Poole received his BA in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973, his MA in Communication at the Michigan State University in 1976, and back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison his PhD in Communication Arts in 1980 with a minor in Management.
[1] Poole started his academic career in 1979 as assistant professor in the Department of Speech Communication of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
From 1989-1993 he was also adjunct professor at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Policy of the University of Minnesota.
In 2006 he returned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as professor of communication and senior research scientist in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
[1] He was one of the principal investigators of the Virtual Worlds Observatory project along with Noshir Contractor, Jaideep Srivastava and Dmitri Williams.