The group can also be a larger collective, such as a classroom of students or a global community contributing asynchronously to an extended discourse on a problem or topic or to a knowledge repository like Wikipedia.
The thought takes place in the individual’s mind (inside the head) and can be expressed in the (external) world through speech, gesture, writing, artifacts.
[6] • Larger groups of people, artifacts and cultural settings (activity systems) may interact, resulting in collective intelligence or distributed cognition.
[7][8] Small groups of people can engage in activities such as mathematical problem solving and can accomplish intellectual achievements.
These accomplishments often proceed by means of interactions in which ideas emerge from the discourse between multiple perspectives and cannot be credited to any one person.
The meaning of what was said is determined at the group level of the interactions, and is not in general attributable primarily to the expression of pre-existing mental representations of the individual participants.
In contrast to video analysis, there is no need to worry about camera angles, lighting, transcriptions, interview protocols, coding reliability, etc.
The VMT Project's analysis looks closely, line-by-line, at how chat postings build upon each other sequentially; how they respond to previous postings and elicit future ones; how they establish the social order of the group interaction; how they repair problems of co-construction of shared group meanings; how they construct, reference, remember and name resources that they use in their meaning-making.
The knowing that groups build up in manifold forms is what becomes internalized by their members as individual learning and externalized in their communities as certifiable knowledge.
The motivation for the VMT research project emerges from the previous CSCW and CSCL studies reported in this book.
• Stahl[10] presents 28 chapters analyzing various aspects of the study of group cognition as conducted by the Virtual Math Teams Project.
The VMT project was designed specifically to study group cognition in small teams of students discussing mathematics online.
A scientific methodology for designing experiments, collecting data, analyzing logs and developing theory is discussed in the book.
It includes philosophic, technical, historical, mathematical and pedagogical considerations—providing a multi-faceted view of the VMT research project.
• Stahl[12] is a monograph analyzing the work of a group of three students as they become introduced to dynamic mathematics during eight hour-long online sessions using VMT with GeoGebra.
It collects important theoretical articles in the CSCL journal as well as publications by the editor, Gerry Stahl on associated concepts and methodologies.