In our First-Year Learning Community, you have already introduced yourself in class and on our site. For our first project, you will design your OpenLab profile that will represent you to your OpenLab audience: members of this course, student and faculty in the Communication Design department, the City Tech community, potential employers or internship directors, and the larger community on the Internet. Then you will reflect on it in a formal essay using descriptive language and visual analysis to consider how you present yourself online verbally and visually. This project will consist of four parts: a relevant biography, an analysis of your avatar, an alternate understanding of your avatar, a reflection on how your profile represents you, all according to the instructions below.
First, include a one- or two-paragraph version of your biography, a version of which you will use in your OpenLab profile. This should be relevant to the audience identified above, so it will likely be different than the bio you wrote as your first blog comment. In addition to the details about yourself that you choose to include, be sure to also identify what you are passionate about, your personal philosophy or aesthetic sensibility that guides you, and your goals for where you will be in five to ten years. Include a statement that represents you and your goals for college, or for your career–this is the thesis statement or argument for this project, and should represent what your whole project is about in one to two sentences.
After writing your bio, choose an avatar to represent you on the OpenLab. It should depict what you have identified about yourself in your bio. 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, including any interpretations of the image necessary for your readers to understand how you claim it represents you.
Images can be misleading, or can be misinterpreted. This is especially important to consider in online environments where our images or language stands in for us, and we do not have direct communication to explain or guide someone through our materials. Write another paragraph or two in which you consider how someone viewing your avatar might understand it differently than you intended, or misinterpret it. Again, connect image details to your ideas in this paragraph. Please keep in mind that any image can be used to represent more than one thing or meaning, so let yourself imagine other interpretations than the one you intend.
Finally, write a paragraph or two in which you reflect on your completed profile. Consider what it conveys overall about you, why it matters, what you expect it to do for you, how you expect it to develop as you complete your degree at City Tech.
Requirements for this project:
- Post your work on our course site using the category ENG Project #1
- complete the related homework posts described on our Locating Writing site
- use new vocabulary properly
- include your avatar image
- add your finished work, approximately 600-900 words, as a post to our site
- add any tags that you find appropriate for each post, indicating both substance and which part of the project your post corresponds to.
- draft due date and logistics: Write rough first draft in class, W 9/12; Peer review revised draft M 9/17; peer review nearly final draft W 9/26. Bring printed copies to class.
- re-read your work carefully several times, making changes as needed based on your ideas and feedback from me or from your peers
- final due date and logistics: Due M 10/1 on the OpenLab by the start of class.
- Revisions due on M 10/29 at the start of class.
