Month: February 2025

Below are the 10 songs I chose to keep for this task:

Country of Origin	Composition	Artist(s)	Length
Peru	Wedding Song	recorded by John Cohen	0:38
United States	Navajo Indians, Night Chant	recorded by Willard Rhodes	0:57
Senegal	percussion	recorded by Charles Duvelle	2:08
United States	“Johnny B. Goode”	written and performed by Chuck Berry	2:38
Austria	Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14	Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor	2:55
India	raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho”	sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar	3:30
Germany	Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement	Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor	4:40
Java	court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers”	recorded by Robert Brown	4:43
Bulgaria	“Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin”	sung by Valya Balkanska	4:59
China	ch’in, “Flowing Streams”	performed by Kuan P’ing-hu	7:37

Reflection

I wanted to choose a variety of songs to preserve the original intent of the golden record. Some major considerations I had when determining my opinion of “variety” were: country of origin, length, genre, and if the song was instrumental or vocal. This list contains both short and long songs (in fact, it keeps both the shortest and longest track on the record!), represents each continent of the world, and has a mix of vocal and instrumental tracks. Overall, I also tried to include songs that differed from each other tonally, as I felt that would have the strongest impact.

References

Music from Earth. (n.d.). NASA.

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound. 

Audio File – Describing what’s in my “memory boxes”

For this task, I chose to redesign it, by changing it more to a “reaction-style” audio recording. I thought that by going through an old shoebox of personal belongings, I would be able to elicit some genuine reactions, which could help others gain insights into my life from a different perspective.

Cope and Kalantzis (2009) write, “In a pedagogy of multiliteracies, all forms of representation, including language, should be regarded as dynamic processes of transformation rather than processes of reproduction” (p. 125). In light of reading this, I made the decisions to change both the semiotic and sensory modes of the task. Firstly, it is no longer about what is in my bag, but rather what is in an old box that I’ve stored special things in. However, to change it up even more, I narrated the experience instead of taking a new photo. The change-up from visual and written to mostly oral also in and of itself represents a large shift.

I felt like a reaction-style recording was very fitting for this assignment, as reaction videos are highly popular on YouTube, and “live” audio sort of pays an homage to the livestreaming culture of today. The New London Group (1996) writes, “people are simultaneously members of multiple lifeworlds, so their identities have multiple layers that are in complex relation to each other” (p. 71). I think that this task in tandem with Task 1 really highlight the meaning behind this message. In Task 1, others were able to get a glimpse of my “professional” life, and make some guesses about things that I might enjoy. In this task, some of my other hobbies are now revealed, and you get a closer look at some of my more personal belongings.

In this narrative style, I describe things that are related to my hobbies – I may use jargon or terms that are not easily understood. In this case, only others with knowledge about those hobbies might understand what I am saying. Each time this assignment is done, different “literacies” and abilities are at play and engaged. As I went through other students’ webspaces, I personally found audio really fun to listen to, and I preferred it over scouring over photos of their bag’s contents. I wonder how many others shared the same opinion.

References

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). Multiliteracies: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164-195.

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

My Emoji Story

Without giving away the title of the movie, TV show, or book, reflect on the process and challenges that you encountered in translating the title and plot of the chosen work into emojis. The following questions can lead your reflection:

For this task, I picked a movie that I had seen recently (I don’t watch many movies). This was a movie that I watched with my wife, and I really enjoyed it. It was a story that resonated strongly with both of us, so I thought it would be fitting to choose for this assignment.

At first, I thought about how I might translate the title of the movie into emojis but I quickly found that it was a bit challenging, so I explored the potential of representing the story through emojis. I went with a more conceptual approach rather than syllabic or word based for this task. I chose not to break the movie down into parts, because I thought that it might be too confusing to follow. I think that although the emojis give a more conceptual idea – it allows others to make their own assumptions about the visuals being presented. I found that adding extra lines of emojis ended up muddling the concept and making things a bit too confusing.

Part of me did choose this movie because I thought it would be an effective example for this class (i.e. not too challenging), but even so, I found myself brainstorming many different ways that I could accomplish my goal during the creation period.

Explore your colleagues’ entries and see if you can translate their titles and synopses. 

This area will be populated with some of my colleagues’ examples once they have been posted.

Tom Skinner created a whole bunch of really creative ideas which included: Pineapple Express, Batman, Spiderman, and Brokeback Mountain: https://sites.google.com/view/etec540-tomskinner/assignments-and-activities?authuser=0

Jazz Chapman wrote about some sort of medical TV show – I’m not a big TV watcher so I would have to guess Grey’s anatomy or something similar: https://blogs.ubc.ca/jasminechapmanetec540/2025/02/16/an-emoji-tv-show/

Tatiana Kloster‘s post displayed a movie that I’m not sure of the title. When I first saw the emojis, I thought of the movie “Bridesmaids”, but I realized that doesn’t match the hint of the title, so I was a bit stuck: https://sites.google.com/view/etec540/weekly-tasks/an-emoji-story?authuser=0

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 46-69.

Play in fullscreen or click here to download the file.

Reflection

This was a really fun activity for me. As someone who has experience with programming, I was excited to try out this new tool and see what I could be able to make it do! My approach for this task was to make a dungeons & dragons-style encounter where they player “rolls a dice” to determine the outcome of their decisions. I thought that this would be a great way to leverage the abilities of using a digital platform. Although there were pictures in The Temple of No, I wanted to pay homage to the retro text-based games while focusing on immersing the player in the narrative. As a dungeon master – I felt like I wanted the story to stand on its own without the help of visual aids, and this is the result of that decision.

In exchange, I implemented more complex logic and made used of multiple variables, and spent a bit less time on the colors and visuals. Even after spending hours creating and testing this Twine, I still enjoyed playing it from start to finish.

I think that Twine is great at pushing the limits of how we can use text to communicate. For example, the animations are a really effective way of communicating context and emotion, and the color and weight can also add additional information for the reader. I found that this reminded me of Cinelli’s (2020) proposal for additional punctuation and visual inflection. These animations allow us to add this sort of inflection to the writing, which greatly assists the reader in connecting with the text.

References

Cinelli, M. (2020). Speculative characters for visual inflection. Core77 Design Awards. https://designawards.core77.com/speculative-design/94899/Speculative-Characters-for-Visual-Inflection.html