Week 1: Poems are Parts (October 1-October 7)
Welcome to “Hack this Poem: A Workshop.”  In Week 1 we’ll be figuring out what we want to get from the course, and trying our hands at breaking down poems.

Who We Are.
As P2PU Community Members, we all have ownership in the learning process. That starts with finding out what we want from the course, and what our various backgrounds are.  We asked you to complete the Hack this Poem sign up form to establish what we want from the course.  Here are the results:

On Flickr

Download PDF. 

Most of us are here to get involved with the open education movement--which is awesome! Among us, we are educators, experienced poets, members of the tech community and product designers.  

Several interesting options were mentioned as final products--including visualizations and remixes of art and words. We can’t wait to see the ideas generated!

How We’ll Work
Please try to post your tasks by Tuesday of each week. We suggest taking the next few days after that to move through your colleagues’ creations--we'll focus on feedback by Thursday of each week.  All work here will be public. P2PU's license is CC-SA, and you can find out more about what that means here.

Social Contract / Code of Conduct
1.) Be gentle. P2PU is all about discussing and diverging. But always be polite.
2.) Make your voice heard. Share it with the group if you have suggested improvements. For every week, please feel free to add more example poems if you know a better example.
3.) Participate each week. That means posting your version of the poem, commenting on another peer’s piece, and augmenting the conversation with links to other poems, etc.
4.) P2PU is both informal and serious. Activities are proposed here--post them whenever you like during the week, but be committed to it.
5.) Have fun!

Task 1: Why Does Your Favorite Poem Work?
Take your favorite poem (that you can find online) and show folks how it works.  A few ideas:

• Visually portray the narrative of the poem in a PowerPoint
• Draw the mechanics: convey the scaffolding of the poem and its connective bits
• Read it aloud with a summation and post to Youtube
• Physically mark on the poem, and scan it in, post to Flickr

Whatever your outcome is, it should complete the phrase: “this poem works because...”

Use whatever program or tool you like--we love to learn about new tools!--but please share the link (or even better, embed) in Week 1’s tasks.

Dig deeper: for your reference

• A quick primer on basic terms: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17105
• A primer on figurative language: http://42explore.com/figlang.htm

Next Steps:

• Locate your favorite poem that you can find online and show folks how it works, using any tool
• Post both the original and your hack to the Task 1 space by Tuesday, October 4th
• Be sure to complete the phrase “this poem works because….