Task 7

Task 7 - Mode Bending

I found this to be the hardest task yet of my masters. I brainstormed, read, and reread the articles and still found myself emotional and frustrated. As I submit this, I am still totally unclear if this has satisfied the assignment. What I took from the criteria is that we needed to redesign the bag task to be mostly aural. The purpose of the bag task was for us to get to know each other, an introductory task, and to consider what we are literate in in our lives. I would not consider myself a creative person, so having slam poetry or writing a song seemed like the correct route for this, but completely out of my ability. I wanted, and needed something more concrete, but I suppose that is the challenge of the task. I decided I would do a video, and as stated the New London Group (1996) video includes many modes which is why it’s powerful. The article asserts that the best semiotic mode is one that combines multiple literacies (New London Group, 1996). So it was settled, I was going to create a game show about the items and what they would say about a person. In reflection, this would not satisfy the challenge of focusing on the auditory mode. Instead of being multi-modal, I focused on just oral literacy. So instead, I went out on a limb (for me), and created a sound bite representing my day, including some of the items in my bag. I found it challenging to use every item, but in going through the process, I think it routed out the more important items in my bag and eliminated the unnecessary items, like Chapstick. In the end, Chapstick doesn’t tell anything important about me, so it made sense to omit some items. The other decision that I made was to make it a chronological audio clip of a typical day. This chronological order was not present in the original assignment, other than pre-covid and post covid items. In other ways, the audio tells more about me. My bag did not show I had animals, but they are a huge part of my life, and I volunteer for a rescue as well.

The audio starts with an alarm, a dog and a door to let her out, a blender for my shake, and then the car starting. Then there is some rustling for my mask, and keys for the doors at the school. Typing, writing and photocopies comes next before the bell and the noise of a classroom. The bell indicates the end of the day, engine sounds, and the door shows the arrival at home. The sounds, happy animals, making dinner, video games time, a home workout follows, the sound of a shower, a rustle of covers, and sleeping to end the day.

To create my clip I used a free version of soundstripe and recorded the final product on a voice recorder app on my phone.

The result is a piece of sounds, that would engage the audience to recognize or guess the sounds, and infer what that means about the person. It would encourage active meaning making on the listeners part. On the flip side, it challenged me to consider more deeply individual modalities, instead of trying to cram as many in as possible.

References

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