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 [...]

How We Skyped in the FL Classroom

Time to share what a wonderful experience this semester’s e-twinning project with Seth Dickens at Martino Martini has been, and in particular the final culminating technological project, the Skype calls.
Over the semester, as mentioned in a previous post, Seth and I introduced our students to Twitter to give them an opportunity to interact and engage [...]

The Tweep Types behind the Tweets

as I write this post, Twitter is down. What did I do to network? Went back to Friendfeed (new UI in beta & a new widget for my blog) and reintroduced myself to it. Well, I also discovered a good thing while I was there (which just might prompt me to use it again).
A few [...]

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 [...]

why twitter?

An interesting international conversation on Twitter this morning caught my attention and prompted this poll. The three participants I follow, @josepicardo (UK), @nergizk (Bursa) and @courosa (Canada), were engaged in a dialogue about the ways in which we use Twitter, the purpose of following and the right to unfollow, and the idea of community membership [...]

E-Twinning: NJ & Trento

Why we learn foreign languages…to understand better the world in which we are living thus, in turn, understand ourselves and our homeland better. Except, with globalization people think barriers are being removed and everyone should just be able to speak English, since it is considered a global language.
But that is not globalization. Cultural globalization does [...]

Similies & smiles

Happy 2009!
Before I get back to the grind, I had to catch up on some e-reading…tweets, blogs, news. It seems that some people never really take a break from their social networks, and for that I am grateful. Much reading, as you can imagine, also occurred as it was written, in real time, so to [...]

Using the right tech tool for teaching…how did you decide?

I have deliberated this post to death, wanting to ensure that I made a positive contribution to the discussion of social network sites (SNS). As an educator, my use of SNS is always from a professional perspective (yeah, right), wanting to investigate different tools for language learning and teaching.
During one of the umpteenth [...]

read-write web vs. academic publishing

Preparing this tenure application has led me to another question about academia in the age of social media. I have mulled over the process vs. the content in a previous post, the medium as the message based on Wesch’s article and also posted on how-to integrate technology in my teaching without disrupting the flow of [...]

is social media really an “us” vs. “them”?

This is a post I’ve wanted to write for some time but hadn’t found my courage voice for it. It was born from a comment of a student evaluation from a fall course that stated that not only were my “clothes inappropriate” but I also “had Facebook”. The comment on my wardrobe is completely off [...]