Who
Both of us are studying classes we especially like because they are challenging (for us and the students) and we enjoy seeing the students experience the thrill of overcoming those challenges.
Both of us were inspired to begin these projects by seeing others' work and we hope that our work and even more our collaboration will inspire others to begin and to examine similar projects.
Student projects
The students in ECE 102 begin their projects on the first day of class. We talk about early experiences, I share one, and a number of students talk about theirs. I caution them that they will be working with the stories throughout the semester and that they should think of an event that they consider important enough to investigate and that is not so personal that they won't want to share it. I'm often surprised by how open students are when they write these stories. I've also noticed that the stories students write run the gamut of the smorgasbord of topics we address in the class.
Student projects
I wanted students to be able to create these projects, and publish them, with the minimum necessary software training. I decided to have students use Microsoft PowerPoint to create these projects.
It was easy to use, already installed on all the computers at BMCC, and required little or no technical support (the resources in this area at BMCC-as they are at so many institutions, are unfortunately limited).
I developed a very simple and basic set of steps (this is the most recent version-I've modified and improved these instructions each semester.)
Every step, from the choosing of the poem, to the ultimate response to the festival, is intended to ask students to be active, rather than passive. Throughout these ten steps, I'm trying to ask students to make decisions-to force them to choose in a way that's very concrete-and that proceeds through a series of logical instances, each one under the control of the student herself.
I wanted the instructions to function not as a recipe, where the outcome is known, but as a kind of scaffolding to support students in building the meaning for themselves-so that they have to consider, incrementally, why they're making their decisions, and how those decisions both grow out of and help to determine, their understanding of their poems.
I had the students begin the project early in the semester (this course meets once a week in a computer lab), and work through the steps over the weeks. At the end of the semester, I burned all the projects onto a CD-and each student got a copy of the CD to keep and show to their friends and relatives as a publication. I made the Digital Poetry Project an extra project for the semester-a way for students to improve their averages, separate from the papers and quizzes which are a normal part of the class.
