Connectedness has always been central to peoples’ lives and careers. Terms such as co-operation, collaboration, communication, and persuasion refer to specific aspects of connectedness, which encapsulates the spectrum of person-to-person interactions that shape our daily lives. A substantial body of literature spanning the last 70 years documents the individual, social and cultural benefits that connecting with others brings (Lewis, 1953; Manderson, 1948; Reis, 1984), improving our life satisfaction, and enhancing wellbeing. Equally, connectedness allows us to prosper in our career pathways by boosting productivity, improving our confidence, finding us opportunities, and supporting our skill and knowledge development (Argyle, 1981; Friend & Cook, 1992). Seminal work by educational theorists such as Berger and Luckmann (1966) explored the social construction of knowledge and learning, investigating how a more social approach to teaching could support educational outcomes; however, the development of social capabilities remained largely implicit in higher education curricula until the early 1990s (Johnson & Johnson, 1990). The last two decades have seen a greater recognition of the importance of social interaction to learning in higher education, evidenced by universities’ increasing focus on developing their learners’ social capabilities. Curriculum emphases have shifted towards promoting not only disciplinary and technical capabilities, but also transferable skills that can be applied in many different contexts (Clanchy & Ballard, 1995). Capabilities such as communication, collaboration and teamwork have become ubiquitous in university courses, emerging as some of the most valuable, and yet tacit and often difficult to teach, skills that learners from every discipline develop during their time at university. Extending from several decades of research into social learning in formal educational environments, in the 1990s scholars started to explore learning that occurred through informal and networked social mechanisms. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) seminal work on communities of practice contributed significantly towards a broad recognition of learning processes that occur through informal participation in shared practice. By the early 2000s, with the rise of social media, educators started to acknowledge the roles that digital networks play in learning, and the importance and distinctiveness of communication and collaboration in digital contexts. For connectivist learning theorists (Downes, 2005; Siemens, 2005), knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and learning consists of the ability to navigate and make sense of those networks.