Networked collaboration transforms curricula: the case of Arab culture and civilization

Liberal Education, Spring, 2004 by Dana Barrow

It was not always necessary to persuade faculty to participate. When Toler contacted Azzedine Layachi, a member of the faculty at St. John's College whose work focuses on North Africa and political Islam, and asked him to act as a consultant on the project, Layachi says he jumped at the chance. In his view creating a serious Web site full of resources on the Middle East, especially in light of current events, was a necessary endeavor. "People tend to rely on the Web more than ever for all kinds of information, so this kind of resource is especially important." He worked on critically reviewing all of the materials Toler and the site's other contributors had gathered, making recommendations for what to include and exclude and checking the content for accuracy. He submitted some of his own research, both published and unpublished, and suggested other scholars who NITLE might contact for contributions. As he worked he sensed a difference between this project for an online audience and the traditional academic publications he had written before. "You feel a huge responsibility," he explains. "This site would be sent out to a wider audience, and an audience that had been shocked, so one had to do the best one could without watering down the information or being apologetic about it."

In addition to consultants such as Layachi, NITLE hosted annual summer seminars that brought together faculty from its member colleges to discuss ways of using the Arab Culture and Civilization site to develop collaborative courses or modules that might enhance their curricula. Rachid Aadnani, a professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at Wellesley College, was a seminar participant who later became involved more deeply as a content consultant. He had been involved with other collaborative technical projects before. Despite these experiences, he says he realized that "it is hard to fit new online technologies that you are just getting acquainted with into your teaching style. But," he adds, "I have to say that after the [NITLE] seminar, I found quite a few ways of using what I learned to improve my teaching and involve students in new communicative and interactive projects."

Other faculty involved with the site have also been inspired by its potential to create new and interesting learning experiences for students. Doug Davis of Haverford College is a personality psychologist by training, with a special interest in adolescence in Morocco and the United States. He linked his own course Web site to the Arab Culture and Civilization site, and would like to create a threaded discussion between adolescents in the Middle East, Europe, and America to explore what it means to be a Muslim adolescent around the world. "Although you can probably drop into a version of this kind of chat using America Online (AOL), this is a more secure environment where people have an identity and a recognizable address." He also sees the site as a venue for sharing research and course materials from American colleges with other academic institutions in the Middle East. "Middle Eastern libraries have good Internet connections, but they have libraries that are struggling to keep up with materials from America, which are very expensive for them. They need online materials. I want people in Morocco to be able to read what I write about Morocco and vice-versa, so I put all of my work that's remotely ready for prime time online."