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kept distinct. Even Vygotsky, who pioneered in distinguishing the social from the
individual, would use terms like “social” and “intersubjective” to apply to anything
from a dyad to all of society. Within the learning sciences, “knowledge build-
ing” has been used at every level, resulting in confusion about whether classrooms
are communities-of-practice, for instance. The characteristics of scientific research
communities were projected onto classrooms, project groups and individuals with-
out carefully distinguishing their different ways of building knowledge.
Such ambiguity of terminological usage even led to pseudo-problems, which can
now be resolved by the theory of group cognition, showing how small groups medi-
ate between the individual and the social phenomena. To take one example, the
seeming irreconcilability of subjective and objective time can be bridged by con-
sidering how small groups co-construct their shared temporal reference system.
Significantly, the co-construction can be observed in logs of interaction and ana-
lyzed in detail—which cannot be done for either the subjective sense of internal
time (Husserl, 1917/1991) or the abstract dimension of scientifically measured time
(Heidegger, 1927/1996).
The move from the individual to the group level of description entails an
important philosophical step: from cognitivism to post-cognitivism. This step
has its basis in philosophy (Hegel, 1807/1967; Heidegger, 1927/1996; Marx,
1867/1976; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002; Wittgenstein, 1953), in social science
(Bourdieu, 1972/1995; Geertz, 1973; Giddens, 1984a) and in analytic meth-
ods of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967; Livingston,
1987; Sacks, 1962/1995; Schegloff, 2007). Post-cognitive theories influential in
CSCL and the learning sciences include the following: the critique of cognitivism
(Dreyfus, 1972; Polanyi, 1962; Schön, 1983; Winograd & Flores, 1986), situated
action (Suchman, 1987), situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), activity theory
(Engeström, 1987), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1996), actor-network theory
(Latour, 2007) and knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996).
In two seminal statements of post-cognitivist theory, Hutchins has explicitly
pointed to group cognitive phenomena: Cognitive processes may be distributed
across the members of a social group (Hollan, Hutchins & Kirsh, 2000, p. 176). The
cognitive properties of groups are produced by interaction between structures inter-
nal to individuals and structures external to individuals (Hutchins, 1996, p. 262).
The group performing the cognitive task may have cognitive properties that differ
from the cognitive properties of any individual (Hutchins, 1996, p. 176). However,
rather than focusing on these group phenomena in detail, he analyzes socio-technical
systems and the cognitive role of highly developed artifacts (airplane cockpits, ship
navigation tools). Certainly, these artifacts have encapsulated past cultural knowl-
edge (community cognition), and Hutchins' discussions of this are important. But
in focusing on what is really the cultural level—characteristically for a cultural
anthropologist—he does not analyze the cognitive meaning making of the group
itself.
In general, the related literature on small groups and on post-cognitivist phenom-
ena provide some nice studies of the pivotal role of small groups but do not account
for this level of description theoretically. They are almost always in the final analysis
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