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This week due to the time limitation, I only chosed to explore Generative AI. The Two generative AI tools I chosed to explore were ChatGPT and Soundraw and I found them incrediblely strong and easy to use.

ChatGPT

https://chat.openai.com/share/6938d262-f5a4-4f99-a37d-be75f9ac59c2

Before today’s exploration, I have never used ChatGPT before even though I know how popular this program is. Then this module offers me a chance to actually get to explore a little bit of it. I was surprised by how powerful the function of ChatGPT is especially when I told it to imagine a dream about spaceship. According to ChatGPT’s response, it said that: “Nebulas painted the cosmic canvas with vibrant hues, and distant stars sparkled like diamonds against the velvety backdrop. The sensation of weightlessness created a surreal feeling, as if I were gliding through the cosmos without any constraints.” (OpenAI, 2023). In its response, a complete story was created with a clear, logical plot and well structured sentences. It even create a somehow romantic fiction atmosphere with the sentence that is illustrated above and other sentences used in the story. I was totally shocked as it can create a story a lot better than me (if I am the one who is imagining a dream about spaceship) in such a short time (maybe just within 5 seconds). It is precisely this powerful ability that made ChatGPT famous, becoming one of the representative programs of the new generation of AI, and sparking another wave of discussions on supporting and opposing artificial intelligence.

Soundraw

https://soundraw.io/edit_music?m=6551419c300b9c0011fbb80e

Because of my personal interest about music, I chosed this AI music gerenator as my second tool for exploration. Actually before this class I already knew that there are music generating AI been developed and used by people or maybe even by people doing jobs related to music professions. However, I have also watched videos about reflections and criticizing some of these AI music generators after using them. There were siilarities with the ideas of criticisms those creators of the video says which are mainly: 1. A monotonous and uninteresting melody and 2. Lyrics that are illogical and not touching (for Lyric generating AIs). Therefore with this curiousity of finding out whether these criticisms applies to every music generating AIs, I had a interesting exploration with Soundraw. During the process I found out that there was some points that the generator actually fits the criticism of boring melody that when I chose the mood to be angry and dark, there were always similarities in most of the demos the generator created. Sometimes even in the same demo, the beat and melody repeated mostly only with a little change after the transition of different sections. There was even one time that my friend (who was sitting next to me and listening to the demos together) said that she heard same song while I told her that I was actually playing a different demo. Besides the disadvantages, the advantage is that not any demo sounds bad and unpleasant to hear. I think it was because of the massive good sample data or demos which are selected by the technicians and professional musicians that are supporting the generators. After my exploration, I chosed a 30 second demo that sounds best to me to include in this blog.

My Reflection:

I seldom use AI in my every day life, but after I went abroad to live in Canada, I started to use all kinds of translators a lot (I think the translator also count as AI). Another tool with the support of AI that I used before is Duolingo. I first learned French and then tried learning Japanese on it a few years ago.

For this week’s explorations of AI tools, I found ChatGPT very useful in most areas as it is an assistant with diversity and powerful multi functions. I would use it for searching and learning new knowledge (as it can do both searching and explanining the materials), assisting when gerenating new/creative ideas, and maybe sometimes even giving me some accompany when I feel alone. Soundraw is somehow useful for inspiring new ideas (with the use of demos) for music composing, and also the demo/beat for lyricist to create lyrics. Actually I have also explored another AI tool which is Stable Diffusion but it seems like the free version of Stable Diffusion did not understand my prompt and also took so long time for generating an image, so I finally gave up on exploring this tool.

Moving forward, I might increase my use of AI tools for assisting tools for my academic learnings, exploring extra knowledges that I want to learn more on, my idea inspiring assistant tools, and maybe sometimes tools for accompany and some emotional support in my daily life. However, I think I still cannot accept or agree on the public opinions saying that AI is going to replace human artists (no matter if the title is musicians, drawing/painting artists, photographers, singers, dancers or design artists) to be the dominance in artistic world, I still believe that it is us, it is human and human heart that is the original sourceand the core of the variety kinds of art forms.Therefore I will not use AI tools for music composing, artwork creating and photographing. I will continue to generate my own thoughts and my own creativity to art pieces even though sometimes my ideas may not be better than what AI comes up with.

Reference

OpenAI. (2023, Nov. 12). [ChatGPT response to a prompt about sleeping and dreams]. https://chat.openai.com/

SOUNDRAW. (2023, Nov.12). [generating music with a categorization of Hip Hop and the time length of 30 seconds]. https://soundraw.io/

My experiences and thoughts after exploring H5P:

From my personal perspective, I went through a relatively smooth process of trying out H5P by following the guide of setting up and creating different interactive tools in H5P settings. The webpage has a claer layout as well as just right amount of words included on each page of the webside which makes each instructions very easy to follow when exploring, and sometimes I knew how to do even without the guide. The setting pages for tools are also well structured and arranged, therefore it was also relatively simple to set up those interacting elements and link them with the video. To me, the interacting tool of multiple choice is my favorite tool and also is the tool that I think I would make most use in my teaching context because it is a very effective way of interacting with the learners and checking if my learners are still with the content by activating their active learning through making them to think, reflect and critique what they have just learned. The statements tool is the one which I think requires the most resources to create because there were lots of blank text boxes that need to be fill out and also because I still do not have a clear idea of when should this tool be used in a video as a interaction with the audiences.

Talking about passive learning and active learning of this course, I have to admit that I used to struggle a lot for the first one or two modules about how to balance the two parts of learning so that my brain would not have an overload because of too much information at the same time. The point I was struggling with was that I spent too much time trying to figure out and memorize all meanings for different theories and academic terms, then after I done my passive learning for couple hours, I found out that I had no energy and motivation for the active learning part and found out that my ability of creativity (which I think is essential when doing active learning) decreased and so as my confidence in doing and reflecting well about those materials. However, after adjustment for several times, I finally somehow figured out my own pattern and pace of learning each modules in this course accodring to my schedule, and balanced my passive and active learning by spend a limit amount of time doing passive learning, and then do some exploration with the new tools, then get some rest, do passive learning about the theories again, and then do the exploration again. Sometimes I also do those two learnings in this course by categorizing the knowledges I need to know with different explorations so that I can split and arange them into different timeslots and do one passive learning + active learning at the same time which really did provide me more motivations and sense of achievement through the learning process.

Creation of my basic lesson plan:

Because of my experiences of learning and practicing of being a Mandarin Chinese tutor and my own experience of learning another language, I somehow know a little bit about what learning a language is like and what should we do in order to learn a language. Therefore I did not have a hard time creating this lesson plan, and what even more was that I was kind of enjoying the process of seperating the big goal into details and solve (create) every parts step by step and finally seeing my prograss (my footprint of this creation) about the outcome, it gaves me lots of sense of achievement and confidence in my ability of making plans and management for a goal. Also thanks to this experience, it gave me a more comprehensive view of the entire process of lesson preparation, giving me a new understanding and perspective on the education process I receive every day in my academic life. At the same time, it also made me think about how our professors from different majors prepare for each lesson, what are the different ways of lesson preparation in different majors, and what kind of effects it will have.

In my opinion, I think this course does really well in backward design as we can see our expected learning outcome for every modules that we are learning right now. This design in this course gives me a clear goal of what I need to know and as I put that goal into the actual learning process, I can be more effective in absorbing knowledges that are useful to me. For most of my other courses I also do see a clear constructive alignment and backward design given every week’s intructions and goals clear and esay to follow. For example, for my culture psychology course, my professor would tell us what we will learn and what we are going to understand after this week’s learning. She would give us discussion time and low skate creative writing time during class to make sure we understands the materials and are able to apply them into real life situations.

Exploration with Twine and reflection on storytelling technique:

From the reading this week: 7 Storytelling Techniques Used by the Most Inspiring TED Presenters, the presenter I found most compelling is Leslie Morgan Steiner who talks about her story of finding the courage to leave her abusive spouse and woman’s equally powerful story of domestic violence. I was really immersed into her story as if I was the victim of that serious and scary violence and I was also surprised with the datas and information she gave about the whole topic of women’s equally powerful story of domestic violence. Her story makes me start to question to myself about what can I do also as a woman to help those who receive unequally treated women to get out of this war in silence and I can feel the painful expreiences that she had when I was listening to her speech. I think the techniques she used in her talk were “immerse the audience in the story” and “tell a personal story”. Her choice of topic can make resonance for most of women audiences (including me), and the part of her telling her own experience can be an example of the second technique which gave her story a more empathetic effect.

While I was creating my story, I found that I instinctively used these storytelling techniques:  Immerse your audience in the story (I immersed myself into the story haha), create suspense (I stopped when important things are about to happen and I give choices that are connecting to completely different plots of my story), and tell a personal story (I was using “you” as the main character description which can create a sense to the reader that it is them that are actually having these experiences instead of watching someone else experiencing the plots). What I think requires more works for me is to build a star moment and to show, don’t tell. Becasue my story is not ended, I still have more space to build a star moment. However, I do not think I have show. don’t tell in my story because I was still confused about how to apply it into my story. Moving forward, I will definitely be more focused on building a star moment, bring characters to live and to let audience be more immersed into the story.

Further more, I think this exploration and practice about storytelling also gave me a brand new experience about creativity and it changed my mind about the form of creativity. When I was writing this story, I suddenly realized that I was so used to write non-fiction, formal passages so when it comes to telling stories, I was a little bit messed up and did not what to write at first. However, then when I went to play video game to relax, I suddenly got the inspiration from the main plots in the game. Therefore I went back to this week’s task and created this little fiction story (although it was not long) smoothly. This is the first time that I started to think I can actually be creative in writing a story! I felt really good after this exploration and I really appreciate this chance which let me found more possibilities in myself!

WAVE accessibility report

When I was viewing my WAVE accessibility report on my first blog post, I found out the fact that although it may looks good, I have no idea about where I could make errors and how I can improve them if I did not use this tool to check my blog style. What was surprising is that there were lots of contrast errors in my blog which means that the color I had for some of the words (especially those with links together) were very light so that it made the words unclear for people who has difficulty distinguishing colors to read. What I expected was that I had lots of structural elements which I think implys that I somehow have a good layer of putting different informaiton into categories that suit them. I think for future creation, I will probably try to avoid the contrast errors as much as possible by changing colors to darker ones about those words that are unclear to see.

My feelings after exploring Text to Speech tools

If talking about my personal experience, I have to admit that I have never used Text to Speech tools before. I tried several times struggling to adapt to this function but it did not work out because I had a hard time figuring out the meanings of sentences according to what the artificial voice saying, and it ended up even wasting more time compared to reading those texts by myself. This time I tried to use TTSReader to explore Text to Speech tools again and I did the task of letting the website read my blog post 1. However, same thing happened: I can catch the information at first, but after reading ffor a while, I could not understand what it was saying because the tone of voice and the position of punctuation are both strange, and the duration of punctuation is also incorrect which obviously affect my ability of absorbing the information.

My Canva Infographic

ALT Text: This is an infographic image about an action role-playing game called GenShin Impact developed by miHoYo. This game is published in both mainland China and worldwide. It has won awards such as Apple design awards: visual and Graphics and The Game Awards 2021: Best Mobile Game. The game is about a travel across the nations of Teyvat, befriend myriad individuals, becoming involved in the affairs of its nations and begin to unravel the mysteries of the land.

During the process of designing this infographic, I used all other principles (1. Focus on alignment, 2. Use hierarchy to help focus your design, 3. Consider proximity when organizing your graphic elements, 4. Make sure that your designs have balance,and 5. Optimize colour to support your design, Leave lots of negative space) except these two: Leverage contrast to accentuate important design elements and Use repetition to your advantage. I incorporate the elements of keeping the whole picture in a good balance which I think this can be considered as a “good infographic”. I also included the Six promising practices for infographic design illustrated in our cousre website to further making sure this infographic looks good. To me, the easy part is to structure the whole image, keeping same style, keeping image simple, leaving enough space, organizing different elements into a united picture and keeping balance for the image. However, this time I think I did not do a very good job in the word fonts (which two is perfect but I used three) and Limiting my colour palette (although the colors are similar, the background color seems a little bit too rich).

Other things to think about:

After watching The World’s Worst Powerpoint Presentations, one thing I found those powerpoints in common was that the words, graphs and sentences are all over the place which shows that they are clearly missing Mayer’s Cognitive Load Theory (too much information) and one of the design principle: Use hierarchy to help focus your design.

In my opinion, media and multimedia can become very strong and supportive assistant tools in learning environment that are encouraging people to learn the knowledge without getting too board which successfully applied engagemant part of UDL guidlines. Also they can be really detailed and allow learners to review over and over again, and moreover, create their own learning result by using these ways and share and pass on the improvement and development of the knowledge they learned to other learners which make the representation part and action & expression part of UDL guidelines achievable.

To me, inclusive design means to include as much principles that may have a positive effect about my design product and considering multiple choices and ways of designing, and welome new and complex but useful skills and tools in order to improve my designing ability.

Comment to classmate: Spring House

For this week’s exploration about screencasting, I decided to introduce a Chinese video editing tool that I am using it a lot lately which is called “剪映Jian Ying(Chinese version of Capcut)“. In the youtube video I created below, I created a editing tutorial about basic and simple tools (functions) included in this application that can be used and learned very fast and widely applied to different types of videos. The screencasting tool I used for my video is zoom.

Principles that I got to experience and successfully applied:

During the exploration about using zoom to give this introduction (tutorial) for this editing tool, I am very aware of not letting my audiences to be extraneous overloaded, therefore I applied the Cognitive Load Theory (which is one of Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning) when scheduling what to say before recording, I only included basic tools that are important and effective and avoided tools or functions within those tools that are complicated and need deep exploring. During the recording process, I followed the voice principle and personalization principle to record my voice into the video and used “we can do like this…” instead of “it can be done by doing this…” to create a conversational environment which may let audiences learn better. I gave the voice explanation and the editing process synchronously by following the Dual Coding Theory (our brains has two seperate systems that allow us to process pictures and words at the same time without affecting the learnig effectiveness) and achieved Modality based on this theory that video editing is a complex process that requires multiple skills and ability to organize, however my video is only 11 minutes (very fast paced) so I think choosing to present this tutorial by narrations and diagrams is the most effective way for my audience to learn about this skill.

Principles and other things that I got into trouble and found chappenging to keep up:

Unfortunately, I did not have a good experience about Redundancy principle and Coherence principle. I have to admit that my fluency in English is not particularly good because English is my second language, and when recording videos, I was afraid of making mistakes, which caused my sentences to be incoherent, with strange pauses and lots of repetition of the same words. Moreover, because this is a Chinese video editing tool, the language on my screen is Chinese (of course I believe that if anyone who is downloading this app they can switch to whatever language they want through the setting), so this could be another thing that might be giving my audience hard time to follow what I was introducing. Therefore I think I failed to apply these principles well when recording my video. Another trouble that I noticed after reviewing my recorded video was that although my voice was recorded into the video, there was no screen sound so the sample audio that I introduced to my audiences could not be showed.which may imply my lack of exploration about zoom recording…I think this is also distracting and might be annoying too.

Overall conclusion：

The whole process is somehow a little bit hard for me because I experienced many issues while recording (e.g. where to save my video files, what to introduce and how to organize all basic steps about editing a video), which is also the point that surprised me. When I was learning about the Theories, I never thought that knowing these theories and applying them feels like entering into two different worlds to me. Obviously applying these theories is a lot harder than just understan ding them. I think my audiences would be people who are interested in Chinese apps and also interested in learning new skills. Next time I will try to improve my fluency when presenting and also using more principles and try to make my content more simplified so that my audiences can learn the knowledge better and faster.

Comment to classmate: Spring House