Back

Contact John

By John Hunter

April is National Poetry Month. For those of you who have faced neither trauma nor boredom when exposed to poetry, this site may be of interest. The American Library Association and the American Booksellers Association support this Academy of American Poets website (www.poets.org). Like much modern poetry, the only way to get to the meat of the site is through indirection. There is no general home page for the site so when you click on the URL, you first get a poet and then you get a list of links. The first poet to come up after I typed the URL was Emily Dickinson.

The entry for Emily Dickinson provides a brief biography, a representative sample of her poetry, and a selected bibliography for those wishing to know more about this influential American poet. Entries for other poets follow the same format.

Clicking on the Help button gets the visitor to a FAQ list. You can find out why April was chosen as National Poetry Month, who started this activity (The Academy of American Poets), and why we should care. Every April, the Academy provides extra support for English teachers who teach poetry and booksellers who sell books of poetry while at the same time encouraging award giving for practicing poets.

All in all this is an organized love fest for poets and poems, and for people who enjoy poets and poetry. You may search the site by typing in the name of a poet or the title of a poem or you may click on an alphabetized list accessed by alphabet letters located at the bottom of the page. Although this website primarily features modern American poets, old chestnuts such as Percy Shelley, John Keats and William Shakespeare also appear for roasting.

If you want to know about upcoming activities in the poetry world, just click on the events calendar. Your choices include Children's events, Non-academy events, Academy of American Poets-National events and Academy of American Poets - New York events. When I selected the Non-academy events for April and May, I found several hundred event listings in places located throughout the nation. In spite of naysayer protestations to the contrary, this site proves that poetry is alive and well in the U.S.

For those of you who might be interested in evaluating websites or teaching your children and grandchildren to evaluate the websites they visit, The National Council of Teachers of English has developed a list of websites that teach website evaluation skills. In a publication aimed at middle school teachers, the journal Voices From the Middle, March 2003, provides a number of websites that help teachers and parents teach children to be critical of source material provided by electronic media. One such site is http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.html, developed by New Mexico State University.

Click on this site and then go to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", a series of activities prepared by the Institute for Technology-Assisted Learning at NMSU. The subtitle for this section of the website is "Why It's a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources." There are four sections to this activity: Examples, Suggestions, Criteria, and Bibliography. I clicked on the Criteria section. This section encourages students to be concerned about the accuracy of information found on sites. Another topic refers to the qualifications held by the website developer. Students are urged to ask questions such as whether or not the page is signed; whether or not the webpage author possesses credible qualifications; whether or not the page sponsor is reputable; who the page sponsor is; and so forth.

Other questions for students concern objectivity. Does the page contain a minimum of discernable bias? Is the page designed to sway or mold opinion? What type of advertising does the page contain, and does the advertising affect the page content? Another question is timeliness. Students are encouraged to question whether or not the information is too dated to be of use. Finally, students are told to question the thoroughness of treatment of the information and are encouraged to try to assess the value of the information the website presents.

Obviously, these approaches for evaluating websites should not be limited to the instruction of school children. All Internet surfers should ask these questions about the information found on the Internet.

Two other sites in this category should also be looked at. One site comes from Michigan State University, http://writing.msu.edu/station/main4.html. The acronym that structures this site is APPLES or Accuracy, Player(s), Perspective, Links, Evidence and Sources.

Similarly, a Cornell University website offers additional perspective to website analysis for students conducting research. This site can be accessed at www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/Webeval.html. The Cornell site provides help for teachers and parents wishing to teach students to evaluate print material as well as online material sources. University librarians developed this site. The Cornell site also provides links to other university sites as well. Until next month . . .

John M. Hunter

Back to the top