A slice of humble pie

I feel a bit foolish over a comment I posted this morning. I'm not writing this post to attempt to absolve myself of any wrongdoing. Instead, I think it's a teachable moment, for myself and my students if I decide to tell them about it.

Here's the short of what happened: David Jakes wrote about an analogy on Posterous between student binders and the cloud. He ended it with the line: The cloud is the new binder. I left a sarcastic comment.

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I follow David on Twitter and I subscribe to his blog and his Posterous blog. Before I commented on his analogy post, I thought I understood David well enough -- though I've never met him -- that I could be sarcastic without coming off as rude.

I learned two things about myself:

1. I need to stop using sarcasm as an attempt at humor -- online or otherwise. Offline it's a cutting way to get through a conversation. Online it just doesn't work.
2. Following someone's tweets, subscribing to their blog, being privy to some of the conversations they have online does not mean we're buddies.

I refer to many of the people I've connected with online as friends even though I've never met them. I'm not going to take that back now. It made me think about my students, though. A colleague was telling us about her nephew the other day who is in 6th grade and has 500+ friends on Facebook. "450 of them he's never even met!" my colleague said.

My favorite part of going to conferences is meeting people. I will say that unapologetically. I've been to some great sessions and keynotes, but making those face-to-face connections with people I've only known up until then on the Internet is what it's all about.

I had convinced myself I knew David well enough from merely following this thoughts online to leave a buddy-buddy, har har comment on his blog. The kind of thing I'd do with a friend if we were hanging out playing video games. I need to keep perspective on the relationships I have online.