Promoting connections around the fringes of virtual classes

Who remembers queuing in awkward silence... which eventually led to carefully negotiated acquaintance and possibly lifelong friendships, or at least learning where you were meant to be next? Social Network Analysis takes a look at who interacts with who on the basis of digital activity traces in terms of the data recorded about interactions. I'm wondering how a typical SNA map of a class/lecture would look before and after the COVID flip to online versions. We used to worry about student chatter in lectures. While this is happening less, if at all, in online classes, and we are glad to still bring students to an 'event', they now join with blinkers on: zooming into the session and back out again causes a kind of tunnel vision with respect to peers. In SNA terms, this would look like a particularly tight hub and spoke network. Although a lecture format is sometimes mocked for requiring one-way traffic from the lecturer to the students, in fact there is a lot more latitude for connections in a lecture setting than zoom, unless there are deliberate efforts to break up those hard-wired spoke-to-hub connections. There actually is no-one else in the room to turn to - what chance purple and black will rub virtual shoulders? How can we enable or promote connections between students? Would putting students into breakout rooms at regular intervals be enough to enable the helpful social learning milieu...? Would #togethermode ...?

PS. Lesley Gourley's keynote at NLC2020 https://www.networkedlearning.aau.dk/nlc2020/keynote-speakers/#402217

Do lecture capture systems promote connections?

Just returning from a presentation about a pilot in lecture capture using Echo360. In a traditional University setting, my hang-ups were:

• if the best this is is a revision aid, that's an expensive revision aid.
• if this would be useful for students who missed the lecture for some reason, cant they do what anyone else has ever done, get the summary or notes from a peer and do some reading around.
  
• £ for £ there is an almost infinitely greater value for lifelong learning in a simple reference list at the back of an appropriate journal article than there is in a recorded lecture. This also goes for other suggested uses, like recording a summary instead of the whole lecture or recording a 'pre-reading'
  
• if we are aiming at students' epistemic fluency, this only encourages them to rote learn - evidence the statistics that say the traffic sky-rockets at exam time.
• how does a recorded lecture encourage them along the cognitive apprenticeship road to mastery in the given discipline?
  
• if we want to keep ephemeral lecture speech lively, how much will knowing your every word is reified prevent you from doing things 'on the fly' that may afterwards seem unprofessional?
  
• limiting the potential audience to just our students (who login to blackboard - assuming they can!) is naff and old hat.
• what is a lecture good for anyway? If your lecture is the same every time then you probably shouldnt be giving it as a lecture. The students in a lecture have given ceded some level of pedagogic control over to you, they're giving their attention to what you have to show and say - will they do that at any other time (in competition with, for example, their chores or family/social time). I would not think anyone would want to review my lectures because they do not contain much raw 'content' - the objective is to stimulate them to think - for that limited time that they have volunteered their attention to what I have got to say...
  

If it was possible for students to interact by starting discussion threads at particular points in the lecture, that might have some promise in terms of promoting connections... but it isn't.
There is a clearer case for providing canned lectures to disparate distance students, but, even there, I would be feeling towards only making them available for a limited time.
Rant over.