Learning from the New DML Competition

I've applied for lots of awards over the course of my career, and served as a judge on many different award panels, but working with the teams at UCHRI and at the MacArthur Foundation to shape an entirely new competition, the Digital Media and Learning Competition, and building it from the ground up is a new experience.  Fascinating how many old lessons you relearn in doing something new.  For example, you learn that there is a very big distance between an "idea" and its "articulation."  I put those words in scare quotes because I'm not entirely sure I believe that they are separate (I would hate to have to defend the difference since there are long philosophical histories around those differences) but I know that getting from one to the other and back again is an arduous and ever-interesting process.  We wrote, rewrote, tweaked, and retweaked various points to make them as clear as possible.  One week into the competition, inevitably we receive questions on exactly the areas we'd given the most attention.  I don't think this is because we failed but, rather, it is because these are intrinsically complex questions.  Here's one:  the difference between "instructional technology" and "digital learning."  I blogged about that a few days ago and it was a long posting, really an essay, and I'm sure that still doesn't fully explain the concept of digital learning.  Digital learning is collaborative and it is not top down.  It's not distance learning.  It's not about creating tools that help teachers in conventional classroom settings.  (All those things are good but they are for a different contest.)   Digital learning is more about the complex, associative, learning and social styles enabled by new digital forms of communication that are about customizing, co-inventing, sharing information, and building upon one another's work, correcting one another, self-correcting, changing, growing.  Examples:  Wikipedia, of course, is the most obvious.  But so is peer review on Ebay.  So is working together in World of Warcraft.  So is building an environmental action movement in and through Second Life.  Dozens or hundreds or millions of people who don't know one another in the real world building something together, learning together.  That's part of digital learning.  But there are many other parts.  Does this qualify? people ask us.  Does that?  Sometimes yes, almost always potentially.  There is rarely a simple "no" but that is because "digital learning" is not a fixed concept.  If we knew exactly what that term meant, there would not be any need for a competition.  Especially since we think of learning as collaborative and a process rather than a product.  What hypocrites we would be if we thought we knew exactly  what "digital learning" meant since we are saying that learning itself constantly changes in interaction with others.  It sounds a bit Zen but, in the end, the competition is about the competition, about shaping the field, seeing what is new, what is being thought through, what the competition sparks.  In turn, what is sparked by the competition will spark the field, change it, add new dimensions, new ideas, new thoughts, new innovations, new networks.  That is exciting.  And it is happening already.  My next blog posting will be about how much response we're receiving but, for now, I'll just say we could not be more pleased.  We're being posted and reposted, blogged and reblogged.  There is excitement and we're excited.  And we are learning, digitally, a lot.