39 research outputs found
Problem Solving in the COVID-19 ERT University Classroom
No full textThis paper deals with pragmatic aspects of Emergency Remote Teaching adopted in an academic setting as a COVID-19 containment strategy. We consider an intensive introductory course in English Language and Linguistics
taught at the University of Bologna by the author of this study (30 academic hours). Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, the first half of the course was taught full distance, synchronically on Microsoft Teams, while the second part was administered live, with part of the audience present in the physical classroom, and the rest connected online from home. Lessons were videorecorded and transcribed using Microsoft Stream, and subsequently stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatised corpus in English. As the study is methodologically grounded in corpus pragmatics (Aijmer/Rühlemann 2015),
both corpus findings and videorecordings are analysed pragmatically for metacommunicative expressions (Bazzanella 2002, 2010), and metadiscursively for markers of interactivity (Hyland 2005: 49). The results
show that the root cause of most pragmatic accidents (as revealed, in corpus data, by the frequency of hesitations, apologies, and other expressions of uncertainty and doubt) is a contextual mismatch arising from the fact that the same lecture is administered simultaneously to students on campus and online. Despite some positives, e.g., more interactivity (Luporini 2020) in comparison with the fully in-person version of the course that was taught prepandemically (Fusari 2021), it is therefore suggested that hybrid teaching should be much more carefully planned if it is to continue after the pandemic
Language is purposeful. Some thoughts on teaching Systemic Functional Grammar
No full textThis volume is part of a Festschrift to celebrate the work of Donna R. Miller. The author is also one of the editors of this book. Her chapter suggests a reflection on the role of teaching grammar at university, with a specific focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics for non-native learners of English who aim to achieve a high level of proficiency in the English language. It is explicitly based on the guidance and inspiration Donna R. Miller gave her mentees and younger colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LILEC) of the University of Bologna. The chapter looks at the methodologies used to teach this subject at the LILEC Department, and on the advantages and disadvantages of teaching this grammatical formalism at BA level
Feasibility of 3D printing in manufacturing hollow vaginal rings for the treatment of vaginosis
No full textINJECTABLE SODIUM ALGINATE BASED HYDROGEL WITH METRONIDAZOLE IN 3D PRINTED RESERVOIR FOR PROLONGED RELEASE
No full textBetween English humour and national stereotypes – translating Stephen Clarke’s novel Merde Happens into Italian
No full textThis paper discusses the translation into Italian of "Merde Happens", a novel by Stephen Clarke, an English author who has lived and worked in France for over a decade. This novel is relevant to intercultural communication because it satirizes three nations and cultures at the same time: French, English and US American. Irony based on national stereotypes is usually considered to be very difficult to translate, and this sometimes discourages publishers to the point that very valuable fictional products end up not being translated. Our aim is to show that a
novel like Clarke’s can (and indeed, should) be translated: we argue that playing on national stereotypes and laughing about them can be one of the most effective ways of fighting prejudice, and we show that this can be achieved in translation through a careful balance of foreignizing and domesticating choices
Tra scienza e amministrazione: Carlo Conti Rossini durante e dopo la dominazione coloniale
No full textCarlo Conti Rossini’s work is still now considered an essential lens to approach the Horn of Africa, especially the region of today Eritrea. In fact, the contribution of knowledge given by the above-mentioned scholar, who also was the founder of the Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, is immeasurable and covers different scientific fields, from ethnography to philology and history. Despite the international reputation of Conti Rossini and the acknowledged esteem for his scientific heritage, a critical elaboration of his scholarship has been until now only touched upon. The present article aims at addressing this gap and putting the author of Principi di diritto consuetudinario dell’Eritrea in a new light; it does it by retracing on the one hand his life spent between science and administration and by highlighting on the other hand the consequences of his work still in postcolonial age. The article wishes to be a incitement to a postcolonial intellectual biography of Carlo Conti Rossini
3D printed reservoir-like vaginal rings for antibiotic delivery
No full text: Targeting the development of 3D printed reservoir-like vaginal rings (VRs) intended to fulfill the needs of precision medicine, prototypes ensuring prolonged release of metronidazole (MTZ) were preliminary manufactured and tested. Indeed, this drug represents the first-line therapy against bacterial vaginosis, which would especially benefit from convenient as well as easy dose adjustment and from more than 48 h continuous release, thus avoiding barely tolerated and repeated administrations. Starting from a soft thermoplastic elastomer (TPE), hollow ring structures were successfully printed at 190 °C and then extemporaneously filled with drug-loaded, in-situ-crosslinking hydrogel formulations based on alginate (ALG). 3 VR designs, differing in dimensions, number of open surfaces as well as in relevant areas were investigated, together with 9 drug-saturated hydrogel formulations containing extra suspended MTZ particles (20-50 %) and increasing ALG concentrations (2-6 %). Manufacturing of final rings was fine-tuned based on materials thermo-mechanical properties. For comparison purposes, hydrogels with analogous composition were either cast using purposely developed molds or 3D printed mimicking the ring design. VR release performance turned out dependent on the drug solubility and on the surface area available for hydrogel contact with vaginal fluids. Interestingly, this surface resulted correlated to both the outer and inner structure of the system. The data collected would provide an effective asset to increase the versatility of reservoir-like VRs, making them a powerful tool towards therapy customization
Formulation-Dependent Extrudability of Highly Filled Alginate System for Vaginal Drug Delivery
No full textThe incorporation of solid particles as a filler to a hydrogel is a strategy to modulate its properties for specific applications, or even to introduce new functionalities to the hydrogel itself. The efficacy of such a modification depends on the filler content and its interaction with the hydrogel matrix. In drug delivery applications, solid particles can be added to hydrogels to improve drug loading capacity, enable the inclusion of poorly soluble drugs, and modulate release kinetics. This work focuses on the case of alginate (ALG)-based hydrogels, obtained following an internal gelation procedure using CaCO3 as the Ca2+ source and containing a high solid volume fraction (up to 50%) of metronidazole (MTZ), a drug with low water solubility, as a potential extrusion-based drug delivery system. The impact of the hydrogel precursor composition (ALG and MTZ content) on the rheological behavior of the filled hydrogel and precursor suspension were investigated, as well as the hydrogel stability and MTZ dissolution. In the absence of solid MTZ, the precursor solutions showed a slightly shear thinning behavior, more accentuated with the increase in ALG concentration. The addition of drugs exceeding the saturation concentration in the precursor suspension resulted in a substantial increase (about one order of magnitude) in the low-shear viscosity and, for the highest MTZ loadings, a yield stress. Despite the significant changes, precursor formulations retained their extrudability, as confirmed by both numerical estimates and experimental validation. MTZ particles did not affect the crosslinking of the precursors to form the hydrogel, but they did control its viscoelastic behavior. In unfilled hydrogels, the ALG concentration controls stability (from 70 h for the lowest concentration to 650 h for the highest) upon immersion in acetate buffer at pH 4.5, determining the MTZ release/hydrogel dissolution behavior. The correlations between composition and material properties offer a basis for building predictive models for fine-tuning their composition of highly filled hydrogel systems
“Yeah, you know, these are the miracles of technology.” Interactivity in the COVID-19 ERT university classroom
No full textCOVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT, Karakaya, 2020) has been described as “an unprecedented challenge in university teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2020), requiring lecturers to adapt or devise entirely new syllabi and testing methods in a very short period of time (Bryson & Andres, 2020; Major, 2020). This study investigates a relatively unexplored area of ERT, i.e. interactivity in the online and blended academic classroom, with specific reference to (1) positive and corrective feedback by the teacher; (2) student live feedback through open microphone; (3) face-saving and other repair strategies. We consider an intensive introductory course of English Language and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna (Italy) by the author of this study, for a total of 30 hours. Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, 50% of the course was taught full-distance on Microsoft Teams, while 50% was administered “live,” with part of the audience connected online from home. Lessons were recorded, transcribed, and stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatized corpus in English. The results show that the level of interactivity is higher than it was the case prepandemically (Luporini, 2020), as students take and keep the floor on average 11.3 times for each 90 minutes lecture. Feedback is more positive than corrective, and repair strategies hinge on humour, sometimes eliciting spontaneous laughter in the “live” classroom. Although this may leave the analyst under the impression that students enjoyed this learning experience more than traditional ones, the data also show a high level of anxiety on the part of all participants, as testified by the remarkable frequency of hesitations,
apologies, weak modals and pragmatic accidents
L'autoritratto nel video d'arte: il dibattito teorico interdisciplinare dagli anni Settanta ad oggi. Proposta di un modello d'analisi con esempi dal panorama italiano tra il 1968 e gli anni Ottanta
No full textThis work unfolds delineating the typology of self-portrait videos to the extent available through the analysis of a series of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches from the 70’s up to today (based on the theories of Philippe Lejeune, Michel Beaujour, Raymond Bellour, Marie-Françoise Grange, Laura Rascaroli) for the purpose of confirming the existential conditions. In the absence of specific works on the subject, the self-portrait video emerges as an intellectual challenge, as it seems to possess excellent elusive and resistant qualities for the delimitation of conclusive definitions which have been acknowledged longstanding in traditional writings of the self. The second part presents, starting from assessed theoretical premises, the proposition for constructing a relevant reference analytical method, to which its general grid is modelled depending on the historical, historical-artistic, technical, formal, social, and personal variables that brought the elaboration of audiovisual works subjects of investigation. Simultaneously, the realization of this model has allowed to detect and select a first repertoire of examples of the Italian panorama from 1968 to the 80’s, to which this highlighted the necessary consideration of technical and historical aspects. In fact, the self-portrait video consists of a performative action which contains a visual metaphor made by subject through a linguistic and technical mediation necessarily present to highlight the social dimension. The third part attempts to introduce a few themes, such as the artist’s body and the relationship he has with his body and space, which contribute to the emblem of the author, symbol of a world not only corporal but also intimate, psychic, aesthetic, and spiritual. Attached are interviews of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, Lola Bonora, and Michele Sambin, conducted by experimenting with different interview models.Questo lavoro è teso a circoscrivere per quanto possibile la tipologia dell’autoritratto video attraverso l’analisi di una serie di presupposti teorici interdisciplinari dagli anni Settanta ad oggi (fondati sulle teorie di Philippe Lejeune, Michel Beaujour, Raymond Bellour, Marie-Françoise Grange, Laura Rascaroli), allo scopo di confermarne le condizioni di esistenza. In assenza di lavori specifici sul soggetto, l’autoritratto video emerge in questo quadro quale sfida intellettuale, dal momento che sembra possedere in massimo grado le qualità di elusività e resistenza a lasciarsi delimitare in una definizione conclusiva che da tempo sono riconosciute alle più tradizionali scritture del sé.
La seconda parte espone, a partire dalle premesse teoriche vagliate, la proposta di costruzione di un modello d’analisi di riferimento, quale griglia generale da modulare di volta in volta secondo le variabili storiche, storico-artistiche, tecniche, formali, sociali e personali che hanno portato all’elaborazione delle opere audiovisive oggetto d’indagine. Allo stesso tempo, la realizzazione di questo modello è servita al rilevamento e alla selezione di un primo repertorio di esempi dal panorama italiano tra il 1968 e gli anni Ottanta, che ha evidenziato la necessità di considerarne gli aspetti tecnici e storici. L’autoritratto video si costituisce infatti come un atto performativo che compone una visualizzazione metaforica del soggetto attraverso una necessaria mediazione linguistica e tecnica che ne evidenzia la dimensione sociale.
Nella terza parte si è tentato di proporre una lettura di alcuni nodi tematici quali la rappresentazione del corpo dell’artista e le relazioni di tale corpo con lo spazio, che concorrono a comporre l’emblema autoriale, simbolo di un mondo non solo corporeo ma anche interiore, psichico, estetico e spirituale.
In allegato, alcune interviste a Maria Gloria Bicocchi, Lola Bonora e Michele Sambin, condotte sperimentando diversi modelli di interviste
