This paper will describe my efforts to meet two related challenges posed by the rise of social media in the undergraduate Middle East politics classroom. The first challenge concerns maintaining a healthy sense of proportion. Social media (SM) outlets, such as YouTube, twitter, and Facebook, often garner hyperbolic attention (i.e., the “Twitter Revolution,” etc.). Our students, heavy consumers of SM themselves, may accept such claims uncritically, including sometimes unsubstantiated claims of SM’s effects on actual political events. My paper and presentation will describe some successful strategies to place the rise and influence of SM in balanced contexts. By way of brief illustration, I ask students to consider the following quote: “It is true that our people are still illiterate. But politically that counts far less than it did twenty years ago… [Social media] has changed everything… Today people in the most remote villages hear of what is happening everywhere and form their opinions. Leaders cannot govern as they once did. We live in a new world.” The quote is attributed to Gamal Abdel Nasser, and hails from the 1950s; I have only substituted “social media” for “radio.” Classroom exercises such as this nurture healthy skepticism towards easy claims of SM’s transformational influence. They also redirect discussions towards considering the actual impact of SM, and its relation to other, often interconnected factors shaping current politics. In short, these exercises allow students to approach the study of SM with fresh eyes. The second challenge I will address concerns useful ways to incorporate SM into the syllabus. Over time, I have devised a number of exercises that improve students’ grasp of how social media does indeed affect politics. One exercise I will describe uses Tunisian rapper El Général’s famous music video “Rais ElBilad” (widely disseminated via SM as “the anthem of the Jasmine Revolution”). Students view the video three times: first, without sound (watching for production decisions such as setting; camera angles, body language, etc.); second, with sound but without translation (observing changes in rhythm and tone, repetition of phrases, etc.); and, finally, with sound and translation. This exercise is stimulating and fun, and inspires student insights into the impacts of globalization, youth bulges, the universality of narratives, as well as the specificities of the Tunisian situation. More broadly, students see that they can gain critical understandings of SM’s role even when they do not know the language. This is an important pedagogical goal.

Perhaps no subject matter has as much contentious, zealously -charged and emotionally-grounded “scholarship” on social media—as well as other sites—with which to contend as does Religion and for the instructor of Religion in general but of Islam/ Islamic Studies in particular, especially in a classroom in which the student population is not predominantly or is only Muslim or even marginally accepting of religion, the impediments to an authentic intellectual exploration, an accurate understanding and an objectively based study of Islam posed by social media are even more pronounced and problematic. Because of the easy access to deep pockets of consistent misinformation, opinion-based misinterpretation, as well as inter- (and intra-) religious hostilities on social media and other forms of technology, the instructor of Islam in a secular/ non-Islamic classroom is tasked with the deliberate mediation of social technology, a constructive and experiential pedagogy in media literacy and media analysis, and as well the creative incorporation of suitable media into classroom instruction and course assignments, for it must be said that some forms of social media can enhance both the teaching and the learning of Islam in the typical undergraduate classroom. My presentation will cover both the negative as well as the positive dimensions of social media on Islam by first problematizing religion and social media in general with references to specific (and popular) sites as well as the currency of images/ imagery in arguing for and sustaining certain predisposed attitudes towards Islam of American students/ about Islam by the more zealous in the religious communities. It is in this section that I will argue for the absolute necessity of media literacy training as well as the use of traditional text-based analysis to dissuade students from the hyperbole and falsehoods about Islam/ beliefs and practices of Muslims in social media. I will then address the many excellent and important resources and modalities of social media that contribute to an effective study of Islam—and why it is vital that our students be introduced to such positively-vetted sites and resources. Thus, I will discuss a range of positive dimensions of social media in the Islam/Islamic Studies classroom, such as: incorporating blogs and personal e-journals by Muslim women, say, in the Middle East; creating Twitter connections with a new generation of Muslim scholars, teachers, etc., and referencing websites and e-communities (like facebook) in contemporary Islam.

This paper discusses experiences incorporating social media into Middle East Studies classes in a liberal arts college context, with a particular focus on their intensive use in two courses offered repeatedly over the past several years: International Politics of the Middle East & North Africa; and Media & Politics in the Middle East & North Africa. The paper tracks the author’s refinement, through trial and error as well as the application of pedagogical theories, of how tools such as blogs, twitter, and social bookmarking can productively be designed into a syllabus as well as applied through adaptation and improvisation as courses run. A significant portion of the paper will be dedicated to discussing the educational value of student blogging, including how to design effective assignments that foster student engagement with the medium for both reflection and conversation. It will include examples of blog-based assignments that help students understand and narrow the gap betweeen their lives and experiences and those of Middle Easterners. Sections on twitter and social bookmarking will consider what works (and doesn’t) in overcoming student resistance to new tools, or tools used in new ways, as well as the effectiveness of modeling versus other approaches in teaching productive social media use in the context of learning about the Middle East and North Africa. A final section will weigh the costs and benefits of incorporating these tools, with a particular emphasis on necessary time commitments from instructors and students, proposing a rubric that can be applied in deciding whether to incorporate a particular tool, and how. The paper will conclude with an argument in favor of the considered application of social media tools to enhance the teaching of certain kinds of content and the transfer of certain skills, but cautions against any over-enthusiastic embrace of them. It also invites readers to use consideration of social media-based assignments as a way to reconsider the purposes and effectiveness of more traditional assignments.

This paper will be jointly presented by the creator of a digital archive and an instructor using the archive in a classroom. The digital archive is a knowledge management system that houses a unique and rich collection of multilingual social media content from the 2011 Arab uprisings to the present. It is a ‘big data’ repository in terms of volume, velocity, and variety of data. Accessing social media to gain meaningful insight poses challenges. The archive addresses the limitations to processing this large scale of varied social media content, by providing search tools: indices of Facebook, Twitter, and website content stored, data visualizers, and teaching modules (under development) to support qualitative research based on ethnographic, social, and historical inquiry. By providing a rich archive of data from across the Internet, a suite of tools to help map and understand this data, and a platform for collaborative research practice, the archive helps academics, artists, and technologists alike to understand engagement in global social movements. As part of the research and development of substantive teaching modules on Arab Social Media, The Middle East Online, and Data Visualization, the archive has been working closely with instructors to bring these collections of social media into relevant classes. In teaching a Freshman Seminar in Spring 2014, the Instructor is focusing on the Arab Uprisings set in historical context hoping to captivate students’ interest in a topic that has deep historical roots, appears on the nightly news, and is plastered across social media. Students must research a major paper using traditional and non-traditional sources. One of the preparatory assignments requires them to use the digital archive’s Twitterminer tool, which aggregates tweets over a particular period of time on a particular topic of the students’ choosing. Students must then make some sense of the content in the tweets over the time period they chose and try to see some changes in the data over time. The Instructor will share the students’ experiences using the digital archive’s Twitterminer and their ability to interpret social media content and transform it into narrative prose. She expects there will be challenges to their success with this digital archive, ranging from their ability to navigate the site, to their ability to interpret tweets as a primary source, to their ability to category shift from social media to academic narrative. She will offer comparisons with their work based on traditional written sources.

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.