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.

My Personal Learning Environment

I think that another suitable title for this post could be “Me versus Technology”. I think I spent more time downloading the programme and uploading it to the Wiki than building my personal map. I know that there were other solutions, for instance taking a picture of it or upload in to Flickr but I was curious and I wanted to see how Freemind works; moreover I’m obstinate and I absolutely wanted to insert my map in the Mindmap Gallery. I tried to do all this, but I still don’t understand if the whole operation was really successful or not.
Anyway, let’s talk about my PLE: I loved it, I mean, it was very interesting to reflect on the ways I learn English…unfortunately I think I was a little bit influenced by the way Martina Garbinato (a student that attended the English course last year) organized her map. Obviously I didn’t want to copy but I realized that our maps are quite similar. I don’t think it’s necessary to describe it in detail (just double click on the image if you want to make it larger) but maybe it’s a good idea to illustrate and explain some of my choices. As you can see the map is quite simple: on the right side I put three links about the way I gather, check and store information whereas on the left side there are only two links about "space" and "people". The people involved in my Learning Environment are of course my colleagues at University, my friends and also my American relatives. I have a dozen aunts, uncles and cousins leaving in the Unites States who like Italy a lot and come over to visit us once or twice a year. Our families are very close to each other so I often exchange e-mails with my cousins and sometimes we talk on the phone. I know it’s not a lot but I think it’s wonderful to have a contact with native speakers so I consider myself very lucky. Besides some of my friends took advantage of the Erasmus Project and went abroad for three and six months in English speaking countries. When they came back we started to exchange SMS in English because they use to do to it constantly in this language while they were away. We started just for fun but then I realized that it was really interesting and useful too: you have compress the meaning of what you want to say and find the right words to express it. I inserted “SMS” in the subcategory related to “virtual spaces”, together with the Internet, which is becoming more and more important as far as our learning process is concerned. We have just experienced how helpful tools like Bloglines, YouTube, Del.icio.us and the whole Blogosphere can be, we should, however, never forget that traditional tools are important as well. In fact, as regards my informal training I put books, newspaper and movies, right next to blogs and in the section related to the way I check information I put online dictionaries as well as more conventional monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.
In my opinion this E-tivity was really interesting and I appreciated it a lot: it’s a good idea to think about our personal learning process and the tools we employ to acquire information, so we can stop, consider them one by one and eventually reflect on the way we can improve them and as a result improve our English. Anyway I’m a little bit scared about my presentation on Monday: I hate to talk in public but I will try to overcome my shyness and be more self-confident.

Evaluating Sources of Information

First of all I would like to say that I was quite surprised to find among the comments that my peers left for me last week about YouTube an observation by Mr Eric Shackle, an Australian retired journalist. I didn’t expect that someone living on the other side of the world could read my blog, I mean, I’m not that naïve, I know that people from all around the world can read it (there is a reason if we call it World Wide Web!), but I didn’t expect it and it made me very happy. Moreover Mr Shackle’s comments are useful because our topic this week deals with the evaluation of sources of information, in particular Internet sources.
Last week I was surfing the Net looking for some information about Youtube and going through various Websites I read that the oldest user in Youtube is a 78 years old man named Peter, but Mr Shackle corrected me and claimed that there is an older user. I felt a little bit stupid because I realized that I trusted those information without doing some cross-checking. Well, we can always learn from our mistakes and in the future I will pay more attention. Anyway thanks to Eric’s intervention I started to think about the way I cope with Internet sources of information and I noticed that I have a little tendency to accept whatever comes from the Internet as true and that I don’t spend enough time checking if the Websites I explore and the information they offer are reliable or not. It is noteworthy that when I read articles, news or books I always do it with a critical eye and I do care about their authors, purposes and target whereas my behaviour is different when I deal with information I find on the Net. I will be quite frank, when I look for information on the Web this is the way I proceed: I open Google, I type the keywords and wait for the search engine to find the Websites, then I check them all and focus on the those which are in my opinion the most interesting. Usually I read all their contents, check their links and only in the end I take a look to the author and if there is a copyright and a bibliography. After having read the tips I found in the three Websites Mrs Guth suggested us, I realized that the way I proceed is quite bad. The main problem is that when I enter a Website I do not ask myself all those questions (but probably I should): I use the Net because it is fast and it helps me saving time, if I stop and I start thinking about the tips it is not saving time any longer. Theoretically I’m aware that this a very superficial way to deal with information and Web material in general but practically this is what I always do.
Finally, I found the tips in the Websites cited in Bloggingenglish very useful and I particularly appreciated the considerations about plagiarism and about the search engines. I use Google all the time but it is important to know that there are other ways to get the Websites with the information we need. I was also struck by the fact the University of Essex suggests not to use essay banks: I often came across these collections of essays and I always thought it was a good idea to read them also because some of them were really well written. Anyway from now on I will handle Internet sources of information more carefully and will use all the tips.
Let me what you think, I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

The YouTube Revolution

In 1968 the famous artist Andy Warhol claimed “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” and as technology evolves, this prediction has actually become true. I think that everybody knows what YouTube is so there is no need to explain how it works; on the contrary there is a great need to discuss about it, about its potentialities and limits. YouTube is an amazing tool and the reason why I appreciate it so much is that it gives “real” people the opportunity to provide entertainment and to make their voices heard. Moreover YouTube is accessible and easy to use: it is not only for young ( I found out that there is a 78 years old man named Peter who uploads videos with the user name “Geriatric 1927” that has become a sort of celebrity) but for everyone willing to shoot a video about anything (from political speeches to the most weird human behaviour) and then to upload it.
Recently the media have been talking a lot about YouTube and often not in positive terms. I remember some videos (I don’t remember if the video was uploaded exactly on YouTube or something similar) in which teenagers hit a boy with disabilities in the classroom: newspaper and TV shows just couldn’t stop talking about it and about the YouTube phenomenon and the YouTube generation. Everybody seemed to be horrified and blamed YouTube and the Net in general for spreading these awful images making its authors really famous with a high risk of emulation. Actually I don’t know if YouTube has a sort of “filter” or if everybody is allowed to upload everything but the first thing that came to my mind hearing all the journalists arguing was that the Website (and the Net) mirrors our society: a society that is a little bit sick and that lacks civilisation, a society full of ordinary people who don’t want to be ordinary any longer.
However let’s get back to the real topic of this post, that is YouTube and language learning. Most of the people enter the Website just for fun: they only want to watch the latest most bizarre video. But the idea of using such videos to improve our English is not bad, I mean, if learners have the opportunity to better their knowledge of their second language and at the same time to have fun, that is great! I don’t have a beautiful and satisfying relationship with technology but I’m open minded, willing to explore new ways to enhance my English and if YouTube is going to help me, I will try it out. As far as I’m concerned, I think that YouTube could be an extraordinary source of material, moreover watching short videos prevent learners from getting bored but I don’t think it could be a substitute for “real” lessons nor that it could be really effective.
Let me know what you think about it: I’m looking forward to reading your comments!

The world of Podcasts

Before writing this post and choosing the Websites to insert in Del.icio.us I thought it was a good idea to investigate on the Web in order to understand what a Podcast exactly is. The term was not new to me: I think that a lot of us have been using this kind of tools but just ignored their names. I took some time to look for extra information and I read various definitions of the term but I still think that the explanation I found in Wikipedia is the most exhausting and clear. According to it, a podcast “a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndacation feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers”. Initially it was used to give people the opportunity to share their “radio-style shows” on the Net but lately it became a way to share also Church sermons, conferences, public safety messages, school lessons and so on. So podcasts are now used as a learning material and students of foreign languages can download files on their Ipods or whatever mp3player then listen to them and practice. Of course this is a great invention: nowadays technology gives us the possibility to explore the language even out of the classrooms and learners are becoming more and more independent. In the past we waited for our English teacher to enter the classroom with a tape and a tape recorder so that we could listen to the daily dialogue and then discuss about the content and then read its transcription in the book. Do you remember? I remember it. Sometimes I start wondering if in the future students will ever need teachers: will technology replace our professors? That would be scaring but it’s dramatically possible and maybe that is what is going to happen, maybe it’s happening right now while we are writing our blogs.
As far as I’m concerned I never used podcasts too much, I mean sometimes surfing on the Net I stopped and listened to some files in the BBC Website and did some exercises in some unknown “cyber listening laboratory” just to test my level of English. I have never downloaded audio files in my mp3player which were not songs but I’m becoming more aware of the utility of these tools and maybe in the future I’m going to overcome my distrust toward technology and I’m going to try it out but for the moment I limited myself to look for meaningful Websites that has something to do with podcasts and English. At first I tried with Google but as I typed the words “podcast” and “education” a thousand Websites appeared and I got scared and I immediately turned to Del.icio.us because in this way the field was restricted so I could focus only on some selected Websites. The first one is about learning Business English through some dialogues and conversation: it provides interesting exercises aiming to improve and enhance the knowledge of vocabulary and phrases dealing with business. The audio files are basically for professionals but I think they can be used by students as well. Englishcaster.com is both for students and educators: it offers English lessons podcast and other study materials. the Websites gives the opportunity to listen to, review and submit podcasts and other English study resources. Students and teachers can also give a mark to podcasts considering their quality and utility and this is quite interesting so you can take a look to the appraisal before listening to the file and you can ignore those that other users had judged as bad. The last Website offers various audio files about breaking news. There are exercises and quizzes which help students to understand the news and the main contents and in the end there is also the opportunity to read the whole text. Exercises seem to be a little bit banal considering our level of English but audio files seem to be good, moreover I liked the idea of a Website about news which was not the BBC or the CNN.

I'm looking forward to reading your comments, let me know what you think!

See you next week!

Social Bookmarking

As the course progresses I realize that the Net offers a wide range of tools aiming to simplify our researches on the Web. Last Wednesday I discovered Del.icio.us which is really a wonderful instrument as it gives the opportunity to store and share our favourite Websites and blogs. Of course it wasn’t the first time I heard about Social Bookmarking and about Del.icio.us but honestly I had never trusted this kind of tools as I always preferred doing researches on my own, without visiting the Websites other people had already selected because it could turn out to be a waste of time, as people could have stored whatever from the Web, not necessarily what I was looking for. Anyway, after a couple of hours wandering in Del.icio.us I realized it was not that bad and started to appreciate it.
It took me quite a lot of time to visit, read and evaluate the different Websites concerning language learning, also because I didn’t want to chose the same Sites my peers had already picked up – though I finally chose a couple of Websites that the girls in my group had already noticed. As far as I’m concerned, I primarily looked for special WebPages on the basis of what my weaknesses in English are: grammar and punctuation. As a consequences I came a across a couple of interesting Websites offering a clear description of the rules of punctuation in English and another one offering a hundreds of exercises of every kind and for any level. When language learning is concerned, I love interactiviness: I would spend hours doing that kind of multiple choice exercises because I think it’s a good way to test my knowledge and eventually to enhance my grammar. Then I looked for some listening exercises on the Web and a thousand of Websites appeared. In my opinion these cyber listening laboratories could be very useful for students since we do not have always the time to watch DVDs or listen to the BBC’s news, so if we want to keep up our English and test our abilities these Websites offer various tracks with different voices and their relative quizzes and solutions.
After fulfilling the first task I spent some time exploring the twenty Websites that my peers selected and I must confess I found all of them interesting and useful. I noticed that we all tried to focus on the four abilities but there is a general tendency to focus on the writing skills and as consequence to search for Websites that could help us avoiding mistakes or that just help us enhancing our abilities and writing effective pieces of paper. Silvia for instance came up with this interesting Website explaining how to write more clearly, think more clearly and learn complex material more easily. I can’t say exactly why this Website captured my attention, probably because the Power Point presentation was simply appealing and as I started reading the various sections I thought that I agreed with its creator Micheal A. Covington and his tips could turn out to be really helpful for me, since when I have to write something in English I am always over concerned about what I have to say, how I have to express my opinions, what the best way to organize the text is etc. Obviously I’m obsessed with errors too and Sara/Zara found this wonderful Website about the most common errors in English. I decided to signal it in Del.icio.us too because I found it amazing: there is a long list of words or couple of words that students as well as native speakers often confuse or just ignore the real meaning.
Elena's choices are instead clearly oriented towards dictionaries. Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries are among the most important tools a student needs and on line dictionaries are a meaningful invention since they are fast, clear and help us saving time, so I really appreciated her choice, most of all because she picked up the dictionary of idioms and idiomatic expressions. Last year we have been doing a lot of translation and it often happened that we came across metaphors and expressions which were culturally bound and which were difficult to translate in English. I remember professor Scott claiming to check always if there was the correspondent idiomatic expression in English. However idioms are quite fascinating and it is interesting to see how they change in Italian and in English and as a consequence I guess I will be using it a lot. Among Letizia’s Websites the one that caught my attention the most is the one about “ Mother Tongue annoyances: how to lose ums and ahs from your speech”. This Website, or better this blog, is really practical: it gives different suggestions for speaking more fluently and feeling more confident when speaking in public. I read the whole post and I warmly recommend everyone to check it out because it might be helpful for our future debates on Monday!
I’m looking forward to reading all your posts and comments about Social Bookmarking and I hope you will appreciate my choices. See you next week!

All Hallows' Day

As I realised I know very little about Halloween I decided to spend some time surfing the Net looking for information about it in order to gather some ideas for the discussion we will have on Monday. I started from Wikipedia and then I visited other websites: some of them focused on the origins and the evolution of the famous festivity but the majority focused on business and their purpose was to sponsor expensive parties and sell gadgets. I have been reading a lot about Halloween and its religious connotation but in my opinion this celebration has lost all its spiritual meaning and it has become just a commercial holiday, another occasion to party and spend money on disguises. I just read that today Americans spend more or less $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday, can you believe it?
The situation in Italy is quite different: most of Italians do not know anything about it and consider it a sort of minor and weird carnival, in other words in our country the celebration hasn’t the resonance it has in the Anglo-Saxon world. However some kids play trick-or-treat and adults go out and party: personally I went out with my friends and we went to a club which was decorated with candles, pumpkins and skeletons. So we can say that the celebration has already been imported and a lot people organise parties like in the UK or in the United States but still a lot of people feel it doesn’t belong to our tradition. Actually I just found out that the Romans had two festivals which were very similar to this Celtic celebration and that they melt with it when the Roman conquered the Celtic territories: “Feralia”, a day in late October when then Roman people commemorated the passing of the dead and another day in which they honoured Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Anyway when Christianity started to spread all over Europe all pagan festivities and symbols were erased or their names were eventually changed by Popes in order to turn them into Church-sanctioned holydays. In this way the Celtic/Roman festival of the dead became a day to honour saints and martyrs. So if we look back we might discover that Halloween is not totally alien to our tradition! I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all these information about the Pagan world but I remember having read a lot about it in the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and that I was really astonished when I realised how the Catholic Church managed to destroy the Pagan traditions which however survived throughout the centuries.
Honestly Halloween really fascinates me: it is the night in which the boundaries between the world of the dead and that of the living people blurry and in my opinion there is nothing bad if we start disguising like spirits (in order not be recognized by ghosts who will mistake us for fellow spirits). Celebrating Halloween could be just another way to exorcise the death and everything that has something to do with it, anyway I can’t wait to discuss it with you all on Monday!

Feeds and Feeds Aggregators

Today I started using Bloglines for the first time and I must confess it is an amazing tool. As usual, I was little bit sceptical at the beginning and on Wednesday I kept on asking myself and my peers about the real effectiveness of a Feeds Aggregator but then I understood that this website could turn into a very useful and irreplaceable instrument for us. In fact, thanks to it we do not waste time on typing in the Urls of our peers’ blogs: we just enter Bloglines and in a couple of seconds we can see if there are any new posts and comments and I really think this is great! Moreover I had no difficulties in subscribing and blogs and playlists are quite easy to insert (I said “quite” because in the lab we work together, in small groups, so it often happens that we help each other and on this occasion, if it wasn’t for my peers’ support I would probably be still there trying to understand what I was supposed to do with Bloglines). Anyway we discussed a bit about the utility of Feeds and Feeds Aggregators and the main point was that we had generally two or three blogs to add so it seemed to be nonsense to throw away two hours in the lab to register in bloglines: wouldn’t it be easier to put those blogs as links in our personal blogs? However we realized that we could made different playlists, give them different names and put in also the blogs we use to read constantly or websites we like to visit and that are daily updated. I guess I will immediately start using this new tool and get familiar with it and see what it offers.
Let me know what you think about it and what were your initial impressions in the lab: I’m looking forward to reading your comments!

Time flies when you're having fun...

I decided to start this post about my first two weeks of blogging quoting this sentence Mrs Guth pronounced at the end of our last lesson, while we were trying to create, modify and writing posts, challenging with Html language. As I heard her words I immediately thought that in that moment I was actually very far from sharing her opinion, but this was probably because when I have to do with computers there is always something that doesn’t work or that I can’t control and I hate when I can’t control the situation, I simply get very nervous.
These two first week of blogging have been quite demanding and I can’t say I really had fun – but maybe I wasn’t supposed to anyway. Probably at the beginning it is always hard because we have to familiarize with the programs and the blogs but once we understand how it works everything should be easier. Although we had only two e-tivities to accomplish I realized I spent a lot of time surfing the Net: writing a presentation wasn’t really demanding from this point of view, after all we had only to find a photo that suited our personality but e-tivity 2 was slightly more difficult to carry out. I think I visited a dozen blogs before finding those that interested me the most and I wasn’t even very happy with them but time was running out and could spent days exploring the whole blogospere as I had also to write a post with meaningful observations. I really don’t think that spending so much time in front of a computer might be really productive for our English, I mean, we have the opportunity to read a lot of English texts with different styles but sometimes it turns out to be boring and even frustrating, however this first semester is all about blogging so staring in front the computer for hours will be normal, that is why I’m realising that my complains just do not make any sense.
I hope that we will be able to have more conversation with our peers on Monday because so far we didn’t have the possibility to discuss a lot, we only exchange a few words and if we are supposed to improve our oral skills and speak English fluently it would be a good idea to focus on conversation, although I’m aware that there are lot of students and it’s going to be challenging.
Let me know what you think, I’m looking forward to having your responses!

Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to my blog! It seems so strange to me to have one to write on: so far I have always been reading and leaving comments on those of my friends and I had never thought to create my own blog. Honestly my abilities in informatics are quite limited, something that really stopped me from getting my own blog, but I must confess I was neither interested in learning how to create it and fill in texts, images and links. Actually the problem is that I don’t like the core idea blogs are based on, that is to make your thoughts, observations and personal experiences public and as a consequence to share them with a lot of people who have the opportunity to leave comments. If there is something I want to talk about I prefer calling my close friends and discuss it with them rather than writing a post: in this way I can express my self freely without worrying about being at any cost politically correct or about mentioning the real names of other people without ambiguities. In other words I felt that writing on a blog meant not to be completely honest, not completely “real” as I can’t forget I’m talking to a wide range of people and I have to respect netiquette.
I must admit that having a blog has positive aspects as well, for instance it is a good way to keep in touch with friends who live far from you and that you meet rarely and it is also a way to improve your English. Anyway I’m still convinced that if it wasn’t for Mrs Guth I would never and ever have a blog of my own and I would just keep on visiting the blogs of my friends (in fact I have the tendency not to read the blogs of the people I don’t know because I have the impression of “entering someone else’s house without having being invited”).
As you can see the title of my blog is not very original: I decided to put my name and surname because I though it would be easier for me and for my peers to remember, furthermore I couldn’t get inspiration last Wednesday in the laboratory so I really put the first thing that came to my mind but as soon as I find a more appealing title I will change it!

Finally, in spite of all my insecurities and suspiciousness towards writing on a blog I promise I will make a good use of this virtual space and that I will try to be always as honest and clear as possible. In the next days I’m going to insert some useful links and I will update my profile, meanwhile I hope you will enjoy reading my posts.