Friday 10 September 2010

First Thoughts

Everyone worries about the start of a new year, staff as well as students. This is a new module for me to support and I’m concerned that it will be useful and engaging. I will be mainly working with you on-line and setting tasks to do that develop your blogs as portfolios of achievement. This is to allow for on the one hand assessment (there has to be some evidence somewhere) and on the other hand it is a staging post towards dissertation development and I’m hoping that by the end of the year everybody has thought through the relationship between what they are doing on the studio floor and what can be written as an academic engagement with the discipline.
I’m hoping for the dialogue to become an open and developmental one, so that at the end of the module individuals have a clear sense of what it is they are interested in and how that can be written about. In particular everyone has to write an essay and I am aware it’s not necessarily the year’s favourite activity.
If you are wondering about who I am and why I should be working on this with you, I would hope to ease your worries by reassuring you that I have worked with both Fred and Amber before and in a much more practical/hands on situation, covering a whole range of aspects in relation to Graphics and Visual Communications. I have a long background in printmaking and illustration, so I am not just a contextual studies tutor. I actually love talking about typography and think it is one of the most underrated disciplines out there, so you might find me asking you to set out a theoretical idea in a responsive spacing and font as much as by getting you to write it up as an essay.
So if you want to contact me do so. Make comments, I don’t mind if they are negative as long as a dialogue can be set up.
In the meantime what do you think about this statement? ‘Images are remembered by thinking about them in words’.
See:Link for Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication