http://www.fininformatica.it/wp/cck08-week-4-groups-networks-and-col

A little premise: I’m following the CCK08 at my own pace.. So I’m still working on week 5 stuff…

I’m very impressed by the Dron & Anderson’s paper on groups, networks and collectives.

The authors succeed to detect the key concepts on which most network technologies are grounded.

While reading, my internal connections lead me to remind a very nice diagram by Scott Wilson. Maybe it’s not so popular as his first one about PLE (the well-known Future VLE graph) but to me this new version is more meaningful.

The new Scott’s diagram shows a three-tier structure, in which I see very well an overlap with the concepts of groups, networks and collectives.

The networked learner belong to all these three types of structures and presumably is going to use a variety of tools.

So, this is my remixed version of the Scott’s diagram, with very simple annotations on groups, networks and collectives:

From right to left, from institutions to individuals, I suppose it is likely to find groups/networks/collectives-oriented tools.

To me, it’s very interesting the middle tier, where I see systems like Elgg, a sort of middleware between institutions and individuals, i.e. between formal and informal learning, i.e. between groups and collectives.

In the perspective of Networked Lifelong Learning (that is the main topic of my PhD..), I guess that this intermediation may be a key point: groups are often too closed and limited, collectives may be dispersive and confusing, networks may fit well.