I'm going to be attending DrupalCon in Portland this week to gather all the skills, knowledge, and connections that I can bring home to help support the HASTAC community.
Thanks to everyone who submitted entries in our magnetic poetry competition. You were all brilliant, and we hope you had as much fun with this as we did. A small committee of HASTAC staff (Kaysi Holman, Hilary Culberston, and myself) has chosen three winners, but we collected ALL your wonderful poems below using Storify, and if you submit any more we will continue to add them to that collection.
HASTAC's magnetic poetry kits have all the jargon you need to spice up that dissertation or fundraising proposal. This week during the HASTAC 2013 Conference, we're having a contest to see who can compose the best* poetry.
Here's how to play:
We are preparing to embark on a process to redevelop the HASTAC site with the primary goal of making the site easier to understand and to use. We are currently reviewing your excellent feedback on our usability survey, and would also like to hear from you HASTAC members about lessons we might learn from other web sites.
The Duke-based HASTAC staff is just back from the fantastic Digital Media and Learning Conference organized by our colleagues at the Digital Media and Learning Hub in Irvine. This is always an interesting and engaging event, but this year's focus on Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices and Remixing Youth Participation really brought many of the issues we wrestle with into focus and we were thrilled to be having these critical conversations with a unique blend of educators, activists, learners, and makers.
Today I am excited to officially launch several new features on the HASTAC web site, including Collections, Similar Content, Knowledge Base, and more. I think these additions will do a lot to help people connect with and utilize the rich and deep content of the site.
The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. The fourth annual conference – DML2013 – is organized around the theme “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices, and Remixing Youth Participation” and will be held between March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois.
We've gotten some great responses this month to HASTAC's Usability Survey. We're going to keep the survey open for a little longer, so if you haven't filled it out, now's your chance. Let us know what parts of the site are important to you, and what needs improvement. The whole thing will take less than 5 minutes.
If you like, you can also leave us comments in the survey. Here is a selection of some of the feedback and suggestions we've heard so far:
While we can't rival the simplicity of an iPhone, we very much want HASTAC to be easy and enjoyable for you to use. To that end, we are surveying HASTAC members about how the site works for you. We kept the survey short and limited the questions to multiple choice to make it easy to complete. It should take less than 5 minutes and is completely anonymous.