Jo's Blog

ICC

2008-05-15T02:25:00.000-07:00

I just completed the ICC questionnaire and I have to say that some questions where difficult to answer. My personal experience is something very personal and sometimes it is difficult to see and judge what has changed. We are always evaluated by teachers and doing a self-assessment was hard.However I think that answering helped me reflect on this year's experience and on my knowledge in general.
This year I realised that our point of view is not always the one and only. Sometimes we think that the way we see the world and the things around us is natural and right. But in a world that is changing more and more, where sometimes boundaries make no sense, it is necessary to get a different perspective. What is more, we are studying languages and it is fundamental to gain intercultural competences and be open-minded. It is also interesting and funny to see how people from other countries look at your own's and sometimes this make you reconsider your thoughts about certain matters.
My answers to the ICC are all positive and this reflects the usfulness of this year's experience. All the things we did and learnt helped me enlarge my views, know more in depth American culture and realise the all the differences there are in the world make it so beautiful and intersting. The key is to accept all the shades and all possibilities you are offered when you get in touch with "the other", and to change ideas on all the things you took for granted.

Skyping with Hugo

2008-04-11T05:10:00.000-07:00

Last tuesday Valentina and I tried to speak with Hugo about politics and the health care system in the United States. I wrote "tried" because Hugo was extremely tired and had some difficulty in following our conversation. I tried to ask why he was so tired but it seemed he didn't want to tell exactly what he did. He only told us he went to bed at four in the morning! Therefore the flow of the conversation was very slow and this was also due to the fact that Hugo had no questions to ask us. So we tried to talk a little bit about the health care system in the States. I told him that some time ago I saw Michael Moore's movie called "Sicko" and that I was really impressed by the story of a man who cut two of his fingers while he was woodworking. When he went to the hospital he had to decide which finger he wanted to be put back in its place because his medical insurance couldn't pay for both. Hugo told us that if you don't have a good job or if you are a student and you have a car crash or something like that, it could be a very serious problem. They would take you to the hospital but if you are not insured they could either let you die or decide to operate you. In this case, you may have to pay debts for the rest of your life.
Then we had to stop our conversation because there were some technical problems with our headphones and we let Hugo go back to sleep, since he had no classes that day.
I think that the topic of health care could be a good subject matter for our final project, since it has been a very debated issue in the States, especially during this period of political campaign.

Skype again!

2008-04-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last tuesday I had an interesting discussion talking to Ann on our third Skype meeting (actually it was the second with Ann). She immediately started asking questions about Berlusconi, because they had a class about politics in Italy with their Italian teacher. Her first qustion was about what we think of him and how we feel towards his political program. I told her that he's not one of my favourites and I explained to her what his political campaign is about. She asked me how come he's one of the richest people in Europe (I think he's the third) and Alessia and I told her that he's good at business and he built up his own commercial empire through industries, television and soccer.

Then I asked her if she had seen the Obama girl video and what she thought of it. She hadn't seen it yet but she knew what it was about and asked us if there is something like that here in Italy. She said that Obama during his campaign is visiting lots of cities including Dickinson but I didn't understand if he went there in person or sent some representatives. We all agree about the importance of these kind of actions that brings politicians to common people and which contribute to create a better image of a candidate. The hope is that all this will turn someday in pragmatic facts and that their beutiful words aren't only virtual promises. We also asked her if she preferes Obama or Hillary. She said she hopes that Obama will win the elections because she thinks that he's a very "down to the ground" person. She also hopes that someday it will be possible also for a women to be elected but she doesn't think Hillary is the right person to be head of state. She said that lots of people are going to vote for her just because she's a woman and not because they really believe in her political program. Then Alessia asked her what she would do if she was elected president. The first thing she said was the universal health care for everybody but we couldn't going much deeper in the matter because the time for our conversation was up. I think this will be an interesting starting point for the next skype meeting.

Image from United States Senate

Second Skype Meeting

2008-03-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and yesterday Alessia, Ann and I talked about terrorism and politics in Italy and America. We started making some questions to Ann about how she feels about terrorism and what has changed in the United States after 9/11. She told us that security measures have generally increased everywhere, above all in the airports. She went back home for the spring break and she had to arrive at the airport three hours early because of all security controls. Another consequence of this situation is represented by the creation of bad stereotypes regarding muslim people and Arabian in general. This happens not only in America but also here in Italy and in Europe in general, I think, because we know that religious extremists of the Middle East hate the western part of the world for various reasons. Then she asked us if we knew other types of terrorism existing in Europe and we told her about the "anni di piombo" in Italy during the seventies and about ETA in Spain.

Then we started talking about elections and politics in general and we expressed our feelings about the present situation. Many politicians here are corrupted and sentenced to prison but they keep their positions thanks to their privileges and this is not fair. Some time ago the governor of New York Elliot Spitzer was caught in a sex scandal and he resigned. Ann told that he was always talking about morality and family but his actions prove that he was not who people tought he was; we vote for people we trust but most times they leave us disappointed.

This skype meeting was more useful to me than the last because I could speak more in English; Ann was very nice and in spite of our topic of conversation we laughed a lot. She had some difficulties with Italian language but I hope she could understand most of the things Alessia and I said. This exchange is becoming more and more interesting and I think I will have learnt lots of thing from my American peers by the end of this academic year.

Questionnaires

2008-03-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

I think that the questionnaires were an interesting way to provoke useful discussions about different topics. Through word association and sentence completion you can see what people from different cultures think about the world, people, politics and other contemporary issues. In some cases there are clear differences but sometimes we seem to have a lot of things in common. The first example I can think of regards the answers about "people from the south". Many of us said that they are cheerful and hospitable but there were also negative comment saying that they don't like to work and are more relaxed. Americans in their responses seem to be very worried not to give stereotyped definitions but in many cases their answers coincide with Italians'. Another field in which we seem to have pretty much the same ideas is politics. Negative words strongly prevail over positive ones.

It is also interesting to see what they think about us and our lifestyle: we appear very similar to their people from the south (relaxed, take it easy), but I think that this image is mainly influenced by the fact that Italians depicted through movies and TV series are people from the south. Personally, I think that Italian people from the north are very different from the stereotyped image Americans have.

I think that through next conversations on skype we will come to know other things about American culture and we will have the possibility to deepen our discussion about stereotypes and false beliefs about each other's culture and way of life.

Skype!

2008-03-10T04:22:00.000-07:00

Last tuesday we did our first Skype session and I have to say that it was really fun. Unfortunately I couldn't speak English a lot because in the first half of the lesson I didn't have the password to login, and I could join the conversation between Marina and Michelle when they started to speak Italian. However there were some words and expressions Michelle couldn't remember and I spoke English in order to help her. We talked about our lessons, parents, movies and our plans for the next future. It was exciting because I had never talked on the phone with an American girl before and I was happy to because I could understand everything she said. It could seem a banal thing but when I watch a movie in English, for example, I always check the actors' mouth movements but on the phone it's obviously impossible! That's why I'm looking forward to do another skype exchange because I want to speak more in English and test my listening skills, learning interesting things about culture and life from our colleagues on the other side of the ocean.

Back to everyday life :-(

2008-01-14T03:03:00.000-08:00

Hi everibody! I just came back from my holidays in Egypt and I'm so depressed. After a week of sun and sea it was awful to see the rain again. Not to mention the fact that the exams are approaching. Well, that's life and there is nothing we can do about it. Here there are some photos showing how wonderful it was!

PL...what?

2007-12-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

PLE is our last task to complete before Christmas Holidays and I must admit that it will be good not to have to work on my computer for a while! I'm not good at creating mindmaps and I had never thought I could make one about my learning environment. What Sarah said last week made me reflect on the fact that if we don't continue to use everyday what we learn we will forget many things. As long as we are students we keep on practicing but after our final degree we'll have to keep on learning in some different ways.

These are the steps that took me to my PLE map's creation:

First, I thought of my experiences with English language outside school and university. So, I started to think in what occasions I had to put in practice what I learnt in theory. My thesis on translation helped me reflecting on many aspects of English and Italian and part of my work consisted in suggesting my translation of a filmscript. Secondly, I thought of some situations in which I had to speak English in a foreign country, using it as a "contact language" between different cultures. A similar experience was to teach Italian to a Thai girl who has lived near my house for some time. Last but not least, I put the achievement of a Cambridge certificate.

Then come all the sources from which I have been gathering information: school, university, teachers, websites, conferences and so on.
An important part of my learning environent is made by all the things that allow me to learn something enjoying myself because when you learn this way it is easier for you to remember things. Watching TV series and films in English are two of the things I like most.

The last part of my map represents the importance of sharing information because when you share you create a sort of virtuous circle. Nevertheless is always important to remember that information has to be filtered.

When our experience at university is over, we'll have to keep on learning using as many devices as possible and we'll have to try to enlarge our PLE, otherwise we'll lose many of the things and skills we have been learning so far.

Judge your sources!

2007-11-30T00:30:00.000-08:00

Many times I've been looking for information through the web in order to retrieve useful material to complete my scholastic and academic tasks but very rarely I've been checking the reliability of the sources. I'm a very lazy person and I have to admit that looking at the links Sarah put in e-tivity8 I went a little bit crazy! There were so many things to read! However I found a lot of useful tips I had never thought of before. I didn't know anything about meta search-engines like Mamma which helps you collect the returns of other search-engines, so that you can have a more complete view of what the web offers. As regards essay banks, I came across some of these material collections many times but I never dared to use them for my purposes because you never know who wrote those things and, as it is pointed out in the University of Essex site, essays banks are a "short-cut to plagiarism". I always prefer to complete these kind of tasks on my own and not thanks to someone else.

After reading "Practical steps in evaluating internet resources" I also realised that the publishing body is important. A site's affiliations and sponsors, as well as the possibility to send messages to the webmaster, are fundamental to judge the officiality of a web page. Another thing I never do is to check the authorship of a certain document: it never occurs to me to search authors' reliability with a search-engine like Altavista. So I tried to put in the name of Bruce Harley, who is the person who maintains the San Diego state university site and the first return it gave me was his personal home page where there are all the necessary information to contact him.
I think that all these tips help us not to run into bad and useless information and materials and if at the beginning they seem to be time demanding they are steps that have to be taken if we want our works to be valuable.

WeTube!

2007-11-23T00:41:00.000-08:00

In YouTube anyone can post a video and everybody can see it. Is it a bad or a good thing? I think it can be both. There are so many videos you can watch to know what's happening in the world, for learning purposes or just for fun. But there are also a lot of stupid, useless and vulgar videos you can run into while you are looking for something else. So, the important thing is to learn how to filter this huge amount of information. However, YouTube is great: you can upload your own videos and share them with the rest of the world.

I think we can definitely use this tools to improve our language skills, watching and listening to videos in English, which don't necessarily have to be specifically about English learning. The best for us would be to search a wide range of topics in order to get in touch with various aspects of the language. I took a look at TeacherTube and I saw that there are many interesting channels like World languages and Writing but also videos about science, sport and cooking.

The video I chose is taken by "An Inconvenient truth" and it talks about global warming which, in my opinion, is one of the most urgent issues to be solved.

Listening to podcasts

2007-11-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

Before this e-tiviy I had never thought of downloading an English podcast in order to listen to it with my Mp3 player. Actually, I didn't know they existed. I always listen to English music and watch films in original language but I found out that podcasts are something different. Lots of lyrics talk about the same things and haven't a wide range of vocabulary and verbs. As regards films, I tend to pay attention to actors' mouth movements when I don't understand something and I don't think this is a good habit. With podcasts you can (and you have to) focus only on what you hear and if there's something you don't understand you keep on listening to it over and over again till you get the meaning clearly.

After spending some time on the web I found three interesting sites about podcasts. The first is English as a Second Language Podcast. It provides audio files about everyday life situations, entertainment, business and so on. Some of them teach you how to describe common medical emergencies in English, or what you should say when you arrive for business appointment, for example. Others are about American culture in general and talk about its folklore, its cities or give some advice if you want to travel to the U.S.A. Each podcast has some explanatory written sentences that let you know what it talk about and which idioms you will learn listening to it.

The second one is The Bob and Rob show and it contains weekly English lessons with a large range of topics: animals, culture, education, health, food. In each podcast Bob and Rob talk about these topics as they were two friends having a everyday conversation. Therefore they are very fluent and the register is very colloquial; what is more you can listen to different accents, grammar, idioms and slang both in British and American English.

The third one is Voice of America which provides podcasts in special English, for people whose first language is not English but I think it is useful also for more advanced learners because its articles are very interesting and some subject are quite complex. There are different topics (agriculture, health, education) for each day of the week and the latest new from around the world. The podcasts have short sentences, a limited vocabulary and a slow pace of speaking but I think that it represents a useful exercise for us too to improve our English. Maybe it will not help us in our listening skills but it represents a good source of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions.

All things considered, I think that podcasts are useful to learn English because they give us the opportunity to listen to people speaking in English, which is something we don't do very often. The more we plunge in all the aspects and different ways of get in touch with English, the better we'll learn it.

It's Del.icio.us!

2007-11-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

Social bookmarking? Before last wednesday I didn't know that bookmarking could be social. What does it mean? Well, you can share all your favourite sites with the rest of the world and anyone can see what yours are. By putting a brief description of the site you chose you can let everybody know what it is about and in this way, when you check other people's choices, you know which are worth visiting and which are not. Are you looking for a website that talks about environment, for example? You put "environment" as tag word and you'll see a list of the most clicked sites about this matter. One may ask what's the difference between "Del.icio.us" and "Google". The answer is simple: the first one gives you a list of sites that are of some interest because someone chose them and decided to share them with other people, whereas searching through the list provided by Google you could waste a lot of time before finding something useful. With del.icio.us you can take advantage of other people's experience and optimize the time you spend on the net.

I visited the sites the other members of my group put on Del.icio.us and I found some interesting and useful things for us who are studying English. I really liked "World English" posted by Elena and Marta and I have to say that I lost myself exploring it. It is full of useful things like readings, grammar exercises and tests, vocabulary activities and also puzzles and quizzes. The "Classic short stories" posted by Martina is so nice! There is a very large number of stories written by the most famous authors all around the world but they are written in English, of course. I really enjoyed searching through them and printing those I liked the most. Then I visited "Study abroad programs" posted by Sara because my dream is to go abroad and spend there a lot of time to study English (the first of my "Top places list" is the United States).

All things considered I think that social bookmarking is a very useful tool for my activities on the net because it speeds up my searches and I can use it also when I'm not at home in front of my computer and I have to use a public workspace.

Halloween!

2007-11-04T03:48:00.000-08:00

Before writing a post about Halloween I decided to look for some information because the only thing I knew was that Anglo-Saxon people like to dress up and carve pumpkins on this occasion (a bit stereotyped belief) but I didn't know anything about the religious and cultural background of this holiday. I looked for it in Wikipedia and I found out a lot of interesting things: it originated in Ireland and it was a sort of autumn festival called "Samhain Night". Later, it was brought to America by Irish people following the Irish Potato Famine.

Then I asked myself: and what about Jack-o'-lantern?. It can be traced back to an Irish legend, too! It was a man who tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil made him eternally wander the earth at night.

After knowing all these things I started to wonder about its meaning in our country. Does it make sense to celebrate Halloween in Italy? I don't think so. Despite the fact that I really like most of the things that come from the States I believe that this is only a pretext used to make people spend their money in decorations, disguises, and other things. This commercialization exists also in the United States but I think that, at least, they take this celebration seriously, because it is part of their culture. They prepare this holiday with care and dedication and they organise many events, such as the "Universal's Halloween Horror Nights" in Orlando and Hollywood or the "Village Halloween Parade" in New York.

Does any of these things exist in Italy? The answer is obvious and all things considerd I think that we should be aware of our traditions rather than badly copy those of other countries.

Feeds and feed aggregators

2007-11-04T02:35:00.000-08:00

Before last wednesday I didn't know anything about feeds and feed aggregators. Now I think that a tool like Bloglines is very useful to keep a precise and updated list of the websites and blogs a person is most interested in. Every time I found something interesting I used to bookmark the site on my pc but when I looked at the list created in this way I couldn't see if there was any new information. Feed aggregators keep the list updated for you and in this way you know which sites are worth visiting and which ones you can pass by because you already know that there's nothing new. Then there is the possibility to create playlists, which is a very useful way to organise information because you can divide and collect different types of information. For example I have a playlist for our English course, one for online newspapers, one for blogs regarding environmental issues and one for my hobbies and passions, like cinema and TV series. I hope that I will be able to enlarge my lists in bloglines, in order to be able to get as much information as possible in a quick and easy way.

Reflections on my two first weeks of blogging

2007-10-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

Before the starting of this course I didn't use to surf the net to visit other people's blogs, I simply looked for web sites that interested me but I never took part in any discussion or left comments on a topic. Now, I'm starting to relise how huge the blogosphere is and how fun and useful is to give your opinion on different matters and to read other people's thoughts.

I think that in this way we can learn a lot of things about many different topics and we have the opportunity to share the things we know and our opinions with the rest of the world, creating in this way a sort of cultural and emotional exchange. The author of one of the blogs I chose for e-tivity two saw my comment about her blog and she, in turn, left a comment on my post in our course blog...I was really surprised when I read it but also happy to see that my message had been noticed by the owner of that blog.

As regards language learning, I think that we are doing something we had never done before. We have always been studying, reading and translating "standard english", whereas now we are starting to deal with something different. Language in blogs is more colloquial, informal and sometimes it contains slang words. I think it is very useful to deal also with this "type of English" because in this way we can improve our vocabulary and our writing skills.

I like the idea of having my personal blog and I think that I will continue to write on it and on other blogs also after the end of this course because it will be a chance to keep learning English and to improve it.

Giovanna

Welcome To My Blog!

2007-10-17T06:04:00.002-07:00

Hello everybody! I'm Giovanna and I have chosen this Jack Russel picture because it reminds me of my dog. Her name is Luna, she's six years old and she's a mix of several breeds of dogs but I don't know how many. She's pretty smart and whenever she wants something she knows how to ask for it. She makes me happy when I'm sad and, unlike some of my family's members, she never annoys me. My friends always say that I am more kind to her than to people!
I like all animals and I think that we should do anything to protect them and the habitat in which they live.

This is a website I visit very often because I like watching films very much, especially horror and action movies. I go to the cinema every week and at this link I can find all sort of information about all the films that are about to be released. What is more, if I miss some news I can retrieve it easily because the archive of this site is very well organised.

http://www.badtaste.it/

The other website I have chosen is about travels. This on line agency is quite particular because it offers many different ways of travelling all around the world. It is interesting because it is not a common travel agency: you don't stay in the same hotel for more than one or two days. You keep moving and in this way you can visit a lot of different things and get in touch with the culture of the country you are visiting. I really hope that some day I will have the possibility to enjoy this wonderful way of travelling.

http://www.viaggiavventurenelmondo.it/