Jackie asked, Do you think it's easier to post online than to be with each other face-to-face?

I've spent a lot of time working-and-reflecting about educational uses of the web, where the question Jackie asks is a really important one. In one of these discussions about a year ago, on intellectual exchange as a medium for community building (on the web and beyond), we agreed that "we tend to be afraid of being attacked, being ignored, being held accountable for thoughts of our own, being changed by thoughts of other people, being judged wrong."

Now, we've had some mixed success in this forum in dealing with these fears, but I do think that the kind of talking that's gone on here--where we don't know what one another looks like, or how others might be responding to what we are posting, as we are writing and putting it up--is one very productive way of going about facing them.

So what I would say (in response to Jackie's question, and drawing again on that talk) is not that it's not necessarily "easier" to post online than to be with each other face-to-face, but that new thoughts and questions can come up precisely because of our "disconnection," that talking a-synchronously and intermittently this-a-way let's us engage in a different "kind of self-reflectiveness" that might leads us into new insights we might not arrive @ while we're looking @ one another in the flesh, and gauging what we have to say in response to what we see.

What do others think?