Nicoletta Di Blas is Full Professor of Special Pedagogy at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano. She holds a degree in Classics and a Ph.D. in Linguistic Sciences from the Catholic University of Milan. She teaches courses in Educational Technology Design and Communication within engineering programs at undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral level.
Her research focuses on how learning becomes distributed and dialogic in technology-mediated educational environments. Through an Educational Design Research approach, she designs and studies technological interventions that support student agency while preserving the teacher’s guiding role.
Her work has investigated distributed knowledge construction in collaborative virtual environments and large-scale digital storytelling initiatives such as PoliCultura, which has engaged over 47,000 students. Building on these studies, she contributed to a distributed and dynamic interpretation of the TPACK model in collaboration with Punya Mishra (Arizona State University).
More recently, her research has concentrated on “student response” in online and hybrid learning contexts. She develops and studies systems such as EVOLI, a video-annotation framework designed to make students’ understanding visible across asynchronous, synchronous, and mixed-reality environments.
She is Scientific Director of DOL, an online master on technologies for education, and Co-Director of MIDIS, a master on innovation at school. She has coordinated or served as Principal Investigator in numerous national and international projects, including the Horizon 2020 project City4Age. She has authored over 160 scientific publications.