Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Giving life

I really enjoyed the devotional today on interactions with others that are motivated by love and by doing so we give them life. How do we do that in Distance Education?

2 comments:

  1. Yes - I think that love can be communicated in an online setting. Seems though that it is much easier if a relationship has already been developed in a f2f context.

    I wonder if the issue really is not one of possible vs not possible but one of efficiency - that it is more efficient to develop relationships in a rich, personal f2f context. On the other hand I think of how much you can learn about somebody by reading letters from them. I wrote letters back and forth with my wife before we were married for three years and you learn things about each other that way that are very different than what you might learn only face-to-face.

    A relative of love is the idea that Andrea is studying and that is "caring." An important dimension of caring is "reciprocity" - not that caring has to go both ways but that caring is at least acknowledged.

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  2. Interesting thoughts. My sister and her husband are writers. For the majority of "dating" she was in California and he was in Hawaii. They sent letters back and forth for while and she said that she didn't really know each other until they both lived in California. I am guessing that you already knew your wife before you wrote letters back and forth where that wasn't the case for my sister. I think that online interaction is much more effective if you already have established some level of community face-to-face.

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