Updating my PLE...

I just took a look to the mind map I published last semester and as I saw the picture I thrilled with horror: I remember going crazy to download the program to build my map. Anyway, I stopped and reflected on all the activities I have been doing in the past 4-5 moths and I realized that nothing really changed in my PLE, I mean, I can add two more tools, for example, as far as “virtual spaces” are concerned, in particular the Internet, I could add Skype and Facebook, but on the whole, I think that my map did not undergo big and meaningful changes.
I started using actively Skype when the exchanged took place, even for the Padova-Poznan group while as regards Facebook, I don’t have an account, but since Rocio -our peer- did, I started wondering through the profiles, just for curiosity sake. Honestly I’m not interested in having a Facebook account, I know that it could be funny and somehow useful but for me it will surely turn into a waste of time. Skype is an amazing tool: you can talk with people from all around the world, you can see them while talking if you have a webcam, you can even just chat if you want. Undoubtedly I would like to add to the map the wikipages, which can be used for gathering, storing and looking for information. Working on our personal wiki was very interesting and I really enjoyed collaborating with Rocio and with the other members of the group, although when fixing the content and the layout of the wiki it is highly probable that you will have to face some difficulties.
Considering the length of the other posts this will probably be the briefer, but I think that I said pretty much everything about my mind map evolution so far and if something else will come to my mind in the next days, I will immediately update it.

Self-Assessment of my Intercultural Competence

First of all I would like to say that my experience of the exchange was definitely positive. Through the Skype sessions I had the opportunity to find out how college students live and in particular I had the chance to know in details what they do to have fun. Thanks to Rocio I actually learnt something new about American lifestyle and discussing with her made me reflect on my own lifestyle and culture as well. Unfortunately we had only three Skype sessions, which were not enough to increase and improve my ICC. Moreover, our conversations were a little bit limited: there were a lot of things I wanted to ask her, I really had a lot of questions, but we had a Wiki page to carry out so we had to focus on our topics, leaving out all the rest.

As far as the first part of the questionnaire is concerned, that is the section regarding the description of my feelings, knowledge and actions during the exchange, I must admit that there were no moments in which I felt uncomfortable. Maybe I felt like this during the first Skype session when I didn’t fully understand what my peer was talking about, so I costantly had to ask her “I’m really sorry but I didn’t understand: could you repeat please?” but later I always felt comfortable while talking to my peer. She’s Spanish and I think that the fact of talking to someone who was born in Europe and relatively near my native country helped me feeling at ease and gave me to possibility of talking more freely about American life style and American students because often our points of view and our reflections or reactions were similar. As regards knowledge the most important thing I learnt about life at school is that College students pay very high taxes if compared to us but they have a lot of opportunities and some meaningful “privileges” we don’t have as University students. For instance they have the possibility to do sports or extra-scholastic activities of every kind within the campus and they have a lot of price reductions. Moreover I think that, the fact of living all together in a campus make the students fell more united, as if they were a community within a community and as a consequence they might have more possibilities to know each other, while here in Italy things are quite different. Finally, considering actions, at the beginning I often had to ask for clarifications because I didn’t understand how things worked within the College, especially regards the first topic we had to discuss, that was accommodation. Sometimes I also met some difficulties in explaining our peer how students live here in Padova: I had to focus on the way students party and it wasn’t always that easy to describe what we actually do to have fun, why we do it, what we drink (also because she had no idea of how the city of Padua is structured, the places the students usually meet, how they get to them etc..). Moreover sometimes there were some interference from the Spanish culture so I had to clarify some points.

As far as the second and third parts of the questionnaire are concerned, I think that during the exchange my interest in other people’s way of life increased a lot since our Wiki dealt with the daily life of students: I remember talking with Rocio about the extra-scholastic activities she was taking and she spent some time in describing the dance show she was preparing. Considering my ability to cope with a range of reactions people from different cultures may have to the way I express myself both in Italian and in English I think I didn’t have to face particular problems. It happened that I was surprised or particularly enthusiastic about what our peer told me about American students and I came out with some Italian expressions like “wow, che figo” that it English would sound like “wow, this is really cool”. The first and only time I did it Rocio started to laugh, she was evidently amused by it – or at least this is what I perceived – and then I translated the meaning of such an informal expression. As regards my ability of engaging in a conversation with people of the other culture and maintaining a conversation I must admit that it wasn’t so difficult to keep the conversation going with our peer: we had so many questions and practically no time to waste. There were no silences at all, also because we used to create a conference in Skype to give all the members of the group the opportunity of listening to the conversation, asking question and intervening if there were misunderstandings. Besides, considering my knowledge about intercultural communication I can say I know how to resolve misunderstanding which arise from people’s lack of awareness of the view point of another culture. I actually didn’t have to solve any specific misunderstanding: it happened that our peer confused our “Aperitivo” consisting in going to one of the three main squares in the centre of Padova and have a Spriz with the Spanish Botellon, which is something slightly different. Thinking about my language learning, I realized that my listening and writing skills improved, as well as my vocabulary: in fact, I learnt some new words such as “Dorms” for dormitories, “frats” or “Greek” for fraternities and I also discovered that similar female organizations are called “sororities”.

Finally, having the chance of discussing with an American peer, or better a Spanish peer attending Dickinson College, was really a great opportunity for me: now I know how American students live while they are studying at College. Even though we didn’t spend so much time in Skype and every time we had technical problems to solve – due the fact that not all the computers in the lab do work properly – I had a lot of fun while talking to Rocio and I hope that next year students will have the same possibility do to this wondeful exchange as well.

Skyping with Rocio...

Yesterday for the first time I talked with one of the Dickinson's students, Rachele. Well, I though that her name was Rachele, actually it is Rocio, so I started that weird conversation saying “Hi, Rachel” and her response was “Who is Rachel?”. It was definitely embarrassing for me, but I decided to laugh at it, together with the other members of my group. The rest of the conversation was, however, quite successful and interesting as well. We exchanged some basic information about us and we found out that she is Spanish and that she went to the United States to study, in other words she’s an Erasmus student. At the beginning I was convinced that she was born in the United States and that she probably had Spanish origins but clearly I was wrong. As there were three of us, I mean three members of my group out of four, we decided that we could all talk with her creating a conference, otherwise one of use had to go home. We spoke about immigration, discrimination and the topic of our final project as we were supposed to decide together with our American peer what issue we should develop in our Wiki page.

As far as immigration is concerned, she said that American people are really open minded, probably more open minded if compared to Spanish or Italian people, and that they are prepared and willing to accept people from other countries and belonging to very different cultures. She told us that when she arrived at the Dickinson College she was afraid not to be accepted or that the other students could be not very friendly, instead she found a lot of friends and did not feel like stranger. However some problems aroused discussing this particular topic: as far as I understood, she spend all the time within the campus of the college, so she confessed not to have a precise idea about immigration in the US and she said she could talk only about immigration in Spain or about what she noticed visiting New York. Here in Italy it’s quite different: students do not live in a campus, we live in the city and we do not form a sort of community; we live just like the other citizens and with the other citizens, so as a consequence we can have a better view of the problems related to immigration. This led us to the topic for our final project: as she lives primarily in the campus together with other students, we thought it could be a good idea to analyse the difference between life in an American college and life in a European university. As far as I am concerned, I’m really happy with this topic, really enthusiastic about it. I guess that living within a community of students is quite different from living in a big city so I am really curious to see what Rocio will tell us about it and I'm looking forward to creating our Wiki page.

Final Project: Women in Politics

When I heard we had to think about a cultural topic to develop for our final project I had not doubt: I would like to write about women in politics, in Italy and in the United States. Probably the fact of working on Us elections for so much time and contributing to the Wiki page fully dedicated to this issue has influenced me a lot. One of the Democratic candidates running for the office of President of the United States is in fact a woman, Hillary Clinton, and I guess this is the first time a woman gets so close to such a meaningful and high political position. I think that this is really amazing, I mean, the whole issue fascinated me a lot but at the same it made me wonder and a lot of questions suddenly came up to my mind. A President woman: could it ever be possible in Italy?
The embarrassing low presence of women in the Italian political scenery is a matter of fact: considering all European countries, Italy stands in the one of the latest places with only 10% of women in the government. On the contrary, it seems that in all Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly in the North of Europe, the percentage of women occupying leading positions in political institutions is very high, or at least their number is equal to that of men. In Italy the situation is rather sad: women seem not to be interested in politics, they don’t candidate and they usually don’t vote for other women. The government introduced the so-called “quote rosa” hoping to increase the number of women in Parliament trying to solve this problem but it seems to me that nothing really changed. My impression is that the world of politics still belongs to men and as a girl studying in a faculty where the number of girls is clearly predominant if compared to that of boys, in a University that is, as a far as I can see, mostly ruled by women, I really would like to see more women involved in politics. So, what I would like to do is try to analyse the problems that women still have to face with as voters and as candidates in the Us and in Italy and most of all to examine what are the social and cultural factors that prevent women from becoming important political leaders.
This week we were also expected to think about immigration in Italy and to do some on line research to gather information, so that we will be prepared to talk about it with the American students. So I just came back from surfing the Net looking for the latest data, statistics and news about it and I found some articles taken from “La Repubblica” stating that immigrants in our country are more or less 4 millions, 6.2 % of the Italian population, and that they mostly concentrate in the cities of Rome and Milan. They talk 150 different languages and they primarily come from Romania, Morocco and Albania. A recent statistic revealed that the relationship between the Italians and the immigrants is hard and contradictory: 48,5% of Italians still consider immigrants as the cause for the lack of jobs available for Italian people and the lack of public safety. Anyway, one Italian out of two see them as a meaningful resource: without them probably our country would collapse. Immigrants work, pay taxes, send their children to school, make Italy a multicultural country but they still cannot vote, or better they can do it only after they have acquired the Italian citizenship, that is to say after 10 years, isn’t it? I really think this is unfair: immigrants should vote and politicians should talk about them and the problems they are involved in while doing their electoral campaigns. No one instead mentioned them and this is really paradoxical. Anyway there are so many things to say about immigration in Italy, it is such a vast and appealing topic to talk about that a single post cannot be exhaustive. I will look for other information before Wednesday and I’m looking forward to hear what the Dickinson students think about it, what their point of view is and how they feel about immigration in their country.

Latest news about US elections...

According to Sarah’s instructions I have been checking the news on the Web sources I mentioned in the last post. Today in particular I took some time to read some articles taken from The Guardian and Le Monde and I surfed the Net looking for information about the two Democratic candidates in general. The Guardian, in its section dedicated to US elections, primarily focused on Obama raising again the so called "racial question" after some controversial remarks made by Revered Jeremiah Wright. The pastor, whose church Barack Obama has been attending for 20 years, has recently encouraged his congregation to sing something like "God Damn America" because of its long history of violence, intolerance and discrimination towards its own people as well as foreign countries. Considering his relationship with the Reverend, Obama made a public speech claiming that he is aware that Wright’s words might have caused controversy and pain and said that he disagrees with some of his points of view; he is, however, a friend, a man that helped him to strengthen his faith and officiated his marriage. Hillary immediately stated that a man like Reverend Wright couldn’t ever be her pastor, that she would have left his church after those terrible declarations and that “You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend”. Undoubtedly she took advantage of Reverend Wrights’ painful comments (which are considered to have ruined Obama’s campaign in Pennsylvania) to distract the media interest away from the fake declarations she made about a presidential trip to Bosnia in 1996: she said she remembered landing under sniper fire together with her husband and daughter but the CBS found a video which demonstrates that the landing at Tuzla was calm and was just part of the ruotine. So Hillary lied in attempt to demonstrate that thanks to her long experience as First Lady she is definitely more prepared to became President if compared to the other candidates and she was caught. As a result she publicly confessed she made a mistake, she said that it happens and it only shows that she is human, a kind of revelation to some people: it was the first time Hillary admitted she was wrong.
Let’s switch to Le Monde. The most important French newspaper focused instead on the "money question": it seems that Obama has made public his income-tax return and defied Hillary to imitate him. This is quite a common practice in the United States, of course it is not necessary but lot of candidates do it anyway. I was wondering if that could ever happen in our country but honestly it is hard to imagine someone like Silvio Berlusconi as well as other Italian politicians to publish their annual income. Besides I came across another appealing article titled "Les dollars pleuvent sur la campagne électorale américaine" and "Les fonds de campagne" which revealed the unbelievable amount of money that the three major candidates have raised since the beginning of their campaign. The journalist stated that in January and February 2008 they have collected about 814 million dollars and that each candidate is believed to gather 100 million dollars per month. This is really amazing as it means that by November they will surely gather at least one million dollars, that is to say more than the budget –or the GDP – of many African States. It is true that the American electoral campaigns are longer if compared to our and that the candidates need a lot of money to buy commercial spaces in television, radio and the Internet and that each State in the Us organises conventions and a caucus, so they actually need a lot of money. In the article an important question emerges: who are the donors? There is only a very restricted group of people in the Us able to provide the candidates with such sums of money and at this point another question, quite scaring if compared to the previous one, comes out: once elected, will the candidates make the interests of the community of those of the few rich people that have been supporting their campaign with thousands of dollars?

As regards the issues we could talk about in the forum I think it could be a good idea to discuss about the abortion and in general the influence that religion has in both our countries. Of course I will ask the members of my group and see what else they suggest. Anyway I just had a look at the forum, commented the last question about death penalty and I can’t wait to read what is the next issue. So far the American students have raised interesting matters, so I’m really curious to see how this forum will progress.

Comparing three online newspapers

According to Task 3 I have been reading and analysing the articles about the elections in the US and in Italy published in three different online newspapers belonging to three different countries. As I have been studying English and French I decided to examine The Guardian and Le Monde and as far as the third source is concerned I chose L’Unità. As you can see the last online newspaper is Italian: I have been studying German as well but unfortunately I don’t know it well enough to read a German newspaper, otherwise I would have probably chosen Die Zeit rather than an Italian newspaper. The three newspapers presented, however, very interesting articles and I enjoyed reading them, analysing their contents and trying to compare the different points if view. Actually it was not easy to compare them: although they are all supposed to be left oriented, lots of differences emerged. I would like to start my analysis comparing the British and the French newspapers, in fact I prefer talking about the Italian L’Unità lately as it clearly differs from the previous papers for a lot of aspects.
As regards the British The Guardian and the French Le Monde I noticed that they both have a rich international section in their online versions and they both have a page totally dedicated to the American elections: in these interactive pages there articles about the protagonists of the 2008 elections and every sort of information about them and situation State by State. This week the two papers seemed to focus primarily on the “race issue” raised by Geraldine Ferraro, a leading member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign who decided to resign after having made a racist comment on Barack Obama. According to The Guardian she stated that Obama “would not be in the in a position to claim the Democratic nomination if he was white or a woman” but Hillary immediately said that she disagreed with Ferraro’s statement and apologized for the offensive remark. The news was presented more or less in the same way by Le Monde, anyway I realized that the French newspaper gave more details about Geraldine, her role in the campaign and her past and similar comment on Jesse Jackson, while The Guardian gave little information about her personality, it ommitted to write that Mrs Ferraro absolutely did not regret what she said about Obama and specified that after all, one of Barack Obama's collaborators - Samantha Power - recently definied Hillary a "monster". Just out of curiosity, I had a look to Le Figaro as well, another important French newspaper whose editorial line is definitely conservative. Surprisingly, in the article about Geraldine Ferraro’s comments titled “Nouveau coup dur pour le camp Clinton” the reporter insists on the fact that Hillary is surrounded by a dangerous team and as a consequence the author talks about the case of Eliot Spitzer. Moreover, the journalist argues that Hillary is usually reluctant to apologize, but in this case she simply couldn’t avoid it. So, reading the two newspapers I had the impression that The Guardian is willing to be more “well-balanced” whereas, on the French side, there are often nasty comments about Clinton and her entourage.
Finally I would like to talk about L’Unità, whose online version is a little bit poor. First of all there were no articles about the US elections (or at least I couldn’t find any) and I was a little bit disappointed: as far as I know there is no “International section”. Maybe it is because this is one of the minor newspapers, but frankly I don’t know why it did not mention what was happening abroad, especially as regards the struggle between Obama and Hillary. Usually I don’t read this kind of newspapers, I prefer something like Il Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica, but I thought it was a good idea to take into consideration a paper considered highly and openly left oriented. On Thursday there was an interesting article about the leader of the Democratic Party Veltroni and his financial policy, or better, the financial policy he would like to develop if he is going to win the elections. The article was extremely well written and clear: I think that the journalist succeed in introducing the positive points of Veltroni’s campaign and his ideas to reduce taxes. Today there was another article about Belusconi and I laughed while reading what the journalist reported about his recent public speeches: I was impressed by one of his hilarious statements that in English could sound more or less like this “I definitely would do something else with soubrettes rather than insert them in our lists” .

Comparing the language of politics: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the PD

Analysing the language of politics was surely a demanding but at the same time a very appealing task. As the elections are getting closer and closer, politicians, both in the United States and in Italy, are intensifying their electoral campaigns and increasing the numbers of public speeches, interviews and appearances on television: as a consequence the quantity of materials to evaluate and explore seemed be quite endless. When I started to look for videos as well as articles about the two Democratic candidates and the leader of the Italian Democratic Party I felt pretty overwhelmed and honestly I didn’t know where to start. Anyway I decided to focus on the videos I found on The New York Times Website and on Youtube and I also had a quick look to the official Website of the single candidates.

Before examining in details the language used by Obama, Clinton and Veltroni, I would like to point out two observations. First of all there are meaningful differences between the way American and Italian candidates organize their campaigns: it seems that in the US there is a tendency to turn politic into a big show: Hillary and Obama always talk to oceanic crowds from big stages with the audience screaming and shouting: they look more like rock stars that politicians. On the contrary in Italy, as far as left wing candidates are concerned, electoral campaigns tend to have a more “intimate dimension” or at least they are not as spectacular as in the US. Then in examining each candidate it is important to take into consideration not only the verbal language, but also their body language, their attitude and the way they relate to the audience, their slogans and hymns: in other words, it is fundamental to study these politicians from different points of view and consider different but equally meaningful elements.
I would like to start my analysis investigating the two protagonist of the “Democratic presidential pack”: Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. After having watched four videos for each candidate I realized that the two Democrats do have something in common: for instance they wave their arms and hands, they are willing to interact with their audiences (which seem to be extremely involved in the political debate) and both focus on helping unprivileged people and choose negotiation and mediation over conflict. Anyway Hillary seems to have a more authoritative attitude and in her speeches she never forgets to point out that she is the “best qualified and experienced person” to run for the office of President; I also noticed that she often mentions the words “economy”, “ Us leadership”, “education” and “children”. She always affords important issues such as the war in Iraq and the need to take into consideration Cuba and the European situation: in other words she explores a variety of topics and she tries to give concrete solutions to the problems of the nation. Barack Obama instead uses different strategies and he seems to prefer a more abstract series of key expressions: he often indicates the need of “discover the better part of ourselves as a nation” and phrases such as “our time has come”, “ we can turn the page of politics”, “we can stand up” and “we can dream big dreams” occur constantly in his public speeches. The keywords he uses are “dreams”, “change” but also “young people”, “families” and “workers” and his slogan “yes we can”, which he often translates into Spanish –“sì, se puede!” – when he is talking to a huge number of people, is nowadays internationally recognized as the brand of his campaign and it seems to be so powerful that it has been adopted also abroad, for instance by the Italian politician Veltroni. Undoubtedly Obama is a great communicator: he tries to put people at ease, he has great smiles and a great warmth: it is definitely not a surprise that people, especially women, find him very charming. Journalists in fact argue that the two Democrats are now fighting to get the vote of those undecided female voters who are attracted by Obama’s appeal abut at the same time fascinated by the strength of Hillary, the only woman to ever have a real opportunity of become President of the United States.
Surprisingly it was easier to analyse Barack’s and Hillary’s speeches than trying to listen to a whole speech of Veltroni. I watched carefully more or less three videos I found in Youtube but I must confess that at the fourth video I was definitely falling asleep. Fortunately I came across a video of the humorist Crozza making an amazing parody of Veltroni and that was really helpful as far as my analysis is concerned. He really succeeded in representing the characteristics of Veltroni’s use of language and his attitude when talking to an audience. The Leader of the Italian Democratic Party is in fact static – if compared to the dynamism of Obama or Hillary on stage – and when talking he uses a lot of adverbs and his speeches are full of repetitions, as well as series of ambiguities: in other words he wants to make people aware that often Veltroni is not very clear about his purposes, or at least that he is not able to express them in an effective way. This is partly true: I think that, although he tries to be as direct as possible, for the leader of the PD it is sometimes difficult to “get to the point” and that he wastes time in useless observation about Italy. Anyway his keywords and key expressions are very similar to those used by Barack Obama: listening to Veltroni we can easily find a wide range of words belonging to the semantic field of “change”, “hope”, “innovation”, “unity”, “young people” and “women”( that is to say in Italian: “tempo nuovo”, “rinnovamento”, “Italia unita”, “giovani precari”, “pari opportunità” etc..). Veltroni insists on the need of giving Italy both economic and social stability and focuses on the problem of young people applying for a secure job and on the problem of giving women the real opportunity to emerge at all levels.
I just finished to read the article that the Financial Times dedicated to leader of the PD and I must admit that Guy Dinmore’s observations are very interesting. It is quite obvious that Veltroni has taken Obama as a model and that he tries to identify with him but in my opinion there are still a lot of differences. Veltroni, as I previously said, is a little bit static and does not interact with the audience as Obama. However, the leader of the Democratic Party only occasionally pronounces the name of his main antagonist, that is Silvio Berlusconi, whereas both Obama and Hillay often point out the weak points of McCain policy.