What Makes a Winner?

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What makes a winning Competition entry? There are no rules, but you can read more about digital media and learning and participatory learning and improve your chances.

The single most important advice I can offer is what I offered over and over and over last year (and no one listened then either): Start your application early! It's a great online application system that lets you go in, see what you need to gather to complete it, and then save your work and come back to it later. Because there is both a youth component and a piloted international component (with specific national sites from which we can accept stand-alone applications, rather than collaborations with US applicants), there are lots of "points of entry" questions and they take real time. If you wait until October 15, the bandwidth may not cooperate, there may be questions you won't be able to answer, and you may just not be able to finish. We had over 1000 applications last year, and most came in at the buzzer, in the last few hours, one a minute at the end of competition.

So, the big advice: This year's application is lots more complicated. Check it out. Start your application now. Find out in advance what you need to do and begin doing it right away.

The largest point is that this Competition, like the brilliant MacArthur Foundation initiative of which it is one part, is about learning more about how online, digital, virtual, participatory learning (in all its forms) works. It is also about finding the most innovative, creative ways of promoting the most (you guessed it) innovative, creative participatory learning.

To find out more about participatory learning, click on the Folksonomy tags that seem relevant on the right side of this website screen.

And here are two blog posts you might want to check out: http://www.hastac.org/node/1224 ("And the Winners Are, Part III) and http://www.hastac.org/node/1230 ("When No Means Try Again")

The very small HASTAC staff won't be able to comment on individual proposals, but there's lots out there for you to read and think about. The MacArthur Foundation's site on Digital Media and Learning and it's remarkable Spotlight Blog are full of important discussions on participatory learning with lots of further references to follow. Here's that url: http://spotlight.macfound.org/

And for the truly serious, the Digital Media and Learning book series was published this February by MIT Press and it is nothing short of an incredible resource on state-of-the-art thinking on these topics.

One final thing:  GOOD LUCK!   And whether you win or not, I hope the process of applying of gathering your thoughts and your collaborators, spurs your project and makes you a winner in ways far greater than one competition.  Again, best of luck to you!