Day 1 of week 1, ModPo 2019 — Al’s announcement
Week 1 of ModPo officially starts today.
Here is the week 1 syllabus: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/home/week/1
Week 1 consists of a few poems by Emily Dickinson and sections (or “cantos”) from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The text of each poem is accompanied by a video recording of an improvised collaborative close reading of that poem. The Teaching Assistants (TAs) in each video are all actively part of ModPo; each holds a one-hour “office hour” each week, and they will be joining us on Wednesdays for our live interactive webcasts.
Our discussion forums are set up so that there’s a subforum for each of the poems we read in the syllabus. There are two ways to find the subforum for each poem. 1) Links are provided on the page where you see the text of each poem; and 2) Go to the “discussion forums” (linked on the left-side menu of every page) and click on “Week 1” to see all the subforums.
People create new threads to talk about topics that interest them. Or they look through the existing threads and pick out a topic of interest and then read and, we hope, participate in the discussion thread.
ModPo is all about discussion. We don’t lecture. Our videos model the kind of collaborative close reading we hope every ModPo person will get to experience.
For those who have read and discussed our Dickinson and Whitman poems before, we hope you will 1) Go to the forums and see what new ideas are emerging in the poem-specific subforums; and 2) Check out the extra/additional Dickinson and Whitman poems (many of them!) that have been added to our course through ModPoPLUS. Each additional poem in ModPoPLUS is accompanied by a new video.
For teachers: if you are thinking of trying to teach Dickinson and Whitman to your students, why not check out our own Teacher Resource Center (TRC)? We offer ideas and tips and guidance for teaching these poems!
This week’s live webcast will happen on Wednesday, at 3 PM Philadelphia time. I’ll be back tomorrow with another of these messages and will say something about the webcasts.
Meantime, please continue to introduce yourselves and enjoy the first week 1 poems!
