Alums learn through online club
The Daily Pennsylvanian
April 14, 2000
As a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, N.Y., Randi Feigenbaum spends much of her day busily writing from her small cubicle. Come 7 p.m., she'll make a stop or two at the grocery store and the dry cleaners and head home.
Fast forward several hours, and Feigenbaum, a 1997 College graduate, receives her sole respite of the day when she transports herself back to her alma mater simply by logging on to the Internet.
Feigenbaum and nearly 200 other alumni are participants in a Kelly Writers House book club, which is conducted entirely via e-mail and run exclusively for alumni.
Alumni who take advantage of the program -- which launched in January with an online discussion of two novelists led by Writers House Faculty Director Al Filreis -- agree that it does exactly what it had been intended to do: allow them to maintain intellectual contact with their fellow Penn graduates.
Each month, a group of alumni sign up to read and discuss a book chosen by one of the moderating faculty members. For the next several weeks, each alumni then e-mails his or her responses to the listserv so that others may comment. And then comes an online conversation, similar to one that might happen in a Bennett Hall classroom.
"They cut across the years and the miles, and they mix people who might otherwise never have an opportunity to come into contact," 1981 Wharton graduate Richard Stein said.
So far, four different professors -- Filreis, Classical Studies Professor Jim O'Donnell, English Professor Dan Traister and Religious Studies Professor Ann Matter -- have led three month-long sessions on topics ranging from the study of contemporary Jewish American author Saul Bellow to a discussion of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
The book club is the brainchild of Filreis, who conceived the idea following his involvement in a program called Alumnverse. In 1996, as part of Alumnverse, 160 alumni discussed poetry over e-mail. But instead of duplicating Alumnverse's one-year discussion, Filreis decided to hold short one-month book discussions this time.
Richard Ross, a 1982 College graduate and now a top Disney Channel executive, then provided a boost to the project by donating $500 for the purpose of hiring someone to maintain the listservs. That's the only expense of the entire program as alumni utilize the listservs for free.
After e-mailing various alumni list serves and Writers House contacts and publicizing the club in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Filreis had a group of 25 alumni sign up to participate in his first discussion on Bellow and novelist Mary McCarthy. Volunteer efforts by the five faculty discussion leaders and students at the Writers house took it from there.
Alumni had initially been restricted to participating in one club, but when Filreis found the initial group to be so enthusiastic, he allowed them to sign up for a later book club.
By now, more than 200 alumni have participated in the discussions.
"There is a history of post-college-age people participating in post-college discussions," Filreis said. "In the 1950s people sat around and read books together."
These virtual book clubs carry advantages besides eliminating the need for a central meeting place, according to those who participate. In fact, the online discussions have made it possible for alumni with full-time jobs, families and hectic schedules to still have time for intellectual discussions.
"I will say that I think this medium actually allowed, in some cases, for more thoughtful discussion than a regular classroom because you didn't have to cram everything into a two-hour window once a week," Stein said.
"We could take time to refer back to the text or other sources -- do our homework in class, as it were," 1963 Wharton graduate Alex Newmark added.
Participating alumni are quick to point out that the initiative keeps them learning in an organized fashion. In short, no matter the drawbacks, it's still better than nothing.
Still, many also recognize that the book club is far from a substitute for face-to-face learning.
"You can't respond to each other [in] real time, so you can't have a real debate back and forth quickly," said Feigenbaum, a former Daily Pennsylvanian editor. "Sometimes, if I missed a day due to work related stuff, I missed whole topics and discussions, some of which I would have liked to respond to -- but they were yesterday's news."
Michele Root-Bernstein, a 1975 Wharton graduate and member of the session on Nabokov, added, "Spontaneity gets lost, of course, since we are all composing our thoughts, editing them with second thoughts and, at times, suppressing them with third thoughts."
The upcoming fourth book group -- moderated by Filreis and Writers House Director Kerry Sherin-- focuses on the works of Jennifer Egan and Ellen Umansky, two up-and-coming alumnae authors. The discussion is open to New York-area alumni only.
The goal in restricting participation to New York residents, Filreis explained, is to encourage alumni to take their conversations from the chatroom to bars and restaurants. "[This is to] see if you can create an online learning community that actually can become a physical community," he said.
With a large number of alumni located in Boston and San Francisco too, Filreis said he hopes to try the same sort of book discussions in those cities next year.