible on the left at all times, with a background image covering nearly a third of the interface. This creates a stronger sense of authorship and aesthetic immersion compared to my minimalist, top-down scroll layout. While my site prioritizes the unobstructed reading of the text, her site privileges the total visual environment, constantly reminding the reader of the creator’s identity throughout the navigation.
3. Megan Fredrick – Task 6: An Emoji Story
Summary:
Megan discusses the power and pitfalls of visual communication. She experimented with varied emoji strategies, moving between literal translations and phonetic sounds, to highlight how emojis can lead to misrepresentation without linguistic anchors.
Reflection:
Both Megan and I encountered the same technical constraint where emojis failed to render correctly, appearing as question marks. This highlights a fragility in digital writing: the flexibility to edit is rendered useless if the system fails to display the data.
Megan’s points on the potential for misunderstanding resonated deeply with me. In my own task, I focused on the risk of the reader misinterpreting my intent. However, reading Megan’s reflection brought me to think about the author’s responsibility: how effectively has the author designed the message for clarity? It reinforced that multiple modalities must complement one another to ensure accurate communication.
Regarding the WordPress authoring environment, Megan’s site utilizes a sidebar for “Recent Posts” and an “Author Bio,” which facilitates social interaction and navigational agency. According to Dobson and Willinsky (2009), this transforms the blog into social software, conversational and interactive. In contrast, my site denies this agency by forcing the reader into a single-column view. Observing Megan’s space, I realized her architecture better supports Kress’s (2005) idea of reader agency, allowing visitors to determine their own path through widgets. This has inspired me to rethink my own site’s structural constraints and reconsider how I might open up more navigational freedom for my readers.
4. Jennifer Bose – Task 7: Mode bending
Summary:
Jennifer redesigned her Task 1 by shifting into a poetic mode titled “Fanny Poet’s Society.” Her reflection highlights the tension between informational precision and emotional resonance, arguing that poetry allows for a deeper redesign of meaning that a simple list cannot capture.
Reflection:
This encounter with poetic mode bending was very refreshing. I was particularly struck by her description of the bag as a “small universe stitched in canvas and habit,” which elevates a mundane object into a profound spatial architecture of the self. Her insight that these objects “travel with me not because I choose them, but because they’ve chosen me” resonates with the idea that our artifacts are often culturally determined, a sentiment that aligns with Bolter’s (2002) view on how media and culture shape our personal narratives.
Architecturally, her use of increased line spacing in the poetic layout was a significant stylistic choice. This intentional use of white space without any image creates a breathing room that encourages the reader to slow down and engage with the text emotionally rather than just scanning for information. This contrasts sharply with my own mode-bending, the hypermedia version. While I prioritize the way the audience interacts with the artifact, her architecture leverages the affordances of the page to foster deep, affective immersion.
5. Shui Yu – Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data
Summary:
Shu-yi performed a great methodical analysis. To overcome the clutter of the initial graph, he manually rearranged nodes to highlight track popularity and curated group clusters. His analysis identifies specific shared attributes within subgroups, such as a preference for vocal performances in Group 2 or orchestral arrangements in Group 0.
Reflection:
Shu-yi’s manual node rearrangement provided a visual clarity that I found difficult to achieve, as I had struggled with the interface’s resistance to movement. Seeing his organized graph allowed me to better grasp the big picture of our collective preferences. We both identified the same fundamental constraint: the pre-defined 27-track list. While I viewed our selections as an exercise of human agency to overcome existing biases, and Shu-yi saw them as a systemic compromise. I fully agree with Shu-yi’s insight that these choices do not necessarily signify true preference. I also think because the data doesn’t reveal our internal selection criteria, the unselected tracks are just as reflective of our personal identities as the ones we chose.
Shu-yi’s WordPress site is similar to mine (I guess we use the same theme). However he utilizes a navigational affordance I had overlooked: the “Previous Post” and “Next Post” buttons at the footer. While my minimalist site currently treats each post as an isolated destination, Shu-yi’s architecture encourages a linear progression to other posts. This functional difference subtly reshapes the reader’s experience, transforming the blog from a collection of static artifacts into a continuous journey. Observing his space has inspired me to re-examine my own site settings to enable a more connected navigational flow.
6. Bryce Glendenning – Task 10: Attention economies
Summary:
Bryce reflects on his frustrating experience with the User Inyerface, identifying how dark patternsare designed to deceive users. He connects this to a real-world deceptive pattern he encountered with Outlook’s persistent storage warnings, which remained unchanged for years despite his efforts to free up space. His post concludes with suggesting that through awareness and community call-outs, users can adapt their brains to recognize and resist these manipulative digital architectures.
Reflection:
Bryce’s narrative style is evocative; his use of personal anecdotes naturally triggered my own memories of navigating deceptive interfaces and the frustrations I felt during my first attempt at the game. Like Bryce, I noticed that during my second attempt, the once-distracting noise of the interface lost its power as my familiarity with the deceptive patterns grew. This experience aligns with the concept of “Critical Framing“ proposed by The New London Group (1996). When we understand the hidden intents and mechanisms within digital algorithms, we gain the conscious control necessary to move from passive subjects to active designers of Meaning. Bryce’s reflection reinforces the necessity of a collective social effort to expose these hidden contexts, enabling us to regain agency over the technological structures that shape our daily interactions.
References
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (pp. 286-312). Cambridge University Press
Haas, C. (1996;2013;1995;). Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy (1;1st; ed.). L. Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203811238
Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u
