This summer’s Innovation Institute led to a lot of breakthroughs for my project. I am working on a floor-to-ceiling redesign of the digital components in my course Middle Eastern Revolutions, a section of CULF 3331: Contemporary World Issues.

I originally proposed this course as a vehicle for experimenting with the use of digital learning tools, given that social media was perceived to have played a momentous role in the Arab revolutions starting in late 2010. Also, and really more importantly, it took a good year and a half for academic publishing to catch up to the events we planned to study, so I anticipated from the beginning using a combination of digital archives of primary sources and revolutionary ephemerata, complemented by news, analysis, and scholarship published in blogs and digital newspapers and journals. Continue reading →