24th edition of the Italian Language Week in the World
This event was a collaboration between the Italian Consulate in Vancouver, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto — the Toronto Italian Cultural Institute, the Italian Chamber of Commerce Canada-West, and the Italian program within the World Languages & Literature Department at Simon Fraser University.
The THEME of this year’s edition of the Settimana.. was Italian Language and Books: The World between the Lines
The keynote speech by Enrico Tallone addressed the material culture aspect of book-making, with a focus on artistic type-setting. Material book-culture was also the topic of Ilaria Baldan’s presentation, while Dr. Arkadianos talked about expectations and limitations of AI technology in educational contexts. His talk was be paired with a brief presentation by our students, mostly Italian Minors, currently in ITAL 300-Advanced Language & Culture, who talked about their own experience with AI technology in the Italian classroom.
Enrico Tallone (Tallone Editore): The Art of the Printed Word: Celebrating Italian Printmaking Heritage, from Manuzio to Tallone
This artistic printing house has earned honours and accolades from around the world. Published books are set entirely by hand using original type fonts from punches created by great artists. Tallone’s passion for art-printing has led him to write and publish a series of books on typesetting by hand, in an effort to spread knowledge and understanding of the art of high-level printing, enabling appreciation of the charm and beauty of the font styles, layouts and formats of cultural books. Tallone’s printed works have been featured in exhibitions and events around the world, from Rome to Kyoto to Santiago de Chile.
Ilaria Baldan
Floating Culture / Cultura Galleggiante - Building Bridges for Italian Craftsmanship
Ilaria Baldan is Executive Director of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Canada West
Dionysios Arkadianos
Dr. Arkadianos is Digital Learning specialist at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation New Media Lab within SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He is a computational linguist and instructional designer, who focuses on online and blended learning environments. His interests include intelligent tutoring systems, instructional design for online learning, the gamification of the learning experience, and computer-assisted language learning.
His talk provided an overview of the evolution of generative AI systems, their principal current applications, with a focus on language acquisition and literature studies. The discussion of both the opportunities and the limitations of these technologies was followed by a presentation by the students of ITAL 300 on their project, which applied some of the theoretical aspects discussed by Dr. Arkadianos.
ITAL 300 Student Project Presentation
This presentation represents the result of an experiential learning project in which some of the technologies discussed by Dr. Arkadianos were applied and workshopped in the context of an Italian Language & Culture class. The presentation was delivered in Italian, with supporting slides in English.
Their presentation can be viewed below.