A few years back, Mark Crotty developed the idea of an electronic poetry museum utilizing the presentations tool in WebCT. The assignment grew out of conversations our department had about alternative forms of assessments, and what attracted me to the idea was that it required students to think critically while allowing them to explore poetry creatively. Last year, I used the assignment as a culminating project in my Modern Poetry class, tweaking the requirements to suit the specific needs of my students. The project involves creating a simple hyper linked document containing about five “rooms” branching off from the entrance of the museum. In my assignment, students were required to create a section on various movements in modern poetry, a section on poetic devices with examples, a section on the relationship between visual art and a modern poetry movement, and a section with examples of their own poetry. I provided the class with links to suggested web pages, and I created assignments throughout the year to help them complete chunks of their museums throughout the trimester so that the work load was distributed over several mini-assignments. Students were expected to examine the work of their a few of their classmates and provide them with meaningful feedback. I found that to be an important aspect of the assignment, but I had some trouble evaluating how well they did on it. For the other part of the assignment, I used a basic rubric for each room in the museum.

I found that my students did more research for the project than previous students did on their formal research papers. When I asked them to reflect on the process of creating their museums, all but one said they felt that they got more out of the poetry museum assignment than they would have gotten from writing another essay. All of them agreed that they put more time into completing the assignment than they would have put into a paper. In some instances, that time was on learning the basics of hyper links, but mostly they spent time just exploring poetry.