Buzz and I continue to be impressed at the level of participation and the quality of discourse in our on-line class. We're also surprised by the level of comfort with technology. The program administrators had led us to believe there would be a lot of difficulty and frustration with asking the students to learn to use a new environment, but there has been no trouble at all. In fact, we could have ramped up a lot faster had we known how quickly students would adapt. Still, it's worth having a gradual introduction to let students start off easily. So far, the questions have all been pretty general and about pedagogy and science education. This week, the students have their first ecology question. The first student to answer it missed the distinction I was trying to make: I asked about interactions among maples in a population and the student responded about interactions between maples and other organisms in a community. I probably should have worded the question more carefully to exclude interspecific interactions, but that's OK -- its useful to see that the idea is a new one with these students -- I'm looking forward to seeing how the students respond as they move forward. I'm still not sold on on-line education, but it has cleared its first hurdle in my mind -- with a bright, well-motivated bunch of students, you can get some interesting discourse around a set questions. Now we'll see if we can get some collaborative projects off-the-ground.