The Arab Spring as a Framework for Teaching a Middle East Survey Course In fall of 2012, I was given a course release by my university to update the Middle Eastern History survey that I teach in light of the recent events of the Arab Spring. As part of the proposal, I had intended to learn to use social media both in the classroom and as a tool to enhance my own teaching of the subject. I went about integrating social media into the course in two different ways. The first was in assignments to students. I asked them to select an online feed related to current events in the Middle East to read each week. I also selected some specific material captured from social media and assigned it as reading assignments. Students were responsible for this material in homework and in class discussions. In addition to passive reading, I had hoped to have student discussion leaders create a wiki on our course management software in Moodle in which they would post questions before class discussions and receive feedback and questions from me and from other students. The second approach was to use material from social media in lectures and class discussions. All of this was assessed with a very simple pre- and post-test Having taught this class one in fall of 2013, the results were mixed. The sections over which I had control, specific readings assignments and lectures, were relatively successful. I think that there is no doubt that identifying themes in modern events that can also be seen in earlier periods helps students to relate to pre-modern actions and ideas. Social media helps make this clearer. This is easily seen in comparing the pre- and post-tests. However, the sections that were under student control were less successful. The wikis in particular were unsuccessful; students did not post questions or use them for discussion, and I had to abandon them at the mid-term in favor of more conventional ways of posting discussion questions. Similarly, while some students took to reading online news or twitter or blog feeds easily, many were confused by the assignment and needed more guidance and more prodding. In short, social media is not a magic bullet and getting students to read and use social media requires as much structure and enforcement as ordinary assignments, if not more.