New Media and New Teaching for the Middle East and North Africa

A Seminar co-sponsored by
The American University in Paris

The Institut du Monde Arabe

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

June 7-9, 2004

Mission Statement: It might be argued that the impact of the Internet and Information Technology on Middle Eastern societies is tantamount to another "print revolution" transcending national borders, liberating the flow of information, and defying overt censorship or other attempts at control. Others have made contradictory claims that the impact of technology in the region has been severely curtailed by economic, political and other social limitations. For scholars and teachers concerned with the Arab and Muslim worlds, the spread of new broadcast and Internet technologies offers exciting opportunities and new challenges, as new media shape and are shaped by a generation steeped in Aljazeera, cybercafes, and weblogs.

Our exploration of these issues will be organized around two themes. The first concerns the construction of 21^st-century identities in and beyond Arab and Muslim cultures. Since much of the political and cultural discourse since 9/11 has treated relations between “Islam” and the “West,” a second theme of the seminar concerns the dialogue among religions in Muslim, European, and North American settings.

This three day workshop/seminar will consider the impact of "New Media," particularly Internet and Information Technology (IT) on the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic world as a whole, as well as the implications for scholars seeking to foster a better understanding of the region. Sessions on the first day of the conference will assess the current situation and explore the changes that this “revolution” has brought about as well as challenges within the region that may be preventing new technologies from having a full impact. Other presentations will assess the current impact of technology on Middle Eastern Studies in the West.

The second day will be a working session in which professors from both outside and within the region discuss how to respond, in and through their teaching and scholarship, to the IT revolution, how to overcome some of the present hurdles, and how they might use IT to build networks of communication across international boundaries. Participants will be expected to explore new ideas of online collaboration and teamwork. Scholars from the participating institutions will present work in progress on teaching and resource development, with emphasis on social sciences and humanities courses with Arab and Islamic themes.

These sessions will result in the development of a preliminary working strategy for the development of collaborative pedagogical resources and scholarly networks. The web resources, teaching materials, and links to academic projects of the various participating institutions will be presented at a closing discussion panel that is open to the general public and at which we expect to articulate a working strategy for collaborative scholarship and teaching.

Participants: Faculty, IT specialists and related staff from the following Institutions:

The Institut du Monde Arabe

The Al-Musharaka Collaborative of NITLE

The American University in Paris

The American University in Cairo

The American University of Beirut

Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane