Community Lives!

by Jas Faulkner 

litbooksJeremy is finishing a story while Kaia and I look at the clock.  We’re waiting with a dozen other classmates for the big hand to click over to the twelve and the little hand to scoot to the six.  At that point, at least for us, class is in session.

Not that anyone would notice if we were late.

After all, Jeremy is somewhere near Jackson Hole ,  I am in Nashville, Kaia is in Victoria, BC,  and the rest of our study group is scattered all over the globe. Our classroom is a digital  pocket of space and time, an online intellectual stasis chamber situated somewhere in 2009 at Yale.  Open Yale Courses  is home to English 300 Introduction to the Theory of Literature, a class that the fifteen of us watch as a group and then discuss in a private email list for the rest of the week.  It is one of the forty-five online courses Yale offers free of charge to anyone with a desire to know more.

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