This year the Department of Education, as provided by their 2010 appropriations legislation, will make available the initial funding required to launch the National Center.   In the words of the Center’s authorizing legislation, “The purpose of the Center shall be to support a comprehensive research and development program to harness the increasing capability of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy.”
 

Thought I'd take a break from my thesis to post a video that always gets me thinking about the education side of digital humanities...

As a profession, humanists have not done a good job of making a case for our centrality, we have not taken our own mission responsibly and seriously enough.  Some programs do this much better than other.  Some disciplines do this much better than others.  I'm generalizing, and I hope departments that have faced the challenges well will respond with their examples in the comment section below.  It would be great for all of us to be able to learn from these models.  We need them now.

I've been thinking about the ways we learn when we make things and how differerent that experience is from learning in order to answer exam questions (especially multiple choice) about things, subjects, or ideas that other people have made.   What is most different is that, when you make something you learn about failure and from failure.   When you "get the answer wrong," you fail.   Therein lies all the difference.

I don’t know of any other museum that does such a good job of conjoining ancient and modern, history and making, as one seamless, interactive, interconnected world of creative, playful learning.

Beyond the ability to synthesize, analyze, and communicate, are there skills you view as indispensable to all but the most stubborn Luddites?

HASTAC has adopted a motto (thanks again, Steve Burnett!) of "Learning the Future Together." As a historian of technology, I believe that you learn the future together by being deeply informed about the past before you shoot off your mouth about the glories that went before, the disaster we're in now, and the catastrophe looming ahead. Maybe, maybe not. What this interview reminds us is that we're by no means the first people to encounter technological change nor the first to be convinced the younger generation is going to the dogs. Those insights alone should remind us to see what is and what we can do with it rather than wring our hands about that which is no longer relevant, available, or inspiring to the world we live in now.