Growing numbers of digital humanists don’t have access to digital humanities centers.  While they may get energized at a THATCamp, it’s hard to sustain that energy back on the home campus.  The vibrant online digital humanities community helps by keeping us connected via social media as seen in Digital Humanities Now.  I’m interested in exploring a more organized form of digital humanities development.

What would a digital humanities MOOC look like?  A MOOC is a massively open online course, where course materials and interaction take place online.  MOOCs thrive on networked learning; those participants  who learn collaboratively by networking around the material get much more out of such a course than those who take it in a silo.  Since the digital humanities community already has a strong ethos of online interaction, it seems ripe for participation in a MOOC.  Granted, such a course might not be truly massive like Sebastian Thrum’s course with 90,000 signed up, but I think we could get enough critical mass to generate some good discussion and interaction.  I imagine a target audience of faculty, grad students, advanced undergrads, librarians, technologists, museum professionals, and anyone else who is interested.

So, let’s get together and plan a MOOC.  Seriously.  My colleagues and I at NITLE plan to pilot this idea in the last two weeks of July.  This is your chance to request your choice of topics.

More and more faculty are offering Introduction to Digital Humanities courses.  What would a textbook look like for such a course?  What about an open intro to DH resource/textbook that would let you mix and match (or as Jeff McClurken suggested at THATCamp Kansas) even let your students decide where to focus in a given course.  What would you like to see in such a resource?

The flip-side to the Digital Aliens? session… Our students are digital natives, but not consciously aware of how to learn from, leverage or be critical of the technology they’ve grown up with. Often they perceive only the social and entertainment value of the web, mobile devices and digital services. What techniques can we use to engage students in a meaningful dialogue about the power and pitfalls of technology?

SoMoLo — social, mobile, local — is all the rage for tech startups trying to integrate the power of social networking, the mobility of our devices and the locales in our daily lives. In addition, the idea of gamification — infusing game mechanics into reality — seems to be present in many different contemporary contexts. What is the crossover into the humanities classroom? In this discussion, we can share ideas about mobile and/or gaming projects and the benefits to student engagement as a practical follow-up to the ARIS Video Games workshop.