Ooh, yummy thread. I had a gut reaction, reading your post Joe, that asks me to think more, but intuitively and from practice, I think the network/community thing is not a layer, but both an essential requirement for connectivism AND the mechanism for both scaling and successfully supporting learning in a complex environment (maybe I should have said “complex adaptive environment” but I caution myself from using terms I am not sure I fully understand!)

The networks and communities are WHY connectivsm work, not icing. Does that make any sense? I’m feeling my way into this one, rather than thinking…