Author Archives: Jody R. Rosen

Considering genre in 1101

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I’m working with an architecture course for my FYLC in the fall, so I’m thinking of this specific course for this assignment, but it could be easily abstracted for a non-FYLC course.

Low-stakes writing activity:

Part 1: Think of a building you’re interested in–either a specific building, like the Flatiron, or a building type, like a brownstone. Find an image of it.

Part 2: Spend about 10 minutes writing about the building, in whatever format works well for you, such as a freewrite, a brainstorm, or a bulleted list.

Part 3: Now imagine you’re writing about that building for an AIA guide, for a Time Out NY article, or for a Twitter thread. Transform all or part of what you already wrote into about 150 words in one of these 3 styles.

Part 4: Read someone else’s response. Reply to that response addressing the following: Which genre did they choose for Part 3? How did you know? What features did it have that helped you understand that? What else could they have added to make their writing fit the genre even more?

(If I were going to assign a low-stakes assignment to get students thinking about genre, I would want them to consider a variety of genres, and we might brainstorm a list of different genres we could compose in. But it’s harder to sequence this in an asynchronous class, so I would have a couple to get them started.)

Education interviews

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Project #2: Introductory Interviews with Image and Text

In our First-Year Learning Community, you have already introduced yourself in class and on our site, and reflected on your first weeks of college. For our this project, imagine you are being interviewed for an online publication about first-year students in your major—you can imagine this will be a publication from your department to be featured on an OpenLab site, or dream bigger and imagine that it’s a feature on a professional site in your field, such as the AIGA Eye on Design site, with the article by Emily Gosling, “Today’s Design Grads Are More Woke Than Ever—and It’s Looking Great,” about a recent design graduate or the interview, or Ksenya Samarskaya’s interview, “Nontsikelelo Mutiti on Interrogating the Euro-centric Design Canon.”

Choose or create an avatar to represent you on the OpenLab. You might need to reconsider your avatar choice if you’ve already selected and uploaded one. Write one or two paragraphs in which you describe the image well enough that your readers need not look at it to know what it looks like, call attention to specific details in the image, and explain how the image represents you, specifically the you you’re representing in the interview.

In your interview, you will identify and answer 5 questions, four of your choosing from among our brainstormed list, plus the question about your avatar: What is your avatar and how does it represent you? Be sure to write more than the 5 and choose from among your best answers to shape a profile of you as a first-year design student. There might be some repetition from one question to the next, but that should be minimal, and instead each question should provide different information about you, your experience, your vision for your future, your goals, your artistic sense*, your place in your chosen profession’s world, that professional world’s place in your life, etc. Refer to the list we brainstormed for the range of questions, and feel free to modify as needed to best answer the questions.

The project overall should be approximately 750-1200 words, with each answer being roughly 100-200 words with an introduction framing the interview approximately 150-200 words.

Throughout your project, you can include images to express yourself better—not only your avatar but also other images that express you as a student in an aesthetic field, as a future  professional, etc. Use the publications from Eye on Design as a model, your visual library and other sources (be sure you’re allowed to use their work!) for images to include, and feel free to be creative!

Ultimately, the materials you develop here can become part of your OpenLab profile or your ePortfolio’s About Me page.

Requirements for this project:

  • Add your work on our course site as comments or posts, according to instructions.
  • When adding a post, use the category ENG Project #2, and add any tags that you find appropriate, indicating both substance and which part of the project your post corresponds to (draft, final, etc). For the final draft, use the tag Deliver.
  • complete the related homework posts described on our Ways of Seeing site
  • include your avatar image
  • re-read your work carefully several times, making changes as needed based on your ideas and feedback from me or from your peers
  • post your finished work, approximately 750-1200 words, to our site by Th 10/10 11:30am
  • Be prepared to write a cover letter in class on Th 10/10.

*I ask about artistic sense in this assignment for learning communities with Communication Design and Architectural Technology