The Task

 

 

 

 

Your task is to design and create a digital poem or song. You will be assessed on how successfully you represent some aspect of indigenous Australian culture and experience.

 

Your digital poem or song should demonstrate your critical understanding of poetry and song in an indigenous context and your skills in designing and creating a multimodal text. In composing your digital poem or song, you may either compose your own words or adapt an existing poem or song to a multimodal context. In the latter case, you will be judged on the visual, audio, and filmic choices you select in transforming the meanings of the original.

 

Examples of creative and moving multimodal texts composed from traditional poems can be found on the Process and In Class Activities pages, in particular Activity 5. (If I can obtain copyright permission, I'm hoping to be able to upload here examples of existing poems and songs written by indigenous authors or non-indigenous authors exploring indigenous content and themes. For now, however, see your teacher or text book.)

 

Your digital poem or song can include audio files, still images (illustrations and photographs), video or film clips (including archival footage), as well as pieces of literary and other texts of your own and others' creation. The text that you construct can be up to 2.5 minutes in length. The word limit for your own composition is 300 words.

 

Your digital poem or song may tell a ‘story' or narrative, give a personal response, or make a political or social commentary, or a combination of all these. In deciding which type of poem or song you wish to create, identify your purpose: are you aiming primarily to entertain, to give a personal response, to make a political or social comment, or a combination of all these? Who do you understand your audience to be? In what context would your digital poem or song be experienced?

 

Examples of different generic types in visual poetic or song form can be found throughout the In Class Activities and via the Resources page.

 

Whichever form you choose, your text should demonstrate a clear ‘poetic' intention: it should aim to evoke an emotional response in the viewer/reader/listener, as well as engage them in some intellectual way about indigenous issues or your response to indigenous culture, language and/or people. Thus, while you create your poem or song using digital media and information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the subject matter you choose is important, the poetic effect of your text is paramount.

 

Digital poems and songs use images, sounds and words to construct the text, but effective digital poems and songs move, engage and inspire. The best digital poems and songs evoke a range of complex emotions from their audiences.

 

Your digital poem or song will be assessed according to the marking guideline available on the Marking Guidlines page. Please download the guidelines and refer to them as you engage with your task. The guidelines contain the criteria that will be used to assess your work.

 

After you've finished the assessment task, evaluate your experience of these learning activities on the Evaluation page, and post feedback on the Guestbook. Keep a learning journal to note your impressions.

 

As you proceed with the task as yourself:

• What am I learning?
• What is frustrating me about this process?
• Is the technology I'm using making this experience easier and more enjoyable, or is it a distraction?
• What problems have I faced and overcome?
• How did I overcome them? 

And finally:

• Do I feel that the end product, my digital poem or song, has achieved what I set out to achieve? Will it move an audience's emotions?

Most importantly - have fun!

 

On to The Process