In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Dr. Al Filreis, the Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, and the creator of ModPo—a free massive open online course about experimental poetry that has drawn some 435,000 students from 179 countries. Our conversation, anchored in his recent book The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, explores how ModPo became a genuinely thriving pedagogical community in a landscape of ghost-town MOOCs, and what that achievement reveals about the relationship between open texts, open platforms, and democratic forms of teaching and learning.
Key Concepts from the Episode:
Openness as Pedagogy
The reciprocal relationship between open texts, open forums, and open-ended interpretation
Why poems that resist settled meaning are better vehicles for democratic learning than poems with knowable answers
How communal interpretation can be deepened rather than diluted by scale when the pedagogical architecture supports it
The Affordances of Poetry
The idea that a poem is not fully a poem until it is received, read, and responded to in community
How the individualist architecture of higher education — grades, degrees, career pipelines — works against the communitarian impulse that makes reading meaningful
Why poetry’s perceived marginality makes it an ideal site for reimagining what education can be
Against Technological Determinism
Rejecting both EdTech’s promise that platforms will save education and the moral panic that says we need to unplug entirely
The access question that gets erased by anti-digital backlash: for whom is unplugging even an option?
What it means to insist on a utopian digital pedagogy without being naive about the platforms that host it
The conversation makes a compelling case that progressive digital pedagogy is not a contradiction in terms. At a moment when both the EdTech industry and its loudest critics seem to foreclose the possibility of deep, humanistic learning online, Al’s work with ModPo stands as a living counterexample. His conviction that poetry only matters when people read it together, and that digital platforms can be sites for that togetherness, left me feeling genuinely inspired about what teaching with and through technology can still look like.
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