Jon Dron and I have been having fun developing a paper for ELearn in which we’ve been wrestling with the distinctions between three granularities of social software. In the process it has helped me to clarify Stephen Downe’s distinctions between groups and networks, the way that certain tools seem optimized for different levels of these granularities (for example blogs are better for networks than for groups) and it has helped us to create a rationale for use of collectives in formal education. Jon has defined the three granularities of Social Learning 2.0 in a recent blog posting.

In this post I provide graphic overviews of the three followed by a table comparing the three applications for educational use.
Groups:

groups

Networks

networks

Collectives


collectivepng.png
Social Learning 2.0

soc2.0

In the following table (click to enlarge) we attempt to categorize the three levels according to a variety of educational concerns.

social2-tablepng.png

We are most interested in hearing from you if these granularity ideas, graphics and table help or hinder your understanding of new networked tools and contexts.