1001. Amazing.

You come up with an idea. People think you are a little nuts. Digitallearning? Wa'dat? Then, a few years later, a major foundation invitesyou to be part of their big idea. Digital learning? You run acompetition. People say, oh, that's really obscure, maybe you'll get ahundred applications. 1001, my friends. When David (Theo Goldberg) and I came away from a Mellon meeting in 2002 and said we should be pulling together others who were seeing a sea-change in the way young people (and the not so young) think, interact, customize media, supply content, interrogate one another energetically (using new media), share ideas, and just plain get excited about complex combinations of ideas that don't fit within the silos and disciplinary terms of universities, we felt like pioneers. Almost immediately, we found people like Anne Balsamo, Tim Lenoir, Jeff Schnapp, Kathy Woodward, Tara McPherson, and the incomparable Ruzena Bajcsy who said: "Yes!" But there were others who, I know, thought this was the lamest idea ever. "You mean IT--Instructional Technology?" they'd say. "No, the complex new ways of thinking that we're all learning, the global and non-Eurocentric collaborative ways of learning, less hierarchical, more contributive, like Wikipedia, like YouTube, like Flickr, like collaborative multiplayer games, all that. How we think, how we learn, how we interact---the foundational concepts of humanistic thinking." Blank stares. We launched this competition not knowing if the result would be a stunning silence. But yesterday was amazing, applications streaming in at the buzzer, until the moment we closed: 1001. That is unprecedented. Time to take a breather. This is so exciting, to see it happen. And now how to find the amazing winners from such plenty. Stay tuned.

If you want to learn more about the winners and future competition possibilities as they unfold, join the HASTAC site. That is where you will receive the first notices on everything. And thank you, everyone, for being part of what we keep calling (with infinite modesty) the "future of thinking."

Special thanks, as always, to the amazing bicoastal team that worked hard (still are, as I type!) to run an incredibly efficient and even elegant competition, with servers that held strong through the deluge, code on the Fast Aps that worked like a charm, and human attention to questions and inquiries beyond compare: Erin Ennis, HASTAC grant director at Duke, Suzy Beemer, HASTAC grant director at UCHRI, Jonathan Tarr, HASTAC Project Manager, Brett Walters, HASTAC and Competition webmaster, Mark Olson, MacArthur New Media director, Khai Tang, Technology Director (and designer of the Fast Aps system), everyone at Duke's Arts and Sciences Computing for getting us the best server this side of the national supercomputing centers, Annette Rubado, MacArthur grant manager. Please add anyone I am missing. A fabulous team. Thank you!