Teachers, gamers, journalists, bloggers and tech wizards - almost anyone creating and sharing knowledge online - can participate in a competition for $2 million worth of grants, announced today by the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
The competition is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's $50 million Digital Media and Learning initiative that aims to help determine how technology is changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.
"Social networks like MySpace hold amazing potential as educational tools," said David Theo Goldberg, director of UCHRI and professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine. "This grant competition will help jumpstart the innovations that leverage the social networks young people are comfortable with as networks to share and create knowledge."
The grants, which range from $30,000 to $250,000, will be given out in two award categories: innovation and knowledge networking. Knowledge networking awards are for projects that take advantage of the Web's potential for collaborative thinking and widely circulating ideas. An example, Goldberg said, is a parent-and-teacher guidebook for effectively using Wikipedia in the classroom. Innovation awards support individuals or groups building new online learning environments or making major adaptations to existing online communities - like MySpace or collaborative games - for educational uses.
"An open competition is an excellent way to identify and hopefully inspire new ideas about learning in an increasingly digital world," said Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur Foundation president. "We do not yet know how much people are changing because of digital media, but we hope that this competition will help support the most innovative thinking about learning, the formation of ethical judgments, peer mentoring, creativity, and civic participation, all of which are increasingly conducted online."
The competition will be administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), which was co-founded by Goldberg and is based primarily at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and UCHRI. With a network reaching more than 80 institutions globally, HASTAC is one of a new breed of "virtual institutions," epitomizing the type of online collaboration that is part of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning initiative.
"We are already teaching a generation of students who do not remember a time before they were online," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC. "Their social life and informal learning are interconnected. They don't just consume media, they customize it. These students bring fascinating new skills to our classrooms, but they also bring an urgent need for critical thinking about the digital world they have inherited and are shaping."
The grant competition begins Aug. 14 and applications must be submitted by Oct. 15. Winners will be announced January 2008. More information about the competition is available at http://dmlcompetition.net/
About UCHRI: The University of California Humanities Research Institute is a multicampus research unit based on the UC Irvine campus. UCHRI stresses interdisciplinary research, in practice bridging gaps between disciplines across the humanities and human sciences and overcoming the intellectual and institutional barriers that tend to isolate the humanities from the sciences, technology and the professions. More: www.uchri.org
About the MacArthur Foundation: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grant making institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition. More: www.digitallearning.macfound.org.
About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,800 faculty members. The second-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3.7 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.
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