Barbara Wasson is Professor of Pedagogical Information Science at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway and Scientific Leader of InterMedia, University of Bergen.  She has led the FLEXIBLE research group at the department since 1997.  Wasson has been involved in research involving the use of information and communication (ICT) technologies in learning since 1983. Her research interests include collaborative learning in distributed settings, socio-cultural theories of learning, design-based research, methodologies for studying virtual environments, and pedagogical agents. Her speciality is the design and evaluation of distributed environments for collaborative learning. She has more than 65 publications related to the use of ICT and learning and has presented her work at all the major conferences within the field.

She is an associate editor of the International Journal of Computer Support for Collaborative Learning and in 2003 was conference chair and local organiser of the International CSCL Conference.  She is on the board of the VERDIKT programme at the Norwegian Research Council. In 2003 Wasson obtained the contract for InterMedia to develop the ICT-based National test in English for the Norwegian Ministry of Education (BITE-IT project).  In December 2004 she attended, by invitation only, a research summit to launch the international research initiative on Youth, Technology and Learning at the UN Headquarters in New York.