Jon Dron & Terry Anderson explain communities and groups in their book Teaching Crowds: Learning & Social Media.
Communities and networks are two similar, but different aspects of social learning. Communities or groups are based around a shared interest.
Groups are normally able to stand as an entity on its own, with its own sense of entity. It is often possible to list the members of a group. A group often has lines of authority and various roles for members as well as rules that govern behaviour in the group. Groups are often created for a purpose and there are restrictions on participation. The intention of the group is to advance knowledge about their topic or work towards a shared purpose.
Within a primary education setting groups are often structured around particular task or activity such as stage teams, working groups, subject teams, committees, project teams.
Facebook is full of groups structured for educators. Examples listed below include Australian groups aimed at Primary Educators.
Group meetings may be scheduled and the community may meet face-to-face or altogether online. As the Facebook conditions above indicated, groups and communities have a shared practice. The success of a community is a reflection of the participants and their involvement, their willingness to participate as a group member. Groups have their downsides, personality clashes, tensions when the group isn’t heading in the way certain members anticipated, and mutiny and lack of participation all cause groups and communities to collapse. A group will function if there are several ‘star’ members providing information while other members simply look and listen with very little participation.
Networks, in this case learning networks, consist of points of information or nodes such as people, ideas or concepts, with connections between them. They are based on the learning theory of connectivism.
A network lacks the top-down structure of a group and instead evolves through interactions. Entry and exit of a network is much more informal. Connections are easily formed and cut often simply through lack of engagement. Participation is often based on what is relevant to learning needs at that time, rather than committing to a community.
While personal learning communities may consist of people with modus operandi, to an outside observer an individual’s network may seem random but has in fact been carefully built and meets the needs of the educator. Often we are not aware of all the people who form part of the greater network. Network creators filter information by choosing to connect to different nodes.
