Lurking

I've just handed in the essay for my Master's paper and now I begin a life again. My research has been based round facilitating and building cognitive presence in online learning environments. Of course lurking and participation came up. While the term “lurker” suggests a negative image, there are many people, who like me at this time, READ lots of blogs and articles but do not necessarily comment or contribute. Although the term lurker tends to refer to one way traffic. Lurker being a negative term, one assumes that no learning is taking place by a person who is not contributing....... I was interested in a quote from a reading by Garrison and Cleveland – Jones p. 144 who believe “students may be cognitively present while not interacting or engaged overtly.” How do we know, how can we tell what goes on in one's mind?
From here I began to think about f2f environments and those passive students. How much cognitive processing are they doing? What assumptions are we making about their learning?
My thought for the day.