In the realm of collaborative intelligence, distributed intelligence offers a compelling lens for understanding how knowledge is co-constructed across people, tools, and environments. Coined by Roy Pea (1993), the concept challenges the notion of cognition as an isolated process, instead framing it as something that is distributed—across social interactions, cultural artifacts, and digital technologies.

Distributed intelligence refers to the idea that thinking and problem-solving are enhanced when supported by external resources—whether those are other people, digital platforms, or multimodal representations. In e-learning ecologies, this means learners engage with a network of meaning-making that extends far beyond their own minds.