of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.
Filreis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book happens to be the final page of a chapter about a massive open (free) online course (a MOOC, called “ModPo”) that drew tens of thousands of people to it during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did they come? What did they want from this (already existing) online community set up for the purpose of collaborative close readings of poems? (Yes, poems!) Well, they came because they were lonely. Because (for those in schools at the time) classrooms didn’t or didn’t yet know how to accommodate remote, quarantined citizens. Because they needed the kind of connection some of them were used to having in conversational spaces (living rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, and seminar rooms). Page 99 describes and defines a variation of MOOC—the weird and iconoclastic “bMOOC.” The bMOOC pushes back against instruction-led learning. In bMOOCs the learners shape the material from which they are to learn. Ken X., one of the 90,000 ModPo people, was alone one night. He entered the ModPo discussion forums and was worried that no one was there. It was late. He needed to talk. He pondered the meaning of loneliness, and the poem he chose to discuss, seemingly by himself, was about loneliness. The primary teaching choice of teachers who set up bMOOCs is to create a learner-centered course that includes content meant to disorient learners. Ken learned to live with disorientation. And, by the way, he wasn’t alone. I was there that night too. We talked. To this day, I don’t know where he was located, nor what his personal situation was. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to him, because…weren’t we all at least a little bit lonely. In a successful online community, no one is lonely for long. ModPo is not truly a bMOOC but on page 99 we happen to encounter an example of what an open online course could look like if we all took seriously the idea that a crowd can not just fit into a classroom but indeed can assume the role of teacher.Learn more about The Classroom and the Crowd at the Columbia University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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