Linking Assignment
Link One - Task #3 (Chelan Hansen)
For Task #3 - Voice to Text, we were to speak unscripted into a voice to text tool, post the unedited text, and analyze our text for “mistakes” and consider how oral and written texts differ. I have connected to Chelan Hansen’s post. Instantly, I connected to Chelan’s post because of the topic: Dogs!
Overall, We had a very similar experience. One major similarity was realizing that we need to say “period” or “comma” during our talking phase. Chelan had noticed it during her recording and adapted the way she spoke, while I tried to not look at my text while speaking so I had noticed after my recording completed.
Chelan used Google’s Read&Write extension while I used my iPhone’s talk to text feature. A major difference that I noticed between Chelan’s description and my experience was how Google Read&Write was able to correct itself as the speaker continued. I was very curious to hear her review of Google Read&Write because there are times that my students use that extension, but I haven’t seen it in action.
Another commonality between our tasks was we both considered our written storytelling to be more polished. Chelan mentions “If I was writing this to someone, I would have gone back and fixed sentences, added descriptive words, and changed some of my word choices.” which is supported by Gnanadesikan (2011) who says that written storytelling is more polished and deliberate compared to a “spoken sentence”.
Reference:
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).
Link Two - Task #6 (Allison J, Jasmeet H, Judy T, & Sandra V)
Colleagues Web Sites:
For Task #6 - An Emoji Story, we were to construct a title and plot of a movie, book, or TV show using only emojis. I chose to use my iPhone emojis and screenshot the message.
My emoji selection came so easily to me, I had assumed I would be able to guess the majority of Task 6’s that I came across. Boy, was I wrong! It became very clear to me after looking at a handful of my colleagues that everyone interpreted this so differently. Some described video games, movies, tv shows, and Netflix series. It was very interesting to imagine everyone’s background and life experiences with their choices! For instance, does Sandra have kids, or does she just have the same movie taste as me?
All four of my colleagues have two things in common. The first is they have organized their emojis into each line being a different scene or concept from the movie. This allows the viewer to imagine iconic scenes from their movie or TV show choice. Secondly, all of their emoji stories are relatively simple (in comparison to some other one’s I have seen). Overall, I was able to decipher more of the simple ones after taking a look at the majority of my classmates.
After looking at all the other Task 6’s, I realize that I should have linked to the answer of my emoji book!
Allison, Judy, and Sandra all seem to have used iPhone emojis (as did I), whereas Jasmeet seemed to use https://emojikeyboard.io/ as her tool in constructing her emoji story. Most emoji producers are so universal that it does not impact how the audience perceives the overall storyline.
Link Three - Task #7 (Allison Johnson)
Allison Johnson's WebsiteAllison redesigned Task One by creating a video using iMovie that explores the contents of her bag. She directed her video to look like a trailer that is letting the audience get to know her. She splits between some screens containing text and then some short videos of some of the contents of her bag.
I connected to her post because I thought she created something very unique and something that fully met the criteria of the task. I thoroughly enjoyed her humor within the video! I noticed it in two parts specifically. One, “possibly French…” was a text screen and it cut to three clips that showed English/French translations written on a day planner. Gum package, and Tylenol container. I’m not sure if Allison meant for this to be funny, but I did actually laugh out loud. The second part I saw her humour was in her end credits. Initially, they looked like legitimate credits, but once I paused the video I was able to see that she had put herself in every position (as she should), with my personal favourite being “Costume Designer”!!
Lastly, Allison mentions in her task “A benefit from this redesign is that I think the viewer would get a better sense of me and my personality from watching my iMovie trailer than from reading my Task 1 post”. I fully agree with her opinion. I felt that I got a much more whole picture of who she is and her personality.
Link Four - Task #8 (Kirsten McKinnon & Scott Richmond)
For task 8, we were to listen to NASA’s Golden Record which contained 27 tracks and select 10 tracks. Then, using the Palladio software, analyze the commonalities in tracks selected. Palladio allowed for me to see my “community” of common songs, which I determined could have selected due to what we considered diverse and a wide range of songs. My community consisted of Scott R, Kirsten M, and Anne E.
Song Selection:
Scott and I both considered that the beings that listened to our song choices may not have the same auditory process as we do.
Kirsten and I both tried to stay as objective as possible and to be “fair and inclusive” as mentioned on Kirsten’s blog.
The main reason for my link was that we all had 6 songs in common based on my Palladio analysis (which I will admit may be flawed due to my lack of experience). I found that quite a significant amount of songs to have in common. After looking at all of our blogs, I had to make a table to cross-reference which songs we had in common. Something I noticed that posed a bit of a challenge was how we all titled our songs. Kirsten used the track number and a link to the YouTube playlist, and Scott appears to have abbreviated some of the titles so some of them look like the YouTube titles and some look like NASA’s websites titles. Whereas I copied the full titles directly from NASA’s website.
After my secondary analysis (see table), I realized that where I thought I had 6 songs in common with three other people, it was more complex than that. I added colour to represent links between all four of us (in my Task reflection, I originally thought Palladio could benefit from this). You could imagine that our community would have 10 nodes (songs in common) and 24 edges (connections between members of the community).
Systems Innovation. (2015, April 18). Graph Theory Overview [video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/82zlRaRUsaY
Link Five - Task #10 (Jennifer Li & Brendan Stanford)
For Task 10, we were asked to complete the game User Inyerface created by the Belgium interaction design studio Bagaar to experience the wide variety of dark patterns. Some dark patterns experienced include: check boxes pre-clicked, timer, pop ups, and buttons in illogical locations or of illogical colours. These are features of websites that designers input in the hopes of tricking or manipulating the user into spending more money or time on their site (Brignull, 2011).
I have chosen to link to Brendan S and Jennifer L’s experiences through this task.
Brendan made it to the very last stage of the game, the dreaded check boxes. A connection I made as I was reading Brendan’s post was that we both realized how “trained” we have become with “good” websites. Features such as the different colours of the ‘next’ and ‘cancel’ buttons, and how time consuming filling out the information boxes took are some examples of how opposite this game felt to our typical experiences on a “good” website. Another similarity Brendan and I have is both using Google Sites as our web tool. He has each of his Tasks on separate pages and has a page for communication where he has embedded a Padlet for commenting back and forth. His website is the second time I have seen a Padlet for leaving comments, and I look forward to giving that a try on my own Site!
On the other hand, Jennifer completed the game in a time faster than myself. She mentioned that she was familiar with the concept of this last as she had done something similar in elementary school. In Jennifer’s post, she had displayed her screen shots in a really visually appealing way with text and bitmoji’s added. She not only described the dark patterns she experienced, but was able to show her audience with the screen shots (see image). A difference that Jennifer and I have is she has used WordPress as her web tool. I have seen the majority of our classmates use WordPress, but Jennifer’s drop down menu was something I have never seen! It organizes everything on her whole blog to be so easy to get to. I had chosen Google Sites for my web tool because I wanted to get to know it better so I could potentially use it for my classroom, but seeing all my classmates different templates and themes of WordPress seems very customizable and worth exploring.
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.
Link Six - Task 4 (Lori J & James Seaton)
This task had two parts that we could choose from: potato printing or manual writing. I had chosen the potato printing, although it was a tough choice for me! For this link, I have selected two of my classmates that chose the latter option, James S and Lori J.
Both James and Lori chose to do the opposing task, so their experience was nowhere near mine, yet they both mention in their reflections that they found this task “easy” and “nostalgic”. In addition, taking time and being consciously aware of what they were writing were big considerations in both of their reflections. An interesting commonality I found was that both James and Lori have written stories/a book in their past. I wonder if that is why they chose this option for Task 4.
When it comes to web-authoring tools, both used WordPress for their websites. But their end products were very different.
James chose to take a picture of his writing and then type his reflection. Since James had a written reflection on this task, I found it very easy to go back and find similarities/differences/quotes/information. I am a very visual person, so having things written out is my preferred way to understand something.
Lori chose to make a video of the whole process of writing 500 words, which I loved that it started off with making tea! Most videos I have seen for this task had been a time lapse of people completing the task, but Lori’s seemed to be in real time, or pretty close to it. There was upbeat music to start which transitioned to Lori speaking out her reflection on the task. Lori’s end-product was the video. While it was very captivating and informative, I found it a bit more difficult to find particular parts of the reflection that I was hoping to use in my link. It was very easy to listen to, so I listened to it twice and then read over James’ reflection to see any common links between the two, or with myself.
