Content + Form + Public Connection = Digital Thinking

Anyone who has spent time glancing through our voluminous rfp for our new www.hastac.org website (http://www.hastac.org/drupal-rfp-2010), knows that our big project here at HASTAC this summer, once our final event for the main HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition was over, was to really put our heads together and think about what we needed and wanted for a new website.  Ruby Sinreich, our Director of New Media Strategies, led our conversations, set the agenda, and wrote the elaborate rfp. 

What came together in that document might well be the definition of "digital thinking."   That is, you have to think simultaneously and in an integrated fashion not only content and form but also how everything you do connects to anyone and everyone since, potentially, anyone and everyone could be part of your network.  That's what open source is.  That's what digital thinking is.

We at HASTAC are often asked if we are "digital humanists."   My answer to that question changes all the time but it's always some version that goes like this:  Many of our HASTAC network members would passionately embrace the description "digital humanists."  Others have almost no interest in that endeavor.  Most of the leaders of our organization come from a humanities background.  Some don't at all.  Some are professional educators.  Others are not, but are passionately interested in learning, formally and informally and lifelong. All of us believe that the way our digital world reorganizes knowledge, learning, collaboration, and connection--how we learn and how we work, how we think and how we play--is monumental and requires us all to rethink our everyday practices and our twentieth-century institutions of school and work.  The part that is quintessentially HASTAC is believing all of those institutions and practices, whether computational or humanistic in emphasis, demand  transformation.  And we believe that true, deep, revolutionary change requires critical thinking, thorough analysis, and good, historical grounding and perspective. 

As we sat in seminar rooms this summer re-imagining our website, these different goals became palpable. (1)  Our job at HASTAC is to GROW ideas, to be leaders in a transformative new way of thinking together.  We have a persuasive component to all we do.   We don't just translate archives or ideas into digital versions of themselves. We believe that the affordances of the digital challenge analog arrangements, and it is our job to understand and explain how that is true and push further in those directions.   (2) Our job at HASTAC is to TEACH AND LEARN, two functions which, we believe, are one and the same, where every great teacher is a learner and every great learner has something to teach.  We champion learning in public, and teaching as process not product.   (3) Our job at HASTAC is to CONNECT. We are a network of networks, with free registration and goals shaped by those who participate most actively and who lead us where we need to go, who shape us as they connect one to another.

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This  diagram is from the rfp we sent around for Drupal programmers but is also a very interesting vision statement from the infrastructure outward.