Trying to reflect on final presentation
Hi folks!
The end of the English course is coming…
This week my Skype exchange was with Lara and Tim.
What can I say? It was great, as usual! : )
Tim had finished his course with a team work on water resources in Italy, focusing on Vajont disaster and Mose project, so he was not very interested in talking about energy in general.
Before starting the exchange, my group decided to “exploit” the conversation in order to gather information on our final presentation topic. And so we did.
At the very beginning we wanted to deal with blogs and wikis applied to the learning of subjects at university: thanks to Tim we found out that we (Sarah and Latifah’ s students) are in privileged conditions! I mean that we believed that social softwares were quite popular in the United States and Italy, as usual, was tail-end.
This time we got wrong, Tim granted us that he came into contact with this technology for the first time during Latifah’s course.
So, we are part of an experiment, (it sounds strange) maybe, an experiment that impressed me much because of its topicality and utility.
Our exchange with Tim helped us to find the right topic: food.
Food is a basic need for everybody but the various meanings it’s able to convey are something that goes beyond the plain idea of nourishment. Food is an aspect of a culture, an element that can distinguish one culture from another, even stressing the presence of subcultures into a big one.
(Now, I’m realizing Sarah’s projects… She wanted us to become more intercultural competent, giving us all the tools we need: language, topic, and comparison.)
After having chosen the topic and the structure of our wiki page, we had to look for information.
We didn’t want to obtain a neutral issue that everyone in our class can make by finding interesting sites on the Net and “flinging” words on the page.
As Tim was really kind and helpful, we kept in touch with him by mail, so that he could communicate us which his and his friends ‘eating habits were.
Now, we just have to complement his suggestions with Internet searches!
Personally, I prefer such a job because we have to give our colleagues an overview of a certain aspect of American culture and a native speaker’s opinion, that is the point of view of a person who really knows how sides that we consider to be of secondary importance are perceived in his country, is more suitable.
Furthermore, the fact that Tim inquires about essential differences in our cultures helps us to reflect on our own culture and draw conclusions we did not think about before.
So, I look forward to start writing on my group wiki page.
It’s going to be a project shared by friends… and one of the many final outcomes of this course.
See you soon, guys.
Francesca
The end of the English course is coming…
This week my Skype exchange was with Lara and Tim.
What can I say? It was great, as usual! : )
Tim had finished his course with a team work on water resources in Italy, focusing on Vajont disaster and Mose project, so he was not very interested in talking about energy in general.
Before starting the exchange, my group decided to “exploit” the conversation in order to gather information on our final presentation topic. And so we did.
At the very beginning we wanted to deal with blogs and wikis applied to the learning of subjects at university: thanks to Tim we found out that we (Sarah and Latifah’ s students) are in privileged conditions! I mean that we believed that social softwares were quite popular in the United States and Italy, as usual, was tail-end.
This time we got wrong, Tim granted us that he came into contact with this technology for the first time during Latifah’s course.
So, we are part of an experiment, (it sounds strange) maybe, an experiment that impressed me much because of its topicality and utility.
Our exchange with Tim helped us to find the right topic: food.
Food is a basic need for everybody but the various meanings it’s able to convey are something that goes beyond the plain idea of nourishment. Food is an aspect of a culture, an element that can distinguish one culture from another, even stressing the presence of subcultures into a big one.
(Now, I’m realizing Sarah’s projects… She wanted us to become more intercultural competent, giving us all the tools we need: language, topic, and comparison.)
After having chosen the topic and the structure of our wiki page, we had to look for information.
We didn’t want to obtain a neutral issue that everyone in our class can make by finding interesting sites on the Net and “flinging” words on the page.
As Tim was really kind and helpful, we kept in touch with him by mail, so that he could communicate us which his and his friends ‘eating habits were.
Now, we just have to complement his suggestions with Internet searches!
Personally, I prefer such a job because we have to give our colleagues an overview of a certain aspect of American culture and a native speaker’s opinion, that is the point of view of a person who really knows how sides that we consider to be of secondary importance are perceived in his country, is more suitable.
Furthermore, the fact that Tim inquires about essential differences in our cultures helps us to reflect on our own culture and draw conclusions we did not think about before.
So, I look forward to start writing on my group wiki page.
It’s going to be a project shared by friends… and one of the many final outcomes of this course.
See you soon, guys.
Francesca
posted by Fedora @ 1:28 AM
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