Upon reading The Internet and Higher Thinking by Garrison, Anderson and Archer, I reflected on the collaborative constructivist perspectives mentioned and that teaching and learning transactions should incorporate a learner’s personal sphere into consideration for meaningful knowledge. That was something that I knew instinctively but had never read, written or spoke about in all of my years teaching and that cognition and cognitive development ought not to be divided from social circumstance (Garrison et al., 2000). “The educational process has two sides, one psychological and one social and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following”. (Dewey 1959). From my own personal limited experiences with online learning many years ago, I realized that my limited success in class was due to the missing elements that Garrison mentioned above...

“sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”  – Niel de la Rouviere  Having read much this week about crowds, groups, networks, tribes and demes, I considered what precisely the word node meant. Deciding to look it up in the Merriam- Webster Dictionary, I found there were definitions for the word in different fields such as physics, astronomy, anatomy, botany and grammar. In botany, the...