Groups, Networks, and Collectives

After reading

Dron, J., & Anderson, T. (2009). On the Design of Collective Applications (Vol. 4, pp. 368–374). Presented at the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering

and

Dron, J., & Anderson, T. (2009). How the Crowd Can Teach. In S. Hatzipanagos & S. Warburton, Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies (1st ed., pp. 1–17). Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

and conducting interviews, I’ve been thinking that perhaps I’m targeting the wrong layer of social entity for my social tools. The papers above discuss an important classification of ways of looking at the behaviour of sets of people.  Dron and Anderson define the group as a small social unit where people know each other (eg. a class); a network as a set of individuals linked by connections of some kind (eg. friendships, or comments on each others’ posts), and a collective as something that emerges from the mass actions of a large group of people. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but rather are different ways of viewing the actions and behaviours of sets of people.

I’ve been developing my tools as a way of allowing the whole cohort of medical students to share resources, but I’ve been mentally modelling them as a group in Dron & Anderson’s definition - a set of people who know each other socially, and for whom the online social tools are a side-channel for other modes of interpersonal interaction. I’ve been think of ways of making the network explicit, but haven’t done much beyond exposing their class groupings and allowing commenting and rating of each others’ resources. But my software design is really for collective software - software that succeeds though its emergent properties - in my case, the collaborative group sharing and rating is intended to allow students to collectively discover the best learning resources.

But my interviews with students are making it clear that what I’m designing isn’t what they’re really looking for (it’s a small sample so far, but the message seems coherent). They are working at the group level - in this case, in the small problem-based learning tutorials groups that they are learning in. They are creating Facebook and other groups to support these small learning groups, and the collective behaviour of the cohort isn’t of real interest to them. Even the network itself isn’t of real consideration; their actual social network is embedded in Facebook, and there isn’t really to a large degree a separate academic social network beyond that created through the course structure of PBL groups and Clinical School groups.

What does this mean for my research and development? Firstly, I need to focus on the real environment that the students are working in, and create affordances that suit that environment. For example, creating small group sharing spaces will be of more value, and allow these groups to share resources with each other without worrying about the wider cohort judging them or freeloading off their hard work. Secondly, I need to keep a sharp focus on the functionality I’m adding, explicitly noting what level of social unit I’m targeting. This means adding a tool to track, for each feature I add, what social level it is addressing (and if it meaningfully addresses any level).