Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 29, 2008, 07:26 PM
AND THE WINNERS ARE . . . (Part One: The Process)
by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg

It has been an amazing hundred days: from closing the competition to selecting the first cohort of seventeen winners of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. While we are finalizing the last details of the Competition, we will offer a few blog postings about the process, the field, what we have learned, and what we will be looking for in future competitions.

The process has been extraordinary in every way. We closed the application cycle on October 15 with what we only half-endearingly call The Avalanche. During the last few hours of the Competition, applications were streaming in at an average of 4 per minute. At the bell, 1010 applications were in. We were ecstatic?and a little terrified. We had commitments from enough judges to read 300 applications, our most optimistic guess. We scrambled, asking those who had already signed on as judges to read more applications, and we supplemented them with additional judges all kind enough to be rushed into service at the eleventh hour. We ended up with a great group, with impeccable reputations and busy lives who were willing to set aside their own work to contribute to the success of this Competition.

Each application was randomly assigned to two judges (paying keen attention though to conceivable conflicts of interest), each of whom was from a different domain (academic and practitioner, educator and entrepreneur, game designer and research, and so forth). The judges read independently, with no knowledge of who the other judge was. They scored each of the proposals in their set, ranking their favorites. We then tabulated the scores and rankings, and quickly sorted out an astonishing group with top scores from both judges. There was only a small cohort of applications where a top score was accompanied by a very low score and we called in tie breakers to give those an extra read. We ended up with 80 finalists and we sent those (listed in alphabetical order, with no comments from the previous judges) to ten judges charged with each reading every application and scoring them, again independently. These ten came together in Chicago, despite snow and a -5 windchill factor, and for two days they talked, argued, agreed, disagreed, championed, chuckled, derided, damned, praised, pushed, and made so many interesting observations about new digital media that we found ourselves in an instantaneous tutorial. These judges (who will be featured on the Competition website) represent the widest possible range of expertise, domains, and interests.

From 1010 to 17. In three months. What a process!

There's a lot of official business between now and having the final winners signed, sealed, delivered, and ready to meet their publics. It?s a remarkable array, an incredible portfolio of ideas, people, projects, technologies. So many people worked around the clock, in invisible ways, to make this a fair process with the best possible results. We thank all the judges who gave up hours and hours of their time to read the applications on the way to building a new field of digital learning. We thank the HASTAC teams at Duke and UCHRI who worked tirelessly, deep into many a night and across too many weekends to make the Competition as efficient as possible and did so with exemplary camaraderie. We thank the MacArthur Foundation for supporting this Competition and for having the extraordinary vision to create a Digital Media and Learning Initiative of which the Competition is one part. And we thank the applicants, all of the teams of people behind the 1010 applications, for their ideas, their commitment, their projects, and their vision. Only a handful won?just short of 1.7 percent--and yet, in a far deeper sense, everyone has won. This first year was a pilot. There are two more Competitions to come. For all of us?as well as for the field of digital media and learning--this is just the beginning.

--Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg
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