HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation will soon launch the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition soon. To be the first to receive word about the Competition announcement, follow us on Twitter.

Our 2008 and 2009 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning winners demonstrated that pioneering work often takes place at the edges and sometimes between the most unlikely of collaborators. These projects are true exemplars of how digital media are transforming the way we think and learn, and even how we participate in democracy.

The Competition is funded by a MacArthur grant to the University of California, Irvine and Duke University, and is administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), a virtual network of learning institutions.

The Competition is part of the MacArthur Foundation's $50 million digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

We are developing a vibrant community of learning leaders that includes youth, international researchers, practitioners and theorists, non-profits and commercial enterprises and ranging across all the different fields from the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.

"It's starting to feel not only like a new field but an actual movement" said Cathy N. Davidson of Duke University, co-founder of HASTAC along with David Theo Goldberg of the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

The decision in 2009 to include proposals from international sites and include a competition for young innovators, ages 18-25, has revealed extraordinary range, depth and creativity, Goldberg noted. It points to profound changes in learning, changes soon likely to challenge educational institutions in deeply transformative ways.

The 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition included two categories: Innovation in Participatory Learning and Young Innovators. The Innovation in Participatory Learning category sought novel projects that used digital media to help learners of any age use new technologies to share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Applications were accepted from Canada, China Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Young Innovators, a U.S.-only category for 2009, accepted applications from individuals aged 18-25 to bring novel participatory learning ideas from the garage stage to full implementation and to think boldly about what comes next.

Successful projects promoted learning and participation through a variety of mechanisms, including games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, social networks, wikis, and video blogs.

The Competition's challenge to identify different forms of participation, as well as the eligibility of ten countries outside of the United States, yielded a diverse pool of awardees including individuals, a school, community organizations, universities, and for-profit companies. Awards ranged from $9,000 to $211,000. Fifteen winners came from the United States, and the remaining four came from Canada, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

Detailed information about the 2008 and 2009 winning projects and the Competition is available here.

The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations.

The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth. Results from the most extensive U.S. study on teens and their use of digital media show that America's youth are developing important social and technical skills online. To learn more about Digital Media and Learning research, collaboration, networking, and projects, visit DMLCentral, the Research Hub based at UC-Irvine.

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