The point is a great and highly innovative ideas are not really ahead of their time, they are catalysts in their time.

For those following our course online on the HASTAC site, here's my opening welcome post to the students.  To find all of our posts, remember the tag to search for is ISIS 120.

Hi all.  Here are a couple upcoming events some of us might be interested in.

Hello!  Along with Prof.

The University of Michigan Press and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) are pleased to announce the launch of The University of Michigan Series in Digital

Anyone who studies "Digital Anything" without thinking through the cultural, social, philosophical, and material implications and applications of technology misses the boat.   It's happened over and over again in the history of technology.  Where people "blame technology" for cultural changes without understanding the mechanisms of cultural change.

As President Obama called for new efforts to reimagine and improve education in science and math, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $2 million open competition for ideas to transform learning using digital media. The competition seeks designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and others to build digital media experiences the learning labs of the 21st Century that help young people interact, share, build, tinker, and explore in new and innovative ways. Administered by HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory ("haystack") through a grant to the University of California at Irvine and Duke University, the competition was planned and announced in partnership with National Lab Day, a movement to revitalize science, technology, engineering and math in schools that was highlighted at a White House event today.

What was different about HASTAC from other Digital Humanities organizations in 2002 is we were about the first organization to embrace Web 2.0 and social media as learning platforms.  We immediately grasped the idea that technology as an affordance would always be limited, but thinking and working together, even across boundaries and especially across boundaries, would allow us to blow old and stale and partial paradigms out of the water.    . . . 

About 5000 unique visitors each week come read and write and think along with us now at HASTAC so something is happening here, and we know the HASTAC Scholars are among the leaders in a new way of rethinking what we do and how we can think and learn together.

Between returning to Facebook (after a hiatus of frustration with its poor interface) and reading Randall Stross's Planet Google, I've been thinking a lot about how the success of many web ventures depends on a snowball effect, combined with brand loyalty.