So, I was lucky enough to meet up with Halley Suitt for lunch today to talk about blogging and Harvard and knowledge management and all that. She’s local here in Cambridge. It confirmed for me, yet again, the importance of the face-to-face complement to working with people online. It’s increasingly clear to me that online interaction has both huge advantages and definite limits. The place it is clearest is in the teaching realm: pure distance learning allows certain people to get access to certain education that they otherwise wouldn’t get, which is good, but it’s *much* better if you can combine the online with the in-person. It’s presumably true too that if you’re working with someone outside the academic setting, sharing ideas, etc., that the face-to-face bit matters. (Harvard President Larry Summers said that it’s like the riddle of the football game: if you have the choice of sitting in the comfort of your home with a perfect view of the game on TV for free, why do people shell out lots of money to freeze on terribly uncomfortable seats and have bad refreshments to fill Gillette Stadium every Sunday?). Blogs = no exception.
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