Inaugural Digital Media and Learning Competition Selects Winning Projects
Filed at 7:00 am on February 21, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide • 6 comments
HASTAC announces seventeen winners in the first Digital Media and Learning Competition. To see a list of winners and their project descriptions visit the competition website at http://www.dmlcompetition.net.
by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg
The HASTAC-MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition was announced publicly on August 15, 2007. The Competition closed October 15, 2007, with an overwhelming number of applicants. We had planned for approximately 300 applications, and received more than triple the prediction. The range and diversity were extraordinary. Each application was read by two initial judges, scored, and ranked. The finalist pool of 80 proposals was scrutinized and discussed in detail by 10 experts. We ended up awarding 17 stellar projects. We hail all the applicants, and heartily congratulate the winners.
The projects awarded funding can be clustered into four broad areas: global outreach and networking; games and do-it-yourself sites; pedagogical and research tools for classroom and self-learning; and activism and self-advocacy. The learning fields funded range across science, technology, computer science, engineering, politics, civics, environmental studies, education, social media, law, public policy, disability studies, the humanities, linguistics, history, journalism, media, art, and music. They involve game development and networking, hand-held technologies, social networking sites, interactive filmmaking, wikis, blogs, aggregators, and actual fabrication tools. They bring together design, implementation, entrepreneurship, and learning communities across the United States, India, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Thoroughly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and interactive, they engage youth groups and university students, school kids and college faculty, language learners and philanthropists, activists and artists.
From today forward, awardees will engage each other in networked mentoring, helping to address common challenges and questions across their respective projects. Online workshops will focus on topics common to many if not all the funded projects: on budget management and marketing, game development and product distribution, knowledge networking and the move from design and implementation to market. Public online tools will allow you to learn more about these projects as they develop. Towards the end of the funded year there will be a demonstration forum for the projects to be showcased.
To see a list of winners and their project descriptions, please visit the competition website at http://www.dmlcompetition.net.
And stay tuned for the next HASTAC-MacArthur DML Competition. If you are registered to the HASTAC site, you will be the first to receive the announcement of the new Competition, which will be announced this coming summer.
We wish we could have given awards to twice or three times as many applicants. There were so many worthy projects. We applaud the innovation, creativity, and vision in this robust field of digital learning, and wish you all success.
Editor’s Note: For more information about the Digital Media and Learning Competition, the award recipients, and the judges click here. See earlier posts on Spotlight about the Competition here, here, and here.
Next: Tony Curzon Price: Tell me who to believe in Second Life? And can I believe your answer? > >
< < Previous: [Reblogged] Davidson & Goldberg: The Digital Media and Learning Competition
Save or share this post
Tags
Tags:
Comments (6)
1: Robert Berkman from The New School at 1:34 pm on Thursday, February 21, 2008
Congrats to the winners…!
Will the rest of us be able to get any feedback on our proposals?
2: Brian O. at 3:24 pm on Thursday, February 21, 2008
Very disappointing. Outside of Black Cloud, not one project concerns actual scientific content. No surprise given the judges: not a single physicist, mathematician, biologist, astronomer, geologist, or MD among 40 or so. A poor showing, and not at all proportional to the clear need for science education in this country. There are references to science and science education all over your Web sites - why, since you’re not interested in supporting it?
3: Idit Harel Caperton from The World Wide Workshop, NYC at 10:00 pm on Thursday, February 21, 2008
Congratulations to the winners!
Some food for thought for HASTAC, MacArthur and the community at large:
1. Selection Criteria: A great deal of thought went into the complex process of review, analyses, and selection. Can HASTAC and MacArthur share this info with the community?
2. Competition Transparency in Web2.0 Era: It would be authentic and useful to add a section on your website with your selection criteria, key questions that guided your judges, recommendations, etc. After all, we are learning technology scientists in the open source Web2.0 era, sharing strong beliefs regarding the power of forming collaborative, transparent learning communities and shared production.
3. Learning within a Productive Community of Practice: Since we are committed to growing our work in Digital Media and Learning, and will continue to seek funding to scale it in future years—anything that we can learn from your competition strategy, rejection/selection, and lessons learned is valuable information to consider—especially from an innovative organization like HASTAC..
4. Walk the Talk: Did the HASTAC judges use an innovative platform for interacting, building and posting reviews, exchanging critique and ideas about proposals and outcomes, sharing consensus about proposals? Can you with thecommunity ?
5. Can you create a semantic map of proposals, indicate where the proposals came from, create semantic pragmatic connections, etc.; you now have loads of information about organizations and communities that share theory and innovative practices, and probably these 1000 proposals could help us form a larger interconnected conversation, a constructive community of practice.
6. Seize the Moment: Did you consider raising la larger funds to support another round of proposals soon? There is an emerging need to follow-up fast with another open competition initiative with these same proposals in order to seize the moment and seed our nation (and world) with more great projects.
4: Cathy Davidson from www.hastac.org at 9:53 am on Friday, February 22, 2008
Thanks for writing. With an acceptance rate of less than 2%, this is the week we hear from a lot of disappointed people. And I’ve now had half a dozen emails who have made a comment similar to yours about the neglect of science but about other forms of neglect (I won’t list them here). Actually, if computational science and engineering are part of “science,” many of our judges come from exactly that background and several of the winners are pioneering new kinds of interfaces, applications, and so forth. Some, such as the Mobile Musical Networks, are working on very complex problems that include the acoustical physics, the issue of time lag in sound, and so forth. But your point is well taken and, fortunately, there will be DML Competitions II and III. This is the beginning, not the ending. But when I get the NEXT email from someone who says “Hey! Where are the humanities and arts in these winners?” I will refer them to your posting. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
5: Cathy Davidson from HASTAC at 10:00 am on Friday, February 22, 2008
This comment is a response to the request for comments. Unfortunately, we will not be able to do this. The Competition was incomparably bigger in every way than we imagined; we had to call upon our judges to do twice or three times the workload that they originally signed on for; comments were one of the things that had to be sacrificed as we did our best with a very small staff . . . and next year (lesson learned!) we will consider options. The one most people recommend is that we set the entry requirements much higher to limit the applications so that we might be able to give more attention to those who do not win. This seems a shame to me, but we are right now thinking about DML II and trying to understand what we can learn, what we can do better. Another idea we are playing with is offering anyone who wishes an open application system where they can receive comments from others, like on YouTube, and then the informal, cursory comments of overworked juges might be included. Many things to think about. This was a first for all of us, we were overwhelmed by the response, we love the results, our staff (one full time person and several specialized people all working in other positions as well) did an amazing job against the avalanche of applications. Was it perfect? Alas! No! Fortunately, we have two more tries to see what else we can come up with. Thanks very much for writing and I’m sorry I can’t offer more positive news about the feedback.
6: Cathy Davidson from HASTAC at 11:51 am on Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Dear Idit Caperton,
Thanks so much for these interesting reflections. There is a lot here to think about for DML II and III.
Currently, we are thinking of ways that we might create an open platform where applicants can, voluntarily, upload their proposals and solicit feedback from a community. Since we did not tell our applicants that we would reveal or make use of their data, we cannot now do some of what you suggest; other things are beyond the capacity of our staff or judging system (which we actually designed and put into practice for the Competition—in record time!) So many rich ideas here. Thanks for sharing them and please know that we are considering them, thinking about others, and will be letting everyone know about future steps and future Competitions and forums.
Best, Cathy Davidson
Robust discussion/debate is encouraged. Comments are reviewed before posting to ensure they are on topic and do not promote commercial products or services.
Add a Comment