Center for Interconnected Curriculum & Networked Learning
Welcome to the Center for Interconnected Curriculum & Networked Learning (ICoN Learning).
If one word has been tapping my shoulder these last few years, it is interconnectedness: the quiet claim that learning flourishes when people, tools, and places are in conversation rather than in quarantine.
Take XR. The question here is how we design presence, attention, and embodiment without leaving anyone at the door. We treat XR as accessibility science first: Universal Design for Learning sets the scaffolds; cognitive load is a design variable, not a surprise; alternatives are first‑class, not footnotes. Our aim is participation, especially for learners long underserved by print‑centric defaults—yes, our dyslexic readers are among the protagonists here.
Curriculum, for us, is a networked ecology rather than a procession of silos. Activity theory reminds us that learning emerges from relations among tools, rules, roles, and communities; sociomaterial perspectives remind us that media co‑author outcomes. So we design for interoperability: assignments that travel across courses and clubs, rubrics that behave like protocols, micro‑credentials that read like passports. The governing metaphor is fluidity—work that can move, accrue, and compound—because the questions students care about rarely respect departmental borders.
Meanwhile, language is the other current. Our translanguaging stance treats multilingual production as ordinary scholarly practice, not remediation. Translation, adaptation, and subtitling are methods of theory‑building: they teach us to move an idea across audiences and media without sanding off its nuance. When a zine, a dataset, and a shoutcast tell the same story in different codes, both rigor and reach improve. Similarly, esports gives us a laboratory for serious play. The arena is loud, but the inquiry is crisp: How do teams coordinate under latency and stress? What does a just‑in‑time rubric look like for a caster? Which wellness practices actually sustain a season? Gameful spaces make leadership, communication, and judgment observable—and therefore coachable.
In short, methodologically we are cheerfully promiscuous : rapid pilots, mixed‑methods evidence, shareable artifacts. We measure what matters—belonging, access, persistence—alongside performance. If the future of learning is a network, our task is to improve its topology: fewer chokepoints, more bridges; less spectacle, more participation; knowledge that travels well.
Dr. Mila Zhu, Founding Director
Mission, Vision, and Values
Mission
Our center focuses on the study and design of interoperable learning ecologies that link courses, technologies, and community partnerships, so that networked, UDL‑aligned, and multilingual practices—including XR accessibility and esports‑enabled collaboration—expand equitable participation, creation, and leadership for every learner.
Vision
Our vision is to cultivate a university that functions as a distributed learning network in which courses, co‑curricular communities, and external partners interoperate; immersive and gameful practices are accessible by default; multilingual production is routine; and authentic collaboration occurs continuously across academic and workforce settings.
Values
- Interconnection over isolation: We deliberately construct cross‑disciplinary, cross‑role, and cross‑platform linkages, treating interoperability as core scholarly and infrastructural work.
- Access‑first design: We operationalize Universal Design for Learning (UDL), reduce onboarding friction, and provide substantive non‑XR alternatives to broaden participation from the outset.
- Playful rigor: We use esports and gameful production environments as legitimate sites of inquiry, assessment, and leadership practice.
- Multilingual by mindset: We normalize translingual composition and regard translation/adaptation as creative knowledge production rather than remediation.
- Care & wellbeing: We design humane workloads, reflective check‑ins, and sustainable cadences that support persistence for students, staff, and partners.
Strategic Pillars
ICoN Learning advances five mutually reinforcing pillars that operationalize our Mission and Vision across courses, co‑curricular settings, and partner sites.
XR for Inclusive Learning
We design and evaluate small, scalable XR/AR/VR activities that support attention, memory, and decoding for diverse learner profiles (e.g., dyslexic readers). Our approach is access‑first: Universal Design for Learning guides facilitation; cognitive load is managed deliberately; and equivalent non‑XR pathways are provided to maintain parity of learning.
Esports & Games for Learning
We treat scholastic esports as a rigorous context for teamwork, communication, live production, coaching, data storytelling, and wellbeing. Gameful environments are used to make leadership and judgment observable, coachable, and assessable through authentic performance tasks.
Multilingual & Multicultural Literacies
We institutionalize translanguaging as ordinary scholarly practice. Students compose for real audiences in more than one language, supported by peer translation labs, shared glossaries, and structured intercultural reflection that links linguistic choice to epistemic clarity.
Networked Pedagogy & Interoperable Design
We architect assignments, rubrics, and micro‑credentials as portable, standards‑aware artifacts that interoperate across courses, clubs, and community settings. Resources are shared within appropriate constraints rather than presuming full openness; interoperability functions here as pedagogical infrastructure that lets work move, accrue, and compound within a distributed learning network.
Community & Workforce Nexus
We co‑produce projects with schools, libraries, clinics, museums, and industry, aligning curricular outcomes with civic and workforce needs. Students develop legible competencies, while partners benefit from evidence‑informed prototypes and analytic reports.