MAIN > SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE > Julia_Stasch (Mar 03)

Monday 3rd March 2008 6:32 pm

Julia Stasch: Reflections on the HASTAC-MacArthur Competition Winners

Vice President Julia Stasch of the MacArthur Foundation reflects on the inaugural winners as a cohort. 

Just recently I had the privilege of meeting with representatives from the 17 winning projects of the Digital Media and Learning Competition.  The date was February 21 – the same day HASTAC and MacArthur announced the winners online and to the press from within the 1010-strong applicant pool.  Here in Chicago, we gathered the winners for a day-long series of events led by HASTAC.

It is unusual for MacArthur to gather fund recipients as a cohort before their projects have even begun.  Superficially, this group of winners is already united in their common application experience and in the shared 12-month deadline for project completion.  Yet even before the day-long gathering, we heard how excited the winners were at the prospect of meeting and learning from each other.  We could not have been more pleased, in part because our highest hopes for the competition depend on the winners as a group. 

For MacArthur, cohesion between projects is important because we believe that one of the primary barriers to the growth of the field of digital media and learning is the fragmentation that persists between both academic disciplines and professional fields.  Our vision for the competition and this field can be glimpsed in the video remarks of our President, Jonathan Fanton, regarding the competition.

We would like to thank everyone who took the time to apply.  The finalist judges did an amazing job (check out their video statements on the competition), as well as the 40 first-round judges.  And special thanks go out to the HASTAC team at Duke and UCHRI who did a stellar job in putting the competition together and running it from start to finish.  This is our second project with HASTAC, following their earlier work exploring the future of social and civic institutions.

The winners are a very impressive group, and we can’t wait to see how the projects all turn out – both individually and as a group.

Editor’s note: for additional information on the competition, visit its dedicated website at http://dmlcompetition.net.  For those who were not selected this year, check out Cathy Davidson’s recent post, When ‘no’ means ‘try again’.

Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

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