Unique opportunities for interdisciplinary research on learning

Lund University is in a good position to start a unique interdisciplinary research collaboration on learning, according to Assistant Vice-Chancellor Sven Strömqvist, who is pushing to get such a collaboration started.

Research connected with learning is carried out at a number of faculties in Lund. In the humanities, there is cognitive science and the new subject education sciences; the Faculty of Social Sciences has psychology research on learning; in medicine there is research on how the brain learns; and LTH studies both machine learning and learning of people with disabilities (at the Division of Rehabilitation Engineering, Certec).

However, the majority of the research is in the humanities and social sciences, which Sven Strömqvist thinks makes it extra special.

“The large groups that have received funding in recent years are otherwise in engineering, medicine and science. Here we are deliberately trying to highlight a field that is important to society and that has its research base elsewhere.”

Sven Strömqvist believes that combining the latest research findings from different disciplines could lead to new teaching methods, new technical teaching aids and new testing and diagnostic tools. There are also good opportunities for collaboration with the business sector.

The EU has also realised the needs and possibilities in the field. Learning could therefore be the focus of a Knowledge Innovation Community, or KIC. A KIC entails major research programmes involving many universities and companies in Europe.

When these ideas reached LERU, the League of European Research Universities, the organisation gave Sven Strömqvist the task of writing a report on a possible learning KIC. Having studied the material available and the interest among other LERU members, he got a good lead at the University of Helsinki.

“A collaboration between Lund and Helsinki, which could also include Nokia and SonyEricsson, would be very exciting”, says Sven Strömqvist. Regardless of whether a learning KIC comes into being, which in any case would be far in the future, he wants to act to get such a collaboration started. The management of LU could give support and a certain amount of start-up funding, and the participating research groups could then hopefully attract more.

The project has already been given a preliminary title: “Learning in the 21st Century”.

- Ingela Björck

Combining the latest research findings from different disciplines could lead to new teaching methods, new technical teaching aids and new testing and diagnostic tools. Photo: mikael risedal