The Process:

Another week and another task that at first glance seems fun and easy to accomplish.  But Yay!  Experiential Learning here I come!  Yes, the task was immensely fun, but not easy, more time consuming and head-scratching than it expected.

 

I immediately thought of my favourite movie and how great this would be.  Right at the start a problem, the title of my movie isn’t covered by an emoji.  A one-word title and neither a single emoji or a cute combination of emojis would convey the title.  I had to resort to emojis whose sounds would add up to the title (hint for above-sound it out).  I’m still not sure it was successful.

 

The one bonus was I found that the main ‘actor’ had his own official emoji.  Now that is a new goal to strive for, your own officially recognized emoji.

 

In my mind, I had thought there were thousands upon thousands of emojis that I could use so this would be easy.  The task completely changed my view.  There’s not enough emojis to convey what the story I wanted to tell.  It was a struggle to find the emojis to make my meaning clear.  Many times, I had to make my own combination of emojis to represent my meaning.

 

There was also the amount of time spent finding and gathering the emojis that I wanted. Typing a thought, action, or idea into the search bar and hoping (against hope) that a single symbol would appear to convey my idea and tell a coherent story.

 

Another concern was the meaning of the emojis.  It feels that each emoji can mean many things.  How would the reader know which way you meant the emoji to be interpreted… as a feeling, an action, or a part of a sound combination.  This became really clear when I realized that I was using one emoji in two different ways in different parts of the story.  That must be quite confusing to the ‘reader’. 

 

I also found that I was attempting to put written text rules into my story; breaking up ‘paragraphs’, trying to create an emoji order pf subject action and result; and mostly splitting each ‘sentence’ into its own line.  Trying to give the reader some order and context to the symbols.

 

Now when I read my title and synopsis it’s all clear and makes perfect sense to me.  Success!  But is it? 

As I look through classmates’ submissions I would bet they also felt that their stories are clear. 

However, I have great difficulty in ‘reading their meaning’   The emojis are out of context and it takes quite a while to decipher a small portion, which then may give context to the rest.  It helps if I have seen the movie/show/or book before as then I can give my own context from experience.  Even then I find sections where think ‘a gun…was there a gun???’

 

One idea I had during the task was to find a site where I could make my own emojis.  After quite a bit of a search and attempt, I realized it would take hours to create all the emojis I would need to tell the story.  This takes me back to the potato printing task, the amount of effort in production creates an expensive, time-consuming method of communication.  Then, once I had created all my emojis there was no guarantee that they would be interpreted the way that I meant them. At least the currently available emojis have some standardized meaning and interpretation.  It was interesting from the sites I used that a dictionary of official emojis is being created.

 

Could you imagine if millions of people were creating these ‘visual modes of representation’?

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So....Watch out friends, all my texts will now be in Emoji !

Confusion will reign throughout the land!!!

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Resources:

Here's some of the resources I used to create my story, you may need them to figure out the new Eva texting style...

 

 

 

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HAPPY EMOJIING EVERYONE

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