This posting is a reprise of my presentation at the MLA session "Humanities 2.0: Participatory Learning in an Age of Technology" which featured three winners of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition. This is a continuation of ?Digital Media and Learning and Twitter at MLA? (http://www.hastac.org/node/1866). In the previous posting, I focused on the Twitter/Microblogging session. In this posting, I will re-enact in text my presentation, on HASTAC and on the MacArthur Foundation?s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and then in the third posting in this series I will post on the other presentations in the Digital Media and Learning session that was chaired by Zita Nunes and featured Howard Rheingold (Social Media Classroom), Todd Pressner (Hypercities), Greg Niemeyer and Antero Garcia (Black Cloud). [Parts of this panel were videotaped and we hope to post those parts at a later date.] (The beautiful images above are from the MacArthur Foundation's kiosk on Flickr and the full photostream can be accessed by clicking on the image.)

In essence this session was a progress report on three of the winning projects in the MacArthur Foundation?s Digital Media and Learning Competition. After Zita?s introduction, I introduced HASTAC?s virtual network, now close to 1900 strong and with far more active visitors than most standard professional associations, and this with our clunky website (it?s changing, it?s changing . . . we hope in February that we?ll be launching the new site). I made a distinction between traditional digital humanities which, in general, uses a range of digital technologies to support, enhance, and foster the traditional goals of humanities disciplines. That is part of what HASTAC does but HASTAC?s primary role is different: it wants us to combine critical thinking about the use of technology in all aspects of social life and learning with creative design of future technologies. It strongly supports bringing the critical theory component of the new humanities (including its interest in issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, region, religion, environment, nation, and other special markers of social difference) to bear on the technologies that shape our lives and those of our students. As a method, it also favors participatory learning and any ways that we can use new models of thinking, new models of engagement, to enhance learning, both inside and outside the classroom. This might include such things as Twitter or social networks as an affordance for study, a subject of study, or something that, together, we develop in order to think in depth about what a social network is even as we are creating the technology and the network itself. It?s all of a piece, we say, the thinking and the doing and the learning.

For that is the world in which our students are coming of age, one in which, they spend much of their time on line, not just receiving information but communicating with their friends, customizing their MySpace pages, interacting on their own, following a new associational form of knowing and thinking. At HASTAC, since 2002, we have been saying that, as educators, there is something very wrong with us if we do not understand we are in an extraordinary intellectual moment?extraordinary in world-historical terms?and seize it. It is our responsibility as educators to respond to the learning conditions our students bring with them into the classroom and to the world they face when they leave our classrooms. It is our responsibility to think through, with them, issues of credibility, authority, privacy, intellectual property, civic participation, and interaction that are part of the world of learning which they participate in and which they will help to shape. HASTAC has had that as its mission since its inception, somewhere in that distant past of 2002.

A few years ago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the most forward-thinking and influential foundations in the U.S., launched its Digital Media and Learning Initiative. HASTAC was making its small, modest way against many currents in higher education when the MacArthur Foundation revealed this initiative. Here?s the description from the Foundation?s website: ?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.?

It was like a bolt of lightning. To be trudging stoically ahead against cynical odds (at one point we were even referred to as ?charlatans? by the head of a major humanities organization!), and then to have the Foundation you have admired for decades start an initiative dedicated to real research and field-building in this area was nothing short of miraculous. Some HASTAC friends and leaders were on the MacArthur Foundation board and soon we were talking directly with the Foundation about ways that we might work together on our common mission. It was humbling to see this impressive organization create a major new initiative in an area about which we were so deeply concerned and to watch the Foundation roll out an agenda that was breathtaking in its scope, including the funding of myriad individual and collective learning projects, a series of scholarly books published by MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=170), a major ethnographic report on how youth today use digital media in their lives (the report led by Mimi Ito and released in November 2009: http://www.hastac.org/node/1806), and dozens of other visionary projects that encompass all aspects of informal learning, formal education, gaming environments, and other revolutions in learning for youth today.

And, to our great delight, the MacArthur Foundation thought what HASTAC was trying to do in higher education was worth supporting. The Foundation?s Initiative first supported HASTAC through a grant to David Theo Goldberg and myself on ?The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital World.? We wrote a draft of that paper for the Institute for the Future of the Book?s interactive website and conducted three national forums on this topic. MIT Press will be publishing both the Research Paper and the booklength version of those collaborative and authorial efforts later in 2009. (http://www.hastac.org/node/1106)

And then the MacArthur Foundation invited us to work with them to administer the annual Digital Media and Learning Competitions. Currently, the applications for the second Competition are out with judges (HASTAC, of course, does not judge but sends all applications out to teams of judges who read independently and then there is a second round of finalist judging: details of the Competition and how it is administered can be found on the Competition website: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/).

With our program officers and leaders at the MacArthur Foundation (Director of Education Connie Yowell and program officers Ben Stokes and Craig Wacker), we have worked to make the topics of the Competition as engaging and engaged as possible, to make the Competition appealing to a wide range of educators, librarians, school teachers, community organizers, and, this year, young participants (18-25) and, also new this year, international applicants. The theme for the current competition is ?Participatory Learning.?

One of the most innovative aspects of the Competition (and credit for this innovative idea goes to the officers of the MacArthur Foundation) is that, unlike most awards, we do not simply hand winners money. Instead, we have created an online community where the winners interact with one another, where we host seminars and other events that the winners can participate in, and where, most importantly, they can learn about one another?s progress, contribute to it, work with one another, and report on what they are doing, learning, and making happen as it is happening. Sheryl Grant is the person on the HASTAC team who coordinates our Winners? Hub at http://hub.dmlcompetition.net/. It is currently a Ning site and we have both enjoyed Ning?s ease of set-up and bristled at some of its limitations and so are currently working to build a new site. Even now, however, you can go to the site and find out more about all of the projects funded by the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition.

And this MLA Panel is another part of this idea of ?participatory winning,? where winning projects from the MacArthur Foundation Competition are shared in process and in progress and can be developed interactively, built upon, not simply delivered, and become part of something larger: a community of learners who are trying, as richly as possible, to address the complex issues of learning, in the classroom and out, presented by our interconnected, digital era.




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Special thanks to Flickr community member Second Story for these gorgeous images from the MacArthur Foundation. Please click on the images for more of the photostream and full documentation.