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Jon Dron et al.
network of connections may be linked through a popular blogging site and the blogs themselves may
be connected through trackbacks and blogrolls to each other, allowing people to traverse a network
structure in order to explore connected ideas, conversations and people. Networks and sets may
overlap and help to form and inform each other. For example, through set-oriented tags displayed as
a tagcloud, we may follow links and discover networked connections. We may treat a network as a set
by counting similar objects within it, and treat a group as an analysable network. We may analyse the
structure of the network itself to discover the patterns and shapes of connections within it – who is
most connected, how strong are the different kinds of connections and so on. Learning in networks is
quite different from learning in groups (Downes, 2007).
Despite our efforts above to differentiate these aggregations of the many we do not wish to imply that
these are hierarchical or exclusive categories. It is useful to think of them as being part of emergent
organization that Kontopoulos (Kontopoulos, 1993) describes as a heterarchy. "Hierarchy means
complete inclusion and supersession; heterarchy means partial inclusion and tangledness." (p.64)
2. Why this matters
Different virtual social spaces are implicitly or explicitly designed to support different social forms. A
system designed to support collaboration and centrally managed closed groups may have different
functions and be informed by different design decisions than one built to support bottom-up network
formation, even though they may share many of the same tools. This profoundly affects the nature of
interactions within them. ‘We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape our lives’
(Churchill, 1943) or, as McLuhan said it, ‘we shape our tools and then our tools shape us’ (McLuhan,
1964). Using a system that supports a particular social form may often lead to difficulties for those
trying to use it to support a different form, even though the tools and affordances can be used that
way. By way of analogy, a lecture theatre may be used to support small group work, but the design of
the tiered forward-facing seats makes it more difficult to conduct smaller team discussions than to
conduct lectures.
As McLuhan (ibid) also noted the content of any new media is (at first) always the content of the older
media. The design of early learning management tools was based upon the existing shapes and
forms found in educational and training institutions and enables the shapes and forms of pedagogies,
processes and communities that had arisen in those physical settings. Unfortunately, many of those
forms had little to do with pedagogy or process and everything to do with physical constraint,
economies of scale and path dependencies. Universities created libraries because books were hard
to come by, lectures to share the scarce resource of learned scholars, classes and timetables to
efficiently allocate those resources, and group-oriented pedagogies because of the constraints of
physical space. Distance universities are, despite freedom from many of those restrictions, equally
driven by constraints: pedagogies of isolation, mainly behaviourist or cognitivist in style, have been
necessary in a technological landscape where communication was slow or prohibitively expensive.
They also inherited the limitations of traditional universities because they had to compete in the same
ecology and thus had to satisfy expectations (and prejudices) about forms of accreditation, roles,
organisational structures and so on that stretched back to medieval forebears (Norton, 1909).
Whether at a distance or face-to-face, the combination of structural constraints that have formed
universities made the group by far the most natural form in traditional institutional learning. It was the
only plausible form of organisation that allowed sharing of scarce resources and afforded the benefits
of both individual didactic teaching and social learning.
In contrast, educational social software typified by systems such as Elgg, Mahara, and BuddyPress is
predominantly network-oriented. Although all such systems do have support for groups (often
explicitly) they are architecturally predisposed to network interactions. They also usually offer strong
support for indeterminate sets (implicitly through features like tags, ‘like this’ buttons, ‘what’s hot’
indicators, as well as through publication tools). Content and interaction are discovered and shared
through links with individuals and their content or through set-based features like popularity metrics
and tags, less through formal groups. Even when formal groups are available, it is generally
impossible to ignore or hide the set and net structures that are parallel, overlaid or overlapping, and
which compete constantly for attention, diffusing and blurring the boundaries that are innate in group
forms. This allows for more open, connected learning that is not bound by the limits of the classroom,
that can better fit changing and shifting needs, that allows richer knowledge construction,
serendipitous knowledge discovery and great opportunities for self-guided, motivated learning.
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