One week in, and we’re aloft! The first week of Open Learning ’17 featured two Twitter events, lots of fine blogging, and some face-to-face conversations that I hope will bring more people into the network soon.

And before I forget, let me add that it’s not too late to join up! You can easily get up to speed by reading some blogs and the main text for each week. If you’ve been thinking about joining, now’s a great time to get involved. Head to openlearninghub.net and click on “join up” for all the details.

Amy Nelson has already posted a thoughtful piece on week one’s activities. So, what she said.

I’ll add that the Twitter mixer on Wednesday was very inspiring for me, as the question of “what’s open in your teaching and learning?” began to resonate through contexts ranging from professors, to students, to administrators, and back again. The Storify record of the chat will suggest much of this resonance. I encourage you to take a look. These Storify pages will preserve much of our Twitter activity during the course. I think they’re great resources for conveying the flavor, and the many directions, of near-real-time online conversation. I should also note that folks who accuse me of operating at the 30,000-foot level would have a very strong case to make in this instance, as I held up my end of the mixer from somewhere near that altitude over Nebraska, on my way to the AAC&U conference in San Francisco.

And speaking of the AAC&U conference, Steve Greenlaw and I held our Virginia Faculty Collaboratives flag high in several sessions, as did the Faculty Collaboratives leader and chief egger-on, AAC&U’s Susan Albertine. Susan was very generous in her shout-outs to our work, and joyfully connected us with other Faculty Collaboratives leaders to help us continue to get the word out and grow the network. Steve and I had many conversations with other state leaders along these lines, most notably Faculty Collaboratives folks from Wisconsin, California, Utah, and Texas. Some great ideas emerged, so as we say in the biz, “watch this space.”

I can’t add much to Laura Gogia’s intense and detailed analysis of our Twitter Journal Club event on Friday, except to say that I found the event exceptionally stimulating and exhilarating. I can’t imagine a better end to our first week, or a better first reading than “Fifty Shades of Open,”, or a better networked encounter with that first reading. I am deeply grateful to Laura for jumping in to make this event possible, even though she had only about four days to prepare. If we do indeed make the road by walking, it’s important to have what Christina Engelbart calls “expedition quality” people to walk alongside who’ll help to make that road. Laura’s expedition quality, through and through. Special thanks and a big shout-out to Jeffrey Pomerantz, one of the essay’s authors, whose presence lent special excitement to the event. Jeffrey’s insights in the article were extended into the Twittersphere in our conversation. He was most generous and thoughtful, and we are grateful for his participation. (And Jeffrey, you know you’re welcome to stick around as long as you want–we’re always open.)

Now it’s week two. What’s on the schedule? Glad you asked. This week we’re reading the immortal essay “As We May Think,” written by Vannevar Bush and published just as World War II was ending. Here are four ways to engage with this essay in our networked community:

Synchronous events:

Wednesday, February 1, at noon ET: “Associative Trails, Online Annotation, and ‘As We May Think’”: a webcast with Jeremy Dean, Director of Education, and Jon Udell, Director, Integrations, both of whom work for Hypothes.is, an online annotation platform whose mission is “to enable a conversation around the world’s knowledge.”
In addition to reading “As We May Think” prior to the webcast, consider setting up a Hypothes.is account for yourself and glancing over the annotations that already exist for the Vannevar Bush essay. You might want to make a few annotations yourself, or perhaps reply to some of the ones you find.
For the webcast, we’ll be using the Twitter hashtag #openlearning17 for our backchannel, and for asking questions of Jeremy and Jon. Don’t miss this extraordinary opportunity to engage with two leading representatives of what Vannevar Bush foresaw as networked learning “trailblazers.”

Friday, February 3, noon ET: Twitter Chat on “As We May Think” and Open Learning. 
This Twitter chat will continue our consideration of Bush’s essay, with a particular emphasis on open learning, the goals of our course, and the Faculty Collaboratives project generally. Here we’ll do the “crosswalks” Susan Albertine has encouraged us to do between open learning, mind-liberating education, and the AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise initiative. Once again, we’ll use our course’s Twitter hashtag, #openlearning17.

And asynchronously:

**Keep those blogs and tweets coming! This week we encourage special attention to our main reading, “As We May Think,” but as always, we’re interested to know what’s on your mind and heart about anything connected to open learning. Don’t forget that linking to a colleague’s blog post is a great way to strengthen the network! For a beautiful explanation of the power of hyperlinking, look no farther than our own Connected Learning Coach’s hyperlinking infographic.

**Consider also annotating “As We May Think.” There’s a rich conversation there already, but it’s great to add our voices and extend the range of topics to include open learning in particular. Tag your annotations any way you want, but remember to include openlearning17 as one of the tags so we can tally and collect the annotations more easily. It’s all about building the resources together! To get started with online annotation, go to Hypothes.is and sign up for an account. Hypothes.is also has lots of short, effective video tutorials to help get you up and running. And as always, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Open Learning ’17 community for help, too.

Week Two is underway Can you find one or two colleagues who’d add to the conversation? Let ’em in!

What a week to be discussing access and transparency as facets of open! Maybe because of the political events of this first week of a new presidential term, including the attempt to limit access to government funding scientific information, the access and transparency aspects of Pomerantz article “Fifty shades of open” resonated with me especially as I was reading.

In my workshops with faculty, we often begin with what most of us think of as the most impactful facet of open: gratis, or free of cost. This means a great deal to our students at this point and I think it will mean a great deal to our institutions soon as well, but it is a narrow focus to stop there. I have faculty ask if its permissible to employ fair use or to use licensed library resources as a part of their open courses. I tell them yes because I don’t want to limit their ability or motivation to provide a course free of costly materials to their students, and though I often want to add a caveat that its not truly in the spirit of open if they do it that way, I rarely do so. I struggle with how to frame that point without reaching so high into theoretical openness that would cause people to abandon practical openness.

But the article linked above got me thinking about the many ways we use that word, and what it really means in different contexts. We are careful to discuss definitions in our workshops and talk about the rights that we are looking for to make sure the materials we are using are useful in the ways we need them to be, but our focus in the end, is on gratis more than libre.

As Pomerantz points out, “openness breeds more openness” and I think maybe this is the way to frame my caveat about freely accessible and all the other rights that come with something that is open. “Openness is not free [of costs]” he continues. We need our students to become working people who contribute to that “virtuous cycle” of creating knowledge and who see the value in a culture that shares knowledge and learning freely. Without this part of an open education, I’m not sure if open can really be sustainable. As the saying goes, “freedom isn’t free.”