Distributed cognition is in some ways quite similar to The Social Construction of Knowledge.  It relies on cooperative settings to function in the way it is intended.  It is a form of cognitive learning and is based on those who interact with the learning through being a part of the surroundings and interacting with it.  Not just items, but also requires a strong social interaction between several people and is best realized with the social group being tapped is broad and diverse.  There is a relationship between distributed cognition and distributed learning.  Distributed learning is something that is seen every day when a group takes information and makes sense of it.  In this case, I imagine a large collaborative group within an organization that is being introduced to a new topic, like Six Sigma methodologies.  None of the participants have prior knowledge to this topic and learn as a group in the process to gaining a green belt certification.  Each learner can approach the topic in their own way and work in collaborative groups to solidify their learning.  Once the initial learning takes place, members of the team can take this information they have learned as a group and apply them to individual situations. Although they are working as an independent Six Sigma Black Belt, the tools they have learned will allow them to serve a greater good as they implement these tools in ways that are collaborative as a group.  The distributed cognition is the awareness of this greater good and how they interact as a part of the good allows the larger process to move forward with more efficiency and direction. The Black Belts are aware of the needs of the group and are “cognitive” of the overall betterment of the process.

In some ways, the use of Wikipedia is a form of social cognition as the group works together to solve a problem (the blank wiki for a particular topic).  They know their section that they makes them a subject matter expert but may not know all of the details to have a complete and robust Wiki.  As a group, all contributors of the Wiki desire to make the page of their topic as complete and accurate as possible.  This usually cannot be done by a single (or even a few) contributors.  As a group, they can achieve higher levels of excellence and make the Wiki a better tool to allow others to draw from.  The same can be seen in blogs, and other community web-based tools that are available for user consumption.