The third meeting of the “Neo-World” series on the future of the world, culture, science, and technology was held on Wednesday, January 18 under the title of “The Impact of Digital Humanities on Higher Education”.
The meeting was held with the participation of Kai-Ming Cheng, a Professor of Education at the University of Hong Kong as a keynote speaker, who participated virtually in the discussion from Hong Kong.
He is the Director of the Education Policy Unit at the Faculty of Education. He was Chair Professor of Education, Dean of Education, Vice-President, and Senior Advisor to the President of the University. He has been involved in institutional evaluation and accreditation, policy discussion, and training in higher education in various jurisdictions, recently in China, Mongolia, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. He lectures occasionally at the National Academy of Education Administration, in China, and SKOLKOVO, Russia.
Over the years, he chaired various policy committees relevant to education in Hong Kong, among others, on language and teachers.  He is among the initiators of “Education 2.1”, an advocacy for education development in Hong Kong. He has delivered hundreds of keynotes around the world. He writes columns for Hong Kong Economic Journal Daily and Shanghai Education, and for three years in Escuela.

Dr. Sadra Khosravi, an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies (ISCS) was the other speaker at the meeting. Khosravi earned his MA and Ph.D. in Communications, from the faculty of Social Sciences, at the University of Tehran. He is a faculty member in the Department of Cyberspace Studies, Institute for Social and Cultural Studies (ISCS), Tehran. His areas of interest are digital media user studies, the idea of the digital university, and post-digital post-humanities. His past research was dedicated to human-computer interaction (HCI), human-information interaction (HII), computer-mediated communications (CMC), dialogue and discussion in social networks (SNs) and virtual communities (VCs), user-generated contents (UGC) and participatory cultures in social media platforms.  His recent publications were on the digital divide, freedom of expression in academia and over the internet, and freedom of information and the internet. Right now, he is working on different projects including but not limited to online learning in higher education, misperceptions of digital literacies, and the concept of (post)digital (academic) cultures.

The academic secretary of the meeting was Dr. Leila Khadem Makhsuos Hosseini, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at MGIMO University. 

Kai-ming Cheng explained during the meeting that technology has always been there since human history, but now it is attracting our attention for two reasons: one is that it is advancing so quickly that most of the world has difficulties in catching up and because of that people have all kinds of speculations, good or bad about its advancement. But the second reason is that technology unlike in the earlier days is now spreading everywhere. Even in very underdeveloped regions of the world. So, the scale and speed are really unprecedented.
He continued that, technology is going so fast, and few people are discussing the negative effects of technology but this will soon or late emerge on the horizon. Because you cannot skip humanities when you talk about technological advancement.
“Maybe we are going to have some resistance in the beginning, we are going to just put emphasis on the critical aspects, but after a while, it is going to be part of the mainstream scholarship”, Khosravi said about Digital Humanities.
He explained in detail about digital Humanities, the digital humanities in academia, with a focus on both the educational part and the research, and the contribution of digital humanities to academia.
Khosravi also emphasized that in the case that digital humanities going to be the mainstream of humanities departments, the digital divides in the academia which exist now all  around the world,  could be widende and we have to learn how to decrease this level of digital divide. 
The full discussion is available at