Despite the strong showing of the digital at January's MLA conference and other big to-dos on the humanities circuit, some good humanists remain skeptical of what the ever-proliferating array of new technologies is really adding to the field. That's a fair and important question, and it's one that too frequently is met with a surprisingly one-dimensional answer.

Card-carrying digital humanists, the partisans of the new school, are quick to point to projects like medievalist Martin Foys' virtual rendering of the Bayeux Tapestry as irrefutable evidence that the windows of the web open to vast new horizons in humanisitic and social science research. And so the argument goes—almost always with a keen focus on what’s new in terms of research. Less attention tends to be paid to what digital technologies are bringing to teaching in the humanities.

It has been refreshing, then, to see that Patricia Cohen’s much talked and blogged about “Humanities 2.0” series for The New York Times has finally devoted an installment to the use of digital tools in the classroom. In her piece, Cohen culls some interesting examples from the field. The greatest "ooh-ahh" moment is surely Bryn Mawr Professor Katherine Rowe's use of a virtual re-creation of the Globe Theater for students of her introductory Shakespeare course to stage the Bard's dramas with their web avatars. And beyond this, Cohen does a commendable job of considering the classroom and coursework possible in the "new" digital humanities as an important space of productive engagement for faculty and students.

In the first "Humanities 2.0" article--published last fall, Princeton historian Anthony Grafton was quoted as saying that "[i]t’s easy to forget the digital media are means and not ends.” In context, the "ends" of Prof. Grafton's formulation were to be the research results produced with the new digital methodology, but it's also important to remember that research is not the only desirable "end" to which digital media promise the "means". In higher education, the scholar is also a teacher, and the promise of the digital extends to the humanist working in both capacities.

At Berkeley, as elsewhere, digital tools are increasingly employed in the humanities classroom.  THL and bSpace both offer instructors a project-based platform and web 2.0 tools to augment class instruction, and to pull only one worthy example from the variety of digital resources recently developed by and for the campus teaching community, the Berkeley Language Center's Library of Foreign Language Film Clips offers language instructors a digital treasure trove of organized, subtitled video clips for use in lessons.

And while skeptics will argue here as well that some of these new tools won't pan out as anything more than novelties in the classroom, more or less the same can be (and always has been) said of any number of traditional teaching strategies.  Is Prof. Rowe's new approach to Shakespeare likely to prove the best, last, and only way to teach "Titus Andronicus"?  Probably not.  But it's a novel technique for engaging with her students and might bring some new insights to teacher and pupils alike.  

The one inviolable law of the classroom is that not all learning strategies are equally effective for all students.  Arguing from that premise alone, adding some digital arrows to the instructor's educational quiver seems like an unequivocally positive thing, and any assessment of the promise of the digital humanities won't be complete without recognizing what they are bringing not just to cutting-edge research, but also to cutting-edge teaching.