I’m to speak at the  Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference at Carleton in May; I’m one of the keynotes. I’ve never done a keynote before… I have a great fear of bringing coals to Newcastle, as it were. Pressed for a title and an abstract, this is what I’ve come up with (for good or ill):

Some Assembly Required

Every day, another university signs up to participate in Udacity, Coursera, or another of the monster MOOCs.  Every day, another job posting makes ‘digital humanities’ a requirement. These two trends are not unrelated. Canadians have been at the forefront of massively open online courses, and in work that has come to be known as ‘digital humanities’, long before the current mania. In this talk, I want to tease apart the strands and histories that conflate these two trends. I want to look at how a perspective grounded in the digital humanities (whatever they are) is not just the latest trend, but rather a prism with a deep history through which we can refract our teaching and learning, and where MOOCs can be transmogrified into good pedagogy. Some assembly is required, and in neither trend can humans be replaced. Rather, the technology requires a humanities perspective in order for it to achieve its greatest potentials.

I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts on this – inverting the normal order of thing, soliciting comments before the paper…

Partly as a result of speaking at this conference (and also a wedding to attend that week) I won’t be able to hit a graduate student conference on the digital humanities happening one building over.