AND THE WINNERS ARE (PART III)

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AND THE WINNERS ARE: PART III: What Digital Learning Looks Like From Here

by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg


We’re counting down to the announcement of the Digital Media and Learning Competition winners on February 21. So far, we’ve blogged on the judging and selection process and on the concept of building a field. Now, we offer a few insights into what the field of Digital Learning looks like from the vantage point of 1010 applications. Our next “AND THE WINNERS ARE” post will be the announcement itself.

As with the previous postings, this one is intended to celebrate the rich, varied, and engaged work that is being done all over, in all formal and informal learning domains, in the new field of Digital Learning. With so many applications, very few people (less than two percent) will receive official funding and recognition from this Competition. Yet so many more than that are deserving.

We intend this series of posts, then, to recognize, in a different sense, that something vital and significant is in the works. Anyone who submitted an application has an idea, a program, a principle that is already far ahead of much of what is generally "out there." You are the vanguard. We salute your efforts, and offer this compilation of insights from the collective treasure-trove of the 1010 applications to the first-ever Digital and Media and Learning Competition as a small way of supporting your efforts. We found that, at many institutions, including the most august and illustrious as well as the least well-funded community groups, there were strikingly original individuals and groups forming outside the traditional divisions and departments to pioneer innovative forms of learning. We hope these shared postings will, if nothing else, provide you with a sense of community as well as something tangible that helps to define your efforts as part of a larger movement. Perhaps you can bring these postings back to your administrators, your boss, your coworkers, your friends, or other skeptics (they're out there too) so they can begin to understand the work you are already engaged in, the vision you are working for.

Here are just a few of the ideas and patterns that have emerged in the current play of Digital Learning:

Many-to-Multitudes: The cliché of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that the former is about one-to-many communication whereas the latter is about many-to-many. What we saw over and over in the projects currently under way is a next step and we’ll coin the term for it: Many-to-Multitudes. Networked, collaborative, interactive non-profits wanted ways of networking with other networked, collaborative, interactive non-profits with different but consistent goals to have maximum impact. What mergers-and-acquisitions are to multinational global capital, Many-to-Multitudes is to digitally-driven social networking: to NGO’s, nonprofits, and other social activist and advocacy global networks. There was, in so many of the projects, a passion to make the world a better place and to use new technologies and the networks they enable to be more effective in that idealistic ambition.

Peer-to-Peer Redistribution: Another cliché of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that the former is about top-down delivery of tools whereas the latter is about sharing among equals. Many of the projects we saw wanted equality of collaboration and communication with those who could not possibly share resources because of social disparities and unequal distribution of wealth, access, and technology. Sometimes age (lack of resources among youth) was the barrier; sometimes class, nation, or other factors.  We saw a form of technological socialism, where richer organizations with a fuller array of resources, wanted to work, as equals, with those who offered other kinds (and often more compelling forms) of intellectual, cultural, or social capital but who did not have the economic or technological assets to collaborate as equals without some transference of technologies. The fluidity of technological sharing in order to have shared learning was breathtaking. “Top-down/bottom up” doesn’t begin to comprehend the subtler dynamics of production, distribution, exchange, circulation, and consumption.

Mixed Reality: So many projects out there flow in and out of the screen, in and out of the streets. Virtuality, digitality, are part of the face-to-face world, more so with cell phones and iPods, but also with laptops (even ones that don’t cost $100). The hype of digitality cordoned it off from “the real world.” But we saw projects where virtual and real meshed, unmeshed, and remeshed in all ways, all times, all places, almost seamlessly, sometimes ubiquitously. Mashup characterizes “the real” as much as the imagined, materiality as much as culture.

Global Learning: Although the Competition rules required that the PI be in the U.S., many of the projects had a global vision, global partners, and global reach. It’s the World Wide Web, after all, and at no time in history has it been easier to learn in tandem with digital partners half a world away. One message of the Competition: Learning's Gone Global.


Digital Together: This is another coinage (you heard it here). The “Bowling Alone” pronouncements about the lonely life of the internet-obsessed youth are over, initially undone by massively multi-player games and the popularity of social network sites. These digital learning projects show that learning together has a much broader reach than we might have expected. In all ways--imaginative, social, communicative, and educational—people, young and not-so-young, are learning how to be digital together. The sociality is online, off line, and all points in between. (Go into any coffee house in America and there are people at their laptops one moment, and laughing with one another the next. They are also working together over a shared interface, whether a common computer or communicating at a distance.) This is an incredibly social time, if these projects are any indication. The digital sociality of youth doesn’t look like past forms of social interaction, but that’s what being young is about.

Are there downsides to digital learning? No doubt! But we saw 1010 projects, so many of them astonishing, and all of them, collectively, ushering in, we believe, an exciting new moment in the young history of digital learning.

--Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg

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[A note on our images: The first was created by our intern Jonathan L. as a Second Life avatar; the second is MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton addressing a SL audience on the topic of virtual philanthropy]