This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg of HASTAC (Pronounced "Haystack," Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) about their work organizing the 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition, accepting applications until October 15th.
The competition is a collaboration between the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, which is centered jointly at the John Hope Franklin Center Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute based in Irvine. This year the Competition will be awarding $2 million in prizes supporting learning entrepreneurs, educators, communicators, and innovators who use new technologies to envision the future of participatory learning. This year’s Competition also includes a special award targeted to U.S. applicants aged 18-25, the Young Innovator’s Awards.
Here’s what Cathy and David had to share with onPhilanthropy in our interview.
Tell us about yourselves.
We started HASTAC in order to encourage critical discussion and promote the creative design and application of digital technology for the humanities, arts and social sciences. The HASTAC network has grown into a swirling organization that today includes more than 80 organizations.
How did the partnership come about and what has the collaboration process been like?
We first met when Cathy was on a search committee for a new director of the University of California's Humanities Research Center. David became the Director as a result of that search and we began working with one another soon after. We started HASTAC together in 2002.
Our partnership with the MacArthur Foundation started when they approached us to write a White Paper on the future of learning institutions and the age of Digital Technology. We wrote a draft and posted it on the Institute for the Future of the Book collaborative site where anyone who wanted could offer feedback. Those efforts led to a research paper that the MacArthur Foundation will publish and then a full-length book to be published by MIT Press.
HASTAC operates as a virtual organization so we work intimately with all kinds of digital learning tools. Our teams participate online and build off each other all the time. Email is our lifeline, we work in BaseCamp, and we use twitter and Facebook as well. One of the strongest underpinnings of our ability to work virtually in this way is that almost every virtual organization benefits from the presumptive understanding of existing relationships. We also have an Information Commons, called “Needle,” on the hastac.org site.
How did you settle on the theme of participatory learning?
We saw a cluster or projects within last year’s winners that were already using digital forums for collaborative thinking and learning. We plucked that one strand out to see what people would invent and what might come next.
We were especially drawn to the contrast of traditional learning with more decentralized modes of learning. Our concern was to spotlight the ways people increasingly are using collaborative forums to participate with each other, particular among young people.
onPhilanthropy is home to the FLiP network - Future Leaders in Philanthropy. What is the thinking behind this year’s Young Innovator’s Awards and how what was the process in opening the competition to international applicants?
This year we aimed to expand our reach to encourage more youth and international involvement, by developing the Young Innovator award and piloting limited international eligibility for our Innovation in Participatory Learning Award.
Many young adults have a strong grasp of the potential of digital media and we wanted to recognize that and encourage it. With the Young Innovator award we hope to encourage youth to think about what comes next in participatory learning and then contribute to making it happen. We want enable youth to take their most visionary ideas from the "garage" to the marketplace, encouraging the development of the next "big thing" in digital learning and collaboration, be it the next twitter, or the next Facebook, or something that has not even yet been envisioned!
In terms of introducing the international component for the Innovation in Participatory Learning award, there is a challenge of reaching people whose connectivity may be more limited. Last year, there were four to five projects that partnered with team members abroad. There is a lot of complication of doing things internationally, so unfortunately, we weren’t able to open eligibility to all countries this year. We hope to expand next year.
This year’s eligible countries--Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Nigeria, The People's Republic of China, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are nations where MacArthur or HASTAC had existing relationships. In a way, the odd mix of countries at this point is a good thing, since each country brings its own level of complexity and unique red tape, so the diversity of that experience will help us to learn more going forward.
I see there is a HASTAC Facebook Group and Ning instance. What role has social media played in your project? What has your strategy been?
We've been using a lot of social media to get the word out about the Competition this year. A lot of the web coverage we've received has been cultivated from personal contacts and our own social network. We have benefitted from a lot of virtual introductions. We've learned a great deal about social networking in the process, and publicizing the Competition has itself become an exercise in participatory learning.
Building a social network is all about trust really, everyone gets spammed, so we made sure our targeted efforts got us where we’d be relevant. Additionally, we created an online Seesmic vlog-vlog forum between one of last year's winners, social networking guru Howard Rheingold and the HASTAC Scholars that explored the theme of the Competition. We continue to participate in various social network sites, have created a Facebook event page, and have established our twitter presence (join us at http://www.twitter.com/dmlComp). We have a Seesmic forum going on right now on “Metaverses and Scholarly Collaboration” led by one of our graduate student HASTAC Scholars Ana Boa-Ventura.
What did you learn from organizing the competition last year? And what can we expect from your next collaboration?
Last year, we didn't remotely anticipate how large the response would be. We ultimately wound up with 1010 applications in all with over 250 of them being submitted within two hours of the deadline.
Currently, we’re starting a resource hub called Futures of Learning, focusing on the ways people are adopting digital media and the innovative work that institutions are doing to use new media for different purposes.
Think you have a worthwhile idea? Take the plunge! You can still apply to the competition. What opportunities do you see for integrating digital media into philanthropic efforts?
How many hours do you have in a day to work? How much of that time can you (or a staff person, if you're lucky) devote to updating your organization's Twitter posts ("tweets"), Facebook Causes items, MySpace page, blog posts, and other social media? OK, how much time can you devote without doing at midnight while in your pajamas or sitting in front of the television on Sunday night? How can you keep up with all social media?
