Us, ourselves, and we: thoughts about social (self-) categorization

In a recent Workshop on community-based learning at the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences (ICLS 2004), one persistent theme was the variety of terms used to describe collections of people (group, community, network, collective) and components of interaction (culture, identity, collaboration, cooperation) in group learning activities. Here, we describe some of the thinking that emerged in those discussions, not as a comprehensive literature review or completely elaborated socio-cultural theory, but rather as an invitation to further discussion. We suggest that a group is the most generic and general social category: all of the analytical units in the literature on collective learning - teams, social networks, and communities - are groups. We argue that these other terms have additional structural characteristics that make them distinct subsets of the generic term group. For example, a team is a group with a common task, a network is a group with strong social ties, and a community is a group with a shared culture. We propose a two-dimensional space of social organizations characterized by shared culture and shared interaction, and suggest both individuals and collectives show a developmental history through the space of collectives, moving from loose group affiliation to increasing identification with, development of, and participation in shared interactions within a shared culture. This analysis suggests, we argue, that: (a) tools to support "collaboration" may need different affordances for different kinds of collectives; (b) understanding different kinds of collectives requires different methodologies; and (c) culture plays a prominent role in the space of collectives we describe, and thus, we argue, should play a significant role in the analysis of any community. We hope that this brief discussion will lead to further work on the social entities within which group learning takes place, on the processes of learning in such settings, and on the technologies that can support such processes.