WIKIS, SKYPE AND MUCH MORE

Hi world!
I’m here once again to report my week experience.

My Skype exchange was quite interesting but very different from the previous ones in some points.

• Summing up all the questions of the people in the course, we obtained a long list of questions to ask our peer. It was good because I succeeded in talking for almost an hour about renewable energy resources; however, I think my peer was a little shocked by my promptness of speech on this topic and it produced a destabilizing factor that is that she had not the same promptness in answering.
• The list made me feel more confident about my linguistic and cultural competences.
• On the other hand, I confess that I was embarrassed because my peer kept on saying that New Orleans problems are not recycling or renewable energy, they are greater. I asked Nichole about solar panels and she replied that it’s difficult to install them in old houses which hardly have a roof. We started laughing but there was nothing to laugh about!
• When I talked about my interests, such as writing and cinema, I found that we can have a better conversation, not just a tit-for-tat dialogue.
  

This week we had to reflect on wikis AS WELL.

Writing and editing wikis is rather complicated because you have to pay attention to what your colleagues wrote before you and try not to say the same things even if your thoughts are quite similar.
Furthermore, you have to quote them in order to show your teacher that you really had a look on their comments.

Rethinking the structure of a wiki is an operation that might take hours and produce scarce results if one of your colleagues decides to change your modifications. That’s why I think it’s better to work in small groups of 2 or 3 people, depending on the quantity of information the wiki contains.
In this way each person learns how to collaborate and how to give his/her contribution without relying too much on a bigger group.
My teacher tried out this method and we are having the verdict next Monday but I’m quite sure the result will be excellent.
The “comment button” helped me a lot in consulting my peers on the best term to be used or the division on different paragraphs. In this way I could change whatever I wanted and have an immediate comment on what I was doing.
In my opinion if we want to be closer to the “old way of wiking”, we should work on others’ pages in order to be more impartial.

See you next time (next week) for Easter time!

To be continued in the next instalment.

Francesca

Cultural competence: a new challenge

This week, it was Spring break time in Tulane, so, we had not felt the emotions of Skype.
We had to discuss about cultural competences and try to correct the mistakes in our edited pages on Recycling in Italy and Recycling in USA.
When someone says to you that there is a mistake, it’s not difficult to find it. The main difficulty is avoiding mistakes in your papers.

To enrich our knowledge on culture competence, we had to read 3 different web sites at home and fill a questionnaire.
This questionnaire retrieved on http://www.sit.edu/publications/docs/competence.pdf showed us that that we are less open-minded than we believe. We learned that being intercultural competent requires specific competences and a certain amount of awareness.
If it is true that “Looking out is looking in”, we have to revolve around our culture to really know another culture but, at the same time, if we don’t want to fall into ethnocentrism, we must distance ourselves from our culture.

I found quite fun the site suggested by Sarah concerning stereotypes about Italian culture.
To be not afraid of the unknown, people tend to create models and images; in doing so, they filtered a culture with pre-established schemes, creating stereotypes.
Sometimes we associated a culture to material elements, such as food (Germans with wurstel and beer), or clothes (Scottish with kilt) or we simply choose one person such as Queen Elizabeth or Dante to represent a culture.
Every time we do that we are running down the tradition and the history of a culture, but what really matters is awareness, the awareness of the schemes we are applying to a culture that is richer than what we think.
Learning a foreign language requires the knowledge of a culture because we cannot separate a language from the context in which it was born. Knowing a culture is also useful to understand how a language can vary according to the different places where it is spoken.

I would like to be cultural competent but I don’t think the questionnaire can help me.
I mean that is only one step I have to do, that is the step of the collection of information. In fact, it does not explain how to combine theory with practice.
I can become an expert of the theory of cultural competence but I will not be a complete person if I don’t know how to deal with the foreigners coming to my town.
And all this will be possible only thanks to the respect of a culture. It does not necessarily mean that our culture must fit to others, because, first of all, we have to respect our own culture; I think that one has to ask oneself ”What I really know about my own culture?”

Last week I was surfing the Net in search of information for the e-tivity 3 and I found a site (I don’t remember the URL, sorry!) in which everyone has to describe the behaviours of his “compatriots” on certain occasions.
I learned than in Italy everybody is supposed to do the crèche at Christmas and this is the only thing WE do in this occasion. I think it is rather short-sighted and false.
No distinction about religion was made.

So, in brief, don’t base your considerations on a culture on what you have learned from one single person, go beyond! Visit a country and take notes, comparison is needed.

My cousin Elena left Italy for Spain when she was eighteenth (she wasn’t allowed before) because she hated Italian culture (more or less her words!). I can’t imagine what she could say about it to a foreign person.
But that’s the beauty of culture! Not a single culture inside one Culture!


These are only my thoughts.



Francesca

Second week together with Skype

Hi everybody.

This week I skyped with an American woman, Nichole.
It was the first time I had skyped with her (we start skyping one week ago).
Our conversation made me reflect on the role recycling plays in New Orleans and in culture in general.
Nichole told me that New Orleans has lots of problems and, honestly, recycling is not the main one. So, because of the fact that her city is very engaged with rebuilding, environmental questions take second place.
As she rightly said, people focus their attention on houses because financial incentives are not enough and if they want to start living again they have to gird up their loins.
I wanted to ask her some questions, such as” How can a city or a country plan its reconstruction without paying attention to the environment?” or “Why in the Internet we found out the existence of an environmental plan while you said to me that no measure has been taken, excepting separate collection at university?".

I hadn’t the heart to do it because she probably replied that I couldn’t understand the gravity of the situation since I live in the Northern Italy where everything is ok or that theory and practice have a different meaning.
However, she recognized the importance of recycling and explained to me that we can change people’s thinking with practical actions rather than with advertising campaigns.

I think that everything is useful if we are able to coordinate it with real interests and efforts made to solve a problem.

Culture definitions refer to “awareness”: it is, in my opinion, the essential step that everyone should do before adopting a realistic approach.

Skype is a rich opportunity for language and culture.

As Sarah affirmed, these two fields are highly related and we can’t separate them.
Only thanks to the knowledge of a culture we can find out the peculiarities of a language.
And recycling means respecting your culture…

Skyping pushes me to enrich my vocabulary because, at first, my aim was that of speaking with a native in order to improve my English; now, I want to communicate, convey ideas and for doing so, I must express myself in a more appropriate way.
I don’t want American students to say that the Italians are indolent students without critical competences and a superficial knowledge of their culture!

What will happen with my third skype experience?
Who knows! Don’t worry, see you next week with all the details.


Francesca

I like Skype

Hi, here I am…
I come back with a new interesting experience: Skype.
Have you ever tried skyping? No? You are missing a big opportunity. You must try it.

This week I have skyped for the first time in my life and with my friend Lara and an American boy, Timothy.
It was great. I’m enthusiastic because I can practice my English in the way I like most: by talking to a native speaker who is also very nice and friendly.

I love skyping! Not only it allowed me to train my language knowledge, but also it gave me the opportunity of knowing a culture different from mine.
I must confess that at the very beginning I was scared about talking to a complete stranger and I feared my English did not live up to the situation.
But Timothy made me feel welcome: he was calm, he seemed to understand me perfectly and I felt I had to give him what he gave me. I mean that I felt that I was really learning a language by achieving its main goal: communication. On the other hand, I wanted Timothy to feel the same thing like me and I was happy to help him with Italian learning.
I’m aware that we had to talk about recycling and that this experiment involved several subjects, not only language, but I couldn’t stop thinking how wonderful speaking a foreign language was.

During the years I spent at the university, I was totally concentrated on accuracy, rules and formal structures. That was good but my passion for foreign languages and cultures was gradually fading. I felt that I was studying something deeply taken out of the reality and largely academic.

Skype is one of the biggest instruments the Net can offer to language learners.
During the first semester with Sarah we have practised two important aspects of languages: writing (with blogs, comments, wikis, etc.) and listening (with Podcasts). Speaking is developed this semester with skyping. We spoke to each other in class during our blogging course, but now speaking is becoming more and more important.
I understood that my difficulties in spoken English are also related to the fact that, usually, we don’t talk a lot in class because of the number of the students, but also because of a certain way of teaching languages. I’m convinced that I can make enormous progresses thanks to Skype.
It could be also an incentive to do my best to develop the weekly subjects and enrich my general culture… Timothy was really competent in recycling, I don’t want to cut a bad figure next week!

I look forward to skype again.

Francesca