cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on May 25, 2009
On the Friday leading into the Memorial Weekend here in the U.S., Kevin and I had the pleasure of speaking with Enza Antenos-Conforti, a professor of Italian at Montclair State University in New Jersey. You’ll notice some issues with the recording in a few sections, but we hope they won’t detract from the quality of the discussion.
We had discussed the power of Twitter in a previous post and had listed Enza’s e-twinning project with her Twitter colleague, Seth Dickens, as an example of how you could use Twitter educationally. We were eager to hear more about Enza’s Twitter projects from her perspective as a seasoned classroom instructor and active researcher. Enza’s research on her use of Twitter in university-level intermediate Italian classes can be found in the 2009 Calico monograph, The Next Generation: Social Networking and Online Collaboration in Foreign Language Learning and she writes frequently about her teaching and research on her blog, An Academic at Work.
In this interview Enza shares with us how her use of Twitter with her students evolved through observation, feedback and reflection, the role her own Twitter community played in the construction and implementation of her projects, as well as her new iPod touch project slated for this coming fall. Enza’s work shows how a transparent, accessible and collaborative approach to teaching and research, made possible through the judicious application of web 2.0 technologies, can have a profound impact on teaching and learning that extends far beyond our classroom walls.
In that spirit of collaboration and sharing, here are some resources Enza mentioned in the course of our conversation that you will want to check out:
- Enza’s inspiration for using Twitter in the classroom as described in her blog post, Twitter’s “what are you doing?” is making families
- Enza’s initial thoughts on the e-twinning project with Seth Dickens: E-Twinning: NJ & Trento
- Seth’s post project reflections: Skype Calls for e-Twinning in L2
- Enza’s post project reflections: How We Skyped in the FL Classroom
- Martino Martini and Montclair University wiki for e-twinning project
- Crowdstatus to manage twitter groups
- Skype in Schools to find classes to communicate and collaborate with
- Enza’s Twitter accounts: profeac, ivenus and profenza
- Research project by Professor Monica Rankin and graduate student Kim Smith of the University of Texas, Dallas that influenced Enza’s upcoming iPod touch project: The Twitter Experiment: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas
- Monica Rankin’s follow-up conclusions: The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas
- Howard Rheingold’s post on Twitter Literacy
- Twitterfone: Send Messages to Twitter with Voice
- Learn10: Learn 10 new words a day
As always, if you know someone who is doing great work integrating technology into the language curriculum or have a tool to share that would be of interest to our readers, please let us know!
The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti [53:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (280)
cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Music for our podcasts is courtesy of George Wood and is called Travelogue. You can find more of George Wood’s music at podsafeaudio.com
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