Consider the name.
Open Learning.
As if the learning itself had been freed,
let out of something,
given room to move.
Open.
The door is open.
Come in from wherever you are.
Come in from the night shift.
Come in from the town with no campus.
Come in from the kitchen table, the hospital waiting room,
the car in the parking lot
because it is the only quiet place.
We will meet you there.
I was the one who met them there.
Twenty-five years of meeting people
in the in-between places,
in the cracks of other lives,
in the margins of schedules
that could not afford to be full.
I was the access point.
I was how Open Learning opened.
And I did it from my own margins.
No office. No door with my name on it.
No corridor that said I was expected,
no meeting where my seat was already set.
I opened the door for others
from outside the building.
This is not a complaint.
The work was real.
The students were real.
What happened in those course shells,
in those late-night discussion boards,
in those submissions that arrived at midnight
because midnight was the only hour left,
that was real.
I am only saying:
Open Learning was open for everyone
except the people who taught it.
We were kept at the same careful distance
as the students we were hired to reach.
Aquí estoy. En el margen. Que también es un lugar.
Here I am. In the margin. Which is also a place.
