ready for the new academic year

I am very fortunate to be one of a select few professors to pilot a personalized study on learning with the iPod Touch (an entire class set–w00t!). As I am an Italian professor, the Office of Information Technology at Montclair State University, has also provided my students with the mini microphone.
In addition to the apps [...]

Calico ‘09 musings

I was fortunate enough to have a paper accepted at the 26th annual conference of Calico ’09,  my first Calico conference ever. It was an experience that surpassed any and all expectations (how often can we say that?!). Different aspects of the conference that made it so memorable include the venue, the presentations, the participants [...]

the birth of a new legacy perhaps?

I remember reading an article in NYTimes on Jan 21/09 covering the “Nation’s Many Faces in Extended First Family.” As an appendix to this article was the great graphic below giving us a glimpse of this First Family, to demonstrate that this family has multicultural roots.

Inherent in a multicultural family arise many issues for a [...]

word(le) cloud

I finally decided to create my own twitter wordle…words have great significance, even when taken out of context, wouldn’t you agree? Here is what is important to me evidently

7 facts about me

I have been tagged by Seth Dickens for the ‘Seven Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me’ Edubloggers thing. I’ve done a couple of these in the past so forgive any repetitions for those who’ve read my past lists.
The rules say you have to:

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog
[...]

to learn italian or english? both…

One of the greatest rewards of teaching is when your students teach you something. I have taught one of the most challenging courses in my 4 years here this spring semester: Advanced Italian Grammar a.k.a intro to Italian linguistics. I attempted to present students to the scientific study of language, from phonology to morphology to [...]

courses taking on a new design in SP09

The end of another academic year is coming to a close and this brings me much relief. I would like to focus my efforts on my tenure package and continue to ride on the wave of teaching with technology in my department. This is an exciting time for the department, the most exciting in fact [...]

a new discovery or two

I was invited to give a talk at the NJ Italian & Italian Heritage Commission Annual Symposium at Rutgers yesterday. I share this with you for two reasons: 1) I had no internet access and found myself wanting to write tweet but couldn’t; and 2) was rewarded by the experience.

Let’s start with the Internet…OK, so [...]

twitter & teaching/learning Italian

In early 2007, I joined Twitter, one of the many social networking and micro-blogging services. According to Wikipedia, Twitter

allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application
in italiano, anche da Wikipedia… Twitter è un network e [...]

oral vs. written

I have finally finished, more than 30 minutes late, the last of the oral exit interviews for my intermediate Italian students (47 in total). These brief interviews, the second part of their formal oral evaluation for the course, was not as rewarding or fulfilling for a professor of foreign language.The class is, unfortunately, populated by [...]