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Reflection
Tools I used for completing this assignment:
Xmind
Excel
YouTube
Writing a “choose your own adventure” was a little bit difficult for me because this conversation and assignment was my first introduction to this medium of storytelling. I had a couple of my colleagues work through the structure, and the biggest struggle I ran into was the continuity from one page to the next. Eventually, I decided to write about something I know and closer to my own practice. However, the story somehow went pretty dark at the end.
I had to re-write a few times because the consequences of the choices were a little bit too far of a stretch, compared to the preceding events/choices. Bolter (2001) knew that it is not easy to maintain the structure. Creating a story of hypertext offered me time and space to pause and think, it saved me the struggle to choose one ending of the story as well.
I started with an Excel spreadsheet. Following the original structure my colleague helped me with. I wrote a couple of branches, however, I quickly used up all the spaces and I always need to manually add rows one by one. Then it came to my mind, why didn’t I use a concept mind. I deem myself a skilled user of mindmap. And as Bolter (2001) pointed out in his article, the beauty of electronic writing space is that it is flexible and manipulable and can be turned into “a forest of hierarchical trees”(p.32). It is the opposite of what we have done for week 4’s writing assignment. .
I consulted YouTube for detailed operation steps of Twine. Thanks to the channel DigitalExposure TV and their Twine 2 series (2017, October 28), I got the codes for uploading images and the codes to scale images to fit the window easily.
As suggested by Bush(1945), human minds operate with association instead of indexing. I think this assignment is an amazing example of how we spend years “training” machines to perform like us. And in real-life choices, it is unlikely that different choices are going to end up with the same ending. So I kept it that way.
Doing the research for writing in this style was a lot of fun and seeing different ways that authors use it was interesting. As this is my first attempt at it, there are definite improvements that could be made to it but I do think it’s a mode I will continue to work at as I could see it being a really engaging way to work with students and create resources that can be used in the classroom. One of the teachers in the school has already discussed the idea of having a template that they can adapt and use in their classes as well.
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Routledge.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The atlantic monthly, 176(1), 101-108.
DigitalExposure TV.(2017, October 27), Twine 2 beginners tutorial series. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLklITFhXtPCCKadv-0Gcbqoj3OCev695D