Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 10, 2008, 10:36 AM
AND THE WINNERS ARE (Part Two: Building a Field) --Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg On Thursday, February 21, we will be announcing the projects that have won the first HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. Last week, we blogged about the selection process. (If you missed that posting, you can find it at: http://www.hastac.org/node/1202) This week we want to pass on some of what we learned about what it means to build a new field. All of us committed to the MacArthur Foundation?s Initiative on Digital Media and Learning talk about field-building. What, exactly, does that mean? The general lesson from this Competition (brought home to us strikingly by all of the judges who contributed to the selection process and all the different evaluations they made of the applications) is that one doesn?t ?build? a field any more than an architect alone builds a house. Building a field is a collaborative process and, often, the final iteration looks quite different than the initial conception. Maybe the metaphor isn?t even quite accurate enough. Maybe you don?t build a field. Maybe you let it grow and, like any growing thing, its progress is in many different directions with sprouts, offshoots, and all kinds of green and growing things, some of which flourish, some of which turn out not to be quite as healthy, some of which may even be a little mangled. We probably have less constrained an idea, for example, of what ?digital learning? is now than we did before reading 1010 applications and reading comments from fifty judges and spending two days listening to the ten finalist judges deliberate. Nor did the judges or the applicants share a unitary vision of digital learning. And that is a good thing. Any field that is vibrant and worthy of study is not unified but diverse, not singular in its vision. If it is truly significant, a field must be visionary in multiple and unexpected ways. It does not have clean edges but, rather, wraps itself in, around, over, and under existing fields in provocative ways, with areas of overlap, areas of contention, and areas of unequal relevance and irrelevance to other fields. Viewed from the vantage point of other fields, a new field is an upstart, an incursion, a sham, or an insurgency, or some combination. Sometimes perverse, at other times ground-clearing; occasionally frightening, but also exciting. One reason for suspicion of any new field is that traditional fields are never as traditional as they pretend. They are always changing. A new field is exciting and threatening because of the changes it brings, different changes to the different fields it impinges upon. Internally, any field (new or traditional) must have debates, disagreements, competitors, radically diverse views not only of its objects of study but of what those objects are. Without those areas of difference, we don?t have a true field. We have an idea. Or an ideology. We have something safe and protected and defined and cordoned off, unsullied by debate. That?s the opposite of a field. Many of us working on digital media and learning, especially on the MacArthur Foundation?s initiative, came to the DML Competition with certain ideas and ideals about what the field?s distinguishing features might be. Well, surprise! Not everyone out there actually working in this new area agrees. That is one thing we learned from those 1010 applications. They do not all comprise one neat, clear, defined, definitive idea of digital learning. It was a little unsettling, at first, to see so many different ideas about what is most important to the field. It is always unsettling to think you are at the vanguard of something you have helped to create and then to realize, in the blink of the eye, the vanguard may actually be or have moved somewhere else. This self-realization (in any endeavor) is always a salutary moment, a moment of choice. Do you hold to your own idea of the vanguard, despite evidence to the contrary? Or do you learn, exchange and expand your view? This is an existential moment: do you dig in or dig out, resist change or help it along? We have rethought some of our ideas, and, in a future posting, we will try to write about new ways that we are thinking about digital learning, many-to-many thinking, peer-to-peer learning, institutions as mobilizing networks, a range of issues supported by this Competition but then given some very interesting and exciting twists by all of you who contributed your ideas, all of you who submitted applications in our first (but not our last) competition. Thanks, all of you, for your good work and good ideas and your fine contribution to digital learning. A new field, after all, is only as rich as its insights and innovations. A new field is only as good as its pioneers. Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg