Connections as Content: "My students clearly realized that studying from their own notes, their own blog entries, would be somehow inadequate, that the static entry residing on their blog was just a catalyst and that the key part of their understanding grew out of that catalyst. What the social network did with the information seemed to matter more than the initial node. It was the distribution over the social web of the class blogosphere that contributed more to their understanding than the initial entry, regardless of how insightful it might have been."
Comment: In most situations, we only see a part of the whole. Each person within a network sees different parts. In order for us to get an accurate picture of the whole, we need to find ways to form connections between the various perspectives. Making a network (or a node in a network) aware of itself provides great value in understanding the "big picture". In this sense, the original content of learning is at best a catalyst for connection-forming. I recently read an article still extolling "content as king". In my own thinking, I've moved far away from that perspective. Aggregation is king. Networking is king. Content plays a role, but as the least stable element in a learning network (simply because content changes quickly, whereas connections to information sources last much longer), content is no longer central.