“open” so broadly and in so many ways that it becomes essentially meaningless.

I don’t think that being judgmental about a different approach is an effective (or internally consistent) approach for advocates of openness

as it is a choice between awesome and open, I will choose awesome every time

they are often more adept than you at understanding what beginning students need in order to understand the material

an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part. We might insist on the centrality of the 5 Rs to this work, and we might foreground the investments that Open Pedagogy shares with other learner-centered approaches to education.

How much more student loan debt will they take on for each additional semester it takes to complete all of their required classes?

access is critically important to conversations about academic success

a commitment to diversity, collaboration, and structural critique of both educational systems and the technologies that permeate them

traced the term back to early etymologies

The dog barked and barked, down the mountain, echoing up it. An excavating 3 ..bark, digging and digging at nothing

He would be leaving Stanville soon. He wasgoing back to school, to get a master’s in social work

affect the concerned tone of an adviser, when really he wasshing for information

o stay sane, thatwas the thing. To stay sane, you formed a version of yourself that you could believe in

as a row of Phyllis Schlays, all frowning, with stiff hair, industrial pantyhose, and little rippling American-ag pins like the ones Republican candidates wore forpolitical debates

Looking at someone who is looking at you is a drug as strong as any other.

e’d seen her young essence. It wasso wanting and bright that he’d had to look away

t seemed also to bar speculating, even privately

that this thing about facts and equilibrium was a lie he told himself to justifygoing after squalid details that were none of his business

not a worthy endeavor like watching us on security monitors ormasturbating in a guard tower

but I also worked on him for a lessdelusional reason. He knew places I knew. When I talked to him, I became a person froma place. I could roam neighborhoods, visit my apartment in the Tenderloin with theMurphy bed, my happy yellow Formica table, and above it, the movie poster of SteveMcQueen in “Bullitt.”

Here Comes the Bride

Especially when you know it’s the mother’s own fault

or his mixed relief,

The only remedy seemed to be to do favors for others

She wanted him to call a telephone number to nd out where her kid was.

He keptstepping back, to be farther from her, and she kept stepping toward him, and he was notgoing to be manipulated.

The whole long era of my childhood I ranaround like a street urchin, no more rooted than the teen-agers on the posters in theGreyhound station on Sixth Street.

to keep one

as a man of his word.

to make use of these afghans, whichthey churned out on the oily axle of time

On the straightaway toward the brown basin, the scenery changed to oil pipeline andderricks, whose axles wound and wound.

He was excited, like I was doing him a favor by asking for one myself.

If you see a pile of sandbags along the side of aCalifornia road, know that they have been touched by the hands of our celebrities

The farmer just has to know how many there are.” He explained toJackson that numbers started with counting and counting started with names

Jimmy Darling used to do math with my son, Jackson,for fun.

I saw the plush stained carpet of the multiplex out by the Oakland airport, the one wherea cousin would sneak in through the emergency exit instead of paying. It’s probably gone,like all the other theatres I used to know. The Strand on Market, where, as kids, Eva and Idrank Ripple wine with grownups. The Serra, which showed “Rocky Horror.” The Surf,out by the beach, where I went with my mother when I was young

his guy had the patience of a genuine idiot

The guy sat down in a chair next to my birdcage with a stack of worksheets.

dministrative segregation.

Don’t correct, because younever know. Their wrong might be your right

my

but that was the country: nota pure and untrammelled world of native wildlife and songbird calls but people whocleared the trees off their property with chainsaws and cut paths through the woods formotocross courses and snowmobiling

made assumptions about Gordon that he did nothing todispel, because he knew that those assumptions would work in his favor

hrough our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of ourneighbors

Gordon acknowledged that comparing himto Thoreau was not as crude as he’d rst thought.

Kaczynski

his Thoreau year

of late afternoon with a loose metallic rattle.

high-blood-volume stabbings

he guards had been forced toundergo sensitivity training and were furious about it.

and you would be able to see his brain glowing inside it like magic stones. But you could never cut it or harm it. She pictured her father, young and strong, smiling at her, the planets all around him.

But then she thought of the middle-aged virgin jumping off the examining table and smiling as if she’d won something,

You are good, she thought. What you have is good. The boy dropped his eyes in confusion.

she pictured him as a baby with his small mouth on his mother’s breast. She pictured his fierce nature deep inside him, like dark, beautiful seeds feeding off his mother’s milk, off the feel of her hand on his skull. She thought of him now with a girl; he would kiss her too hard and be rough, wanting her to feel what he had inside him, wanting to show it to her.

Her thought folded over unexpectedly,

Her body was alive with feelings that were strong but that seemed broken or incomplete, and she felt too weak to hold them.

The clinic was situated between a busy main street and a run-down slow street occupied by an old wig shop, a children's karate gym, and a large ill-kept park where aging homeless men sat around.

she wanted to soothe him.

With his shirt off, he was big and flabby, but he carried it as if he liked it.

"She had all those mammograms and she lost her breast anyway. Most of it."

who would want honor like that?

and that the lie was O.K. with her.

"A stupid girl," she said to her reflection. Well, she thought, but who could blame her?

Such grotesque humility

it had been stubborn and hard to break.

She remembered a recent news story about a man who had kidnapped a little girl so that he could tie her to a tree and set a fire at the foot of the tree. Then he went to his house to watch her bum through binoculars until the police came.

Laura imagined her father looking at the middle-aged virgin and then looking away with an embarrassed smile on his face. He might think about protecting her, about waving at her from across the street, saying "Hi, how are you," sending protection with his words. He could protect her and still keep walking, smiling to himself with embarrassed tenderness. He would have a feeling of honor and frailty, but there would be something repulsive in it, too, because she wasn't a pretty young girl.

Martha gripped her paper gown in the fingers of one hand when the doctor sat between her legs. H

Laura pictured Martha walking around with a tiny red flame in the pit of her body, protecting it with her fat and muscle.

She had never had any sexual partners. Laura blinked.

She was still buzzing slightly as she sat in the office; even though she was small and placid, it struck Laura that she gave off a little buzz all the time

a gross hash of sorrow and desire.

BEHIND the reception desk there were two radios playing different stations for each secretary

"No wonder you hated them," said Laura softly. "No wonder."

n his head was a new solar system, crackling with light as he created the planets, the novas, the sun and the moon and the stars. "Look!" he cried. "Look!" The dutiful aunts, busy with housekeeping and food, didn't see. The more he tried to show, the more they wouldn't see. The boy hesitated, and with his uncertainty his system began to break Thrown off its trajectory, the sun became erratic, and the planets went cold. The stars burned fiercely in the cold dark, but the aunts didn't notice that, either.

His breath was like a worn moth feebly beating against a surface.

Her voice was raw and hard; she thrust it at Laura like a stick

He's not your enemy now

he seemed too sad and too angry for such a young child.

Now they lay separate even in grief.

White House intern lay spread out on the table. In one of the pictures, the girl posed with members of her high school class at the prom. She stood very erect in a low-cut dress, staring with focused dreaminess at a spot just past the camera.

Laura remembered him as he had been twenty five years ago. He had been standing in the dining room, and she had walked by him wearing flowered pants that were tight in the seat and the crotch. He'd said, "What're you doing walking around with your pudenda hanging out like that? Nobody wants to see that."

his voice was like an old broken sack holding something live.

Her father had started dying in a hospital in Tucson.

Sometimes things that look awful on the outside look different when you get up close.

They looked tenacious and stoic as a band of ragged cats, staring alertly down the street or pulled tidily into themselves, with crossed legs, holding their handbags

When she talked to herself; she often argued with an imaginary person.

Her father had been a small man.

He looked like he was settled deep into something, too.

every morning her body acted as if getting out the door and into the world were an emergency

At least not in the normal way.

Then, out of nowhere, he started talking about his feelings for her. He talked abouthow hard it had been for him when she went away for break, not knowing if she had anold high-school boyfriend she might reconnect with back home. During those twoweeks, it turned out, an entire secret drama had played out in his head, one in whichshe’d left campus committed to him, to Robert, but at home had been drawn back tothe high-school guy, who, in Robert’s mind, was some kind of brutish, handsome jock,not worthy of her but nonetheless seductive by virtue of his position at the top of thehierarchy back home in Saline.

nd then she imaginedthat somewhere, out there in the universe, there was a bo

We should probably just kill ourselves,”

After a short while, Robert got up and hurried to the bathroom in a bow-leggedwaddle, clutching the condom to keep it from falling off. Margot lay on the bed andstared at the ceiling, noticing for the rst time that there were stickers on it, those littlestars and moons that were supposed to glow in the dark

“I always wanted to fuck a girl with nice tits,”

humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal

but that she would carry through with it until it was over.

Losing her virginity had been along, drawn-out affair preceded by several months’ worth of intense discussion with herboyfriend of two years, plus a visit to the gynecologist and a horrically embarrassingbut ultimately incredibly meaningful conversation with her mom, who, in the end, hadnot only reserved her a room at a bed-and-breakfast but, after the event, written her acard.

she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that shecould hardly admit even to herself that she was having it

aybe this was what she loved most about sex—a guy revealed like that.

would make her seemspoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once thefood arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back

it would require an amountof tact and gentleness

hen suddenly he pushed her offhim and turned the key in the ignition

as if she were something too brightand painful to look at, and that was sexy, too, being made to feel like a kind ofirresistible temptation

pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin

By her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert

She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easilyhe could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, becauseonce she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed.

Margot laughed along with the jokes he was making at the expense of this imaginarylm-snob version of her, though nothing he said seemed quite fair, since she was theone who’d actually suggested that they see the movie at the Quality 1

t was a terrible kiss, shockinglybad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing.It seemed awful, yet somehow it also gave her that tender feeling toward him again,

But, when Robert saw her face crumpling, a kind of magic happened

nd then, absurdly, shestarted to feel tears stinging her eyes, because somehow everything had been ruined andshe couldn’t understand why this was all so hard

as though this werean argument he could win

Civic with candy wrappers spilling out of the cup holders

t felt as if the dynamic hadshifted out of her favor,

she felt a jab of anxiousyearning

the heavy coat hid his belly and the slightly sad slump of hisshoulders

elaborate scaffolding of jokes via text, riffs that unfolded and shifted

Not so cute that she wouldhave, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed upan imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class

Iwanted to tell him how much I caredabout my job, even if I had to writeabout small-town firemen. I wanted totell the fighter that I always picked up every Indian hitchhiker, young andold, men and women.

“Jeez,” I said. “You would’ve beena warrior in the old days, enit? Youwould’ve been a killer. You would’vestolen everybody’s goddam horses. Thatwould’ve been you. You would’ve been it.”I was excited. I wanted the fighter toknow how much I thought of him. Hedidn’t even look at me.“A killer,” he said. “Sure.

The fighter stared out the window. Iwatched him for a little too long andalmost drove off the road.

he ghosts of my two dead

like he didn’t want to letit go for nothing.

Then I saw the Indian hitchhikerstanding beside the road. He looked theway Indian hitchhikers usually look.Long, straggly black hair. Brown eyesand skin. Missing a couple of teeth. Badcomplexion. Crooked nose that hadbeen broken more than once. Big, mis-shapen ears. A few whiskers masquer-ading as a mustache. Even before heclimbed into my car, I could tell he wastough. He had some serious musclesthat threatened to rip through his blue-jeans and denim jacket. When he wasin the car, I could see his hands up closeand they told the whole story. His fin-gers were twisted into weird shapes, andhis knuckles were covered with layers ofscar tissue

And there is no journalism moresoul-endangering to write than journal-ism that aims to please.

ghosts of two dogs, Felix and Oscar,and a laptop computer stuffed with badpoems, the aborted halves of three nov-els, and some three-paragraph personal-ity pieces I wrote for the newspaper

“I love it when you touch me there,”she would answer. “But it would help if you rubbed it about thirty per centlighter and with your thumb instead ofyour middle finger. And could youmaybe turn the radio to a different sta-tion? KYZY would be good. I feel likesoft jazz will work better for me rightnow. A minor chord, a C or G-flat, orsomething like that. O.K., honey?”During lovemaking, I would get so exhausted by the size of her vocabu-lary that I would fall asleep before myorgasm, continue pumping away as ifI were awake, and then regain con-sciousness with a sudden start when Ifinally did come, more out of reflexthan passion.

My co-workerssmile back and laugh loudly. They’re al-ways laughing loudly at me, at one an-other, at themselves, at goofy typos inthe newspaper, at the idea of hitchhikers.

ODAY, I drive my own car, a 1998 Toyota Camry, the best-sellingautomobile in the United States, andtherefore the one most often stolen.Consumer Reportshas named it the mostreliable family sedan for sixteen yearsrunning, and I believe them

Once ortwice, we picked up entire all-Indianbasketball teams, along with theircoaches, girlfriends, and cousins. Fif-teen, twenty Indian strangers squeezedinto the back of a blue van with ninewide-eyed Indian kids.

Believe me,

thedead salmon

I learned to covermy heart in a crowd of white people

they worehope like a bright shirt.

EINGa Spokane Indian, I only pick up Indian hitchhikers.

How beautiful tobe seen

I won the best thing a person can win—to be seen!

Is death thesame for everyone, or is this laughing world a death made just for me? How can I knowfor sure?

What is the other side like, you may be wondering. Since I’m here, I might as well tellyou: it’s a ridiculous place where everyone is always laughin

What a chicken I was. I couldn’t bear any aspect of living. Especially that old custom:that you have to live a better life than everyone else.

I didn’t come here to depress you. I came here to tell you a joke

to get to the other side

He could only have foretold it by seeing me to my core

Could I have a glass of water, please? Where is my water?

he thought I took was of a man I loved saying, “You are a joke, andyour life is a joke.”

Lying

When I received your invitation to come speak here tonigh

I was used to his cruelties by the

nd, as heread a popular crime novel on his phone, I fell asleep on my pillow, gently touching hisarm

Now, you can probably tell that I’m lying.

will be through

and love him in spite of it all.

To marry your high-school girlfriend, andhave her with you all through life—that is a lot of witnessing. Everything importantwould be witnessed by one woman. I didn’t like his idea of what a wife was for—someone to just hang around and watch your life unfold. But I understand him betternow. It is no small thing to have someone who loves you see your life, and discuss itwith you every night

amily of origin i

It’s ne.

but the resources are not the essence of the process

I would hate for an edict about what is and is not open pedagogy to get in the way of people “coloring outside the lines”

Open Pedagogy is the practice of using OER.

since it wasn’t based on true OER

Complexity is a leitmotiv running throughout theinformation policy literature.