celebrating via Twitter

An Italian twitterer, Elyl, successfully defended her dissertation at approximately 5:00 p.m., her time. And, the beauty of it all is that before the dissertation, we all cheered her on and after, we happily celebrated with her, from Italy & other countries, from across the ocean too.

Today, Elyl posted a thank you on her blog to all her Twitter following and said (translation mine):  

If ever anyone should ask you “What’s the purpose of Twitter?” … tell him to take a look at the links [the Tweets she received]
Seven months ago, I hardly knew any of the people linked; yesterday they were all with me, beside me, supporting me and rejoicing with me on this my happiest of days…

italian festival @ montclair

Italy’s malaise (see my previous post) may not be cured by the Italian Festival of the Arts and Humanities, but it will bring a series of stimulating, alluring, satisfying and entertaining events to the University in the Spring 2008 semester.

Maybe you may find something (everything is free, except for the production of Hey Girl, which is part of the $15 Peak Performance program) in which you are interested—food, film, fine art & architecture & more—and if there is something you may wish to know more about, leave me a comment and I’ll try to provide you with more info or people to contact about it.

P.S. Although the involvement of our actual department was quite minimal, for reasons unbeknownst  to me, there are some symposia that have been coordinated by our faculty.

Something new for me

Through friends and their blogs, this novice blogger has discovered many things…and unearthed some unknown talents while so doing. Much earlier this year, a friend posted a quiz on American geography. After taking the challenge (which truly was a challenge because I am not American :P), I started to investigate the script of the quiz itself. Languages in general fascinate me, so automatically the structure of the language used to program the game also intrigued me. So after playing with the actual language used to program the game, I gave in to my wonder and curiosity and decided to “create” my own. OK, I’ll admit it is not very original (I just used the template provided and modified the responses, time and tweaked it a bit), I actually got the “interactive script” used in the original American quiz to work for my quiz.

And here is the end result: Le 20 regioni d’Italia / The 20 Italian Regions. I use it to stimulate my students to memorize the regions. Does it work? Well, for those who actually do it…yes. I would love to be able to record scores so I can actually “know” what my students are doing, however, that is a challenge I have not yet managed to work through.

If you are so inclined, try it out and tell me what you think :/