There is an ongoing discussion about how to understand intelligence in groups/networks. The discussion revolves around the distinction between collectivism and connectivism.
Post by Terry Anderson
Collectivism and Connectivism
Post by George Siemens
Collective Intelligence? Nah. Connective Intelligence
These two concepts are interesting to a discussion of where knowledge is situated in organizations – or in broader networks. An interesting aspect of the concepts is that they describe learning and knowledge in relation to social interaction on the web. I believe the concepts could be informed by theories such as activity theory, communities of practice and distributed cognition.
On the other hand, these concepts and the new forms of social interaction on the web challenge these theories, because the theories are not developed with such interactions in mind, and, thus, need to be rethought or expanded.
Ahh - yes - these are very interesting discussions. I think they actually have a longer history, which we can trace back to e.g. differences between a socio-constructivist approach and socio-cultural/shared cognition approach, which are distinctions made by Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye and O’Malley (see ref below).
The three perspectives are argued to represent different ways of approaching collaborative learning, and different ways of understanding the relations between the individual and the group as the unit of analysis. This can be boiled down to: fundamentally understanding groups either as consisting of individual and relatively independent cognitive systems, which exchange messages or it can be stressed as a single cognitive system with its own properties. The former approach is especially connected to the socio-constructivist approach drawing on a Piaget’s theories, whereas the latter is connected to socio-cultural (drawing on Vygotsky) and shared cognition (Suchman and Lave).
This actually seems also to resonate to some degree with the discussions of collectivism/connectivism.
I very much agree that activity theory and communities of practice theory can inform the discusssion, but I also agree that the ideas challenge these theories….However, in Wenger’s recent research plan I think there is actually a move away from positioning the community as the center of analysis. Instead it seems to be focusing more on notions of boundary crossing and development of identity through multimembership in overlapping communities. Likewise e.g. Engeström has started to work with the notion of knotworking
In his ideas about ‘knotworking’ I believe he is pointing more
fleeting and unstable type of work that requires interaction across boundaries by forming provisional teams, groups and other more temporary constellations that draw on the experiences and knowledge from different professions and networks.
In my PhD thesis I actually discussed these developments in socio-cultural theories and also coupled it with developments within the area of networked learning - it was in the beginning of Chapter 12 (p. 417-422 (print) 441-446 PDF). My idea was actually to connect this more thoroughly to the recent web-developments, but I never got around to that (though I believe there is an obvious connection). Anyways - for those interested the thesis can be found here:
It would definitely be interesting to discuss these issues more!
DILLENBOURG, P., BAKER, M., BLAYE, A. & O’MALLEY, C.(1996) The evolution of research on collaborative learning.
In E. Spada & P. Reiman (Eds) Learning in Humans and Machine: Towards an interdisciplinary learning science. (Pp. 189-
211). Oxford: Elsevier.
Thanks for the comment and the references. I think you have an important point, when you state that the theories differ in their approach to the relationship between individual and group or the individual and the social. One approach has the individual and individual cognition as a starting point (Piaget) and views the social as “connected” individuals; in other words, social connections can strengthen individual cognition. The other approach has social practice as a starting point (Vytogsky) and holds that individual cognition is dependent on a social practice.