Similar conversations have been taking place at major universities around the world, as dozens - 74, at the last count - rush to sign up. Science, engineering and technology courses have been in the vanguard of the movement, but offerings in management, humanities and the arts are growing in popularity (see 'MOOCs rising'). "In 25 years of observing higher education, I've never seen anything move this fast," says Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist at Stanford and one of the leaders of an ongoing, campus-wide discussion series known as Education's Digital Future.

Good MOOC's, in their view, foreground and sustain the social dimension of learning and active practices, i.e., knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption. To a limited extent, certain experiments in MOOC's that foreground social media participation over "content mastery" realize some of the ideals of Siemen and Downes.

The shock is that the methods used by these hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages. If you think I'm being a critical outsider, then you might like to know that one of the leading lights in the movement, Peter Norvig, agrees with me. He even makes a joke in his recent Ted Talk  that lectures in MOOCs are just like the 16th century monastic lecture theaters complete with the guy at the back sleeping! khamon- probably an accurate assessment of non-connectivist MOOCs, the kind I do not attend.

The formation of the online social network was explored by testing two distinct network attachment logics: strategic selection and homophily. Both logics received some support. Taken together, the results are suggestive of a "performance-based clustering" phenomenon within the OSS online community in which most collaborations involve accomplished developers, and novice developers tend to partner with less accomplished and less experienced peers.