Reputation, everybody knows who is the best student in a class or a group, students and teachers do know that. So recognizing is not a problem I think.
Please publish your ideas and writing on connectivism. Lots of tweets only retweet sources from the CCK homepage (http://cck11.mooc.ca/index.html) I am curious about what people write on connectivism, not about the content of this home page of CCK11. One of the core aspects of connectionist learning is student transforming and elaborating on their new connections.
example of connected learning. I have some problem with a piece of software. It does not what i want it to do. I know of a forum where people discuss this software. I ask for help, explain my problem and wait for an answer. (while waiting I see a question of a forum member, and I know the answer, so I write an answer to that question) After some time my question has an answer. I do not understand it all, so I ask some questions, ans a discussion starts, others become involved. And I get an answer. Now somebody with the same question will find this discussion and read the answer. Even if I come across the same problem and want to read the answer, it is there. We were connected, it is an open discussion.