As we Embrace the new millennium, the debate concerning the ever-changing role of area studies in the humanities curriculum and in funding and academic policies continues. Middle Eastern Studies is facing a new policy and funding agenda, which is forcing institutions and departments to impose changes in teaching, research and funding and meant to bring Middle Eastern Studies in line with what are perceived as more relevant fields of study. Accordingly, some Near Eastern Studies programs, which have continued to experience a decline in funding levels, have over the past decade placed greater emphasis on interdisciplinary classes in comparative literature, history and religion. Sometimes these changes have led to the marginalization of early and medieval Islamic history, culture and religion at public institutions. Why offer a class in medieval Islamic history, while classes in the modern Middle East, comparative literature, or world history might attract higher undergraduate enrollment? Faculty have not always succeeded in convincing university administration of the need to offer undergraduate seminars on various aspects of Islamic history, or devised ways of making pre-modern Near Eastern history and religion more appealing to undergraduates.

Since the Appearance over 40 years ago of Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, some observers of Middle East regional politics have ascribed great, if largely unexplained, societal significance to the role of information and communications in this rapidly changing and invariably hard to read region. Those persuaded by the profound if uncertain sociopolitical role of communications were both rewarded and analytically challenged by the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979. This upheaval may be characterized as the first political revolution in the Middle East, or anywhere else, that might not have succeeded had it not been for the information revolution. Although those of us who witnessed this cataclysmic event first hand did not as yet have the term “information revolution” as part of our conceptual tool-kit, we did document in rich if unsystematic detail the crucial and central role played by the accoutrements of communications in Iran’s upheaval.

Particularly Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the issue of representation has loomed large in the consciousness of many Middle East scholars as we ply our trade. While this issue is undeniably important in our research, it may be even more crucial in our teaching. Encountering students whose only exposure to the Middle East has come through the evening news places a heavy burden on a teacher to respond to prevalent stereotypes about the region and replace them with a more complex, contextualized picture. One way to do this is to supplement the use of standard scholarly works on the region with primary documents in which a wide range of Middle Easterners “speak for themselves.” As scholars have pointed out in the Bulletin, the World Wide Web (www) provides many opportunities to do this in new ways. As a political scientist I chose to provide students in my Government and Politics of the Middle East course with these types of primary sources by designing a project in which students studied the strategies and goals of political activists of many stripes, and the responses of governments to them, by consulting the websites of political movements and newspapers.

The Range of Information Technology (IT) resources available to support students studying the modern Middle East continues to expand. Some recent additions are traditional reference materials, now available on CD-ROM or via the Internet. Established projects for simulation can now be tailored to Middle East topics. Others are creative packages introducing students to key issues and concepts about the region. All broaden the options for teachers to facilitate student learning through innovative assignments, research projects, and hands-on modules. Recent experience with these resources indicates that they significantly enhance the learning environment by supplementing traditional “chalk and talk” pedagogy.