Online Community, Part II

I poked in on the folks over at The Math Forum @ Drexel time to time throughout the quarter.  My favorite aspect of that site is the plethora of math puzzles that pop up in the various discussion groups.  I use thinking puzzles as "extra credit" points every day before lunch in my school.  The students all compete to figure out the problem first, and when I need a good math puzzle, this was a good site to troll through.  I had intended to post on the site, but never did, probably because my highest math student currently is lower algebra, and I didn't get stuck much.  My online habits as far as forums go have been forming for years, and it proved to be a bit hard to break that mold.  Typically, I post in forums when I have a problem I can't find a solution to by searching the forum first (good net-etiquitte not to double-post a problem).  I also try to "give back" to a forum by posting answers where I can help, but the people on this forum are pretty johhny-on-the-spot, and I didn't have occasion to add original feedback.

In general, I love forums, and have been using them for a long time.  With the advance of good search features (over the news-group days), forums like this one are very helpful for picking the brains of people all over the world.