ModPo overview

Al Filreis

The enrollment in this free, 10-week noncredit course on modern and contemporary American poetry was 42,523 in the fall of 2012, and 38,150 in the fall of 2013 and 38,800 in the fall of 2014, 34,000 in the fall of 2015, and 21,000 in the fall of 2016. Contributions to the discussion forums were read (well, viewed) 957,000 times in 2012. Video recordings of collaborative close readings of poems were viewed nearly a half million times in ten weeks (in '12, '13 and '14 each). The course site remains open for those enrolled for another nine months after each session ends in mid-November. Here are some links:

1. ModPo home page (you can enroll any time—it's free)
2. participant reviews (CourseTalk site)
3. Facebook group: ongoing, although the course has officially ended
4. a blog created by ModPo’ers: to continue post-ModPo
5. a blogroll of ModPo students’ post-ModPo blogs
6. introductory video
7. twitter feed, ModPoPenn (ongoing)
8. ModPo YouTube channel (includes recordings of live webcast sessions)
9. blog review/update
10. another blog review
11. another blog review
12. another review
13. another review
14. notes and vignettes
15. article by Jenni Baker
16. essay emphasizing access by Sara Dias of Capetown
17. article by Laura Cushing
18. NPR radio story partly featuring ModPo
19. Washington Post article on MOOCs, mentions ModPo
20. Robert Holland's non-final words on ModPo
21. Dorian Rolston’s essay in the Paris Review
22. 4-minute story aired on The Today Show
23. article about autistic student [Dan’s MOOC certificates]
24. Karin Wiberg's post-course assessment
25. Physicist/cancer patient takes ModPo (from a Coursera blog)
26. article in the Pennsylvania Gazette
27. review by Ian Chowcat
28. Magdalena Ball's podcast interview with 3 ModPo TAs
29. ModPo featured on “Future Tense” (Australian radio)
30. Filreis named Chronicle of Higher Education Top 10 Tech Innovators
31. Christian Science Monitor article about Taha Tariq, who found his university (Penn) through ModPo
32. Chronicle of Higher Education article on disability & MOOCs, refers to Daniel Bergmann of ModPo
33. Irish poet Christine Murray on ModPo (August 2014)
34. blog post on ModPo pedagogy (September 2014)
35. article in Al Jazeera America (September 2014)
35. blogpost says poetry is alive & well (September 2014)
36. Michal Clements presents on MOOCs & talks about ModPo [video; ModPo talk starts at 2:20]
37. video recording of Al Filreis' presentation at Columbia University (February 2014)
38. article about ModPo in The Atlantic (January 2015)
39. ModPo in Colombia (in Spanish) (December 2015)
40. blog entry by Renee Francoer (November 2016)

December 3, 2012

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.