About the SDLCenter

About the

The Science of Distributed Learning Center is a distributed center with a focus on the nature of learning as a distributed process across different levels of research analysis and across a wide range of content areas and learners. The SDLCenter involves researchers from the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Irvine; Harvard University, Northwestern University; the University of Michigan; Chukyo University (Japan); University of Helsinki (Finland).

We hope to advance the science of distributed learning, in ways that will lead to powerful new ways to understand and to improve learning. The distributed nature of learning is becoming increasingly salient with the uses of new communication and computational technologies. We are developing ways to cross the boundaries between the different approaches to the study of learning, so that each can gain by drawing upon its strengths while using the others to overcome its weaknesses with the strengths of others.

We are systematically comparing and contrasting theoretical frameworks, research methods, analytical techniques, and other conceptual tools used in different approaches to the science of learning, in order to seek those used successfully in one approach that might help solve problems facing other approaches. Students, including a substantial number of underrepresented minority students, serve a central role in this boundary-crossing activity. The Center uses a variety of interactional media, including face-to-face, email, video conferencing, asynchronous conferencing, and multi-user virtual environments. The Center promotes a variety of interactional frameworks, including explicit boundary-crossing activities, internships and tele-internships, geographically distributed university seminars, and distributed knowledge building activities.

The Center integrates into its own practice the distributed learning principles and guidelines that it uncovers, and through a strong self-evaluation activity, is determining which of these principles, guidelines, and activities are effective for which learning, research, and development goals. By involving a group of researchers that are distributed geographically (including international participants from Japan and Finland), we are systematically exploring ways to overcome the barriers that other attempts to establish distributed research have encountered, and the Center will share those interactional frameworks and media found to be effective with other learning researchers and practitioners.