Diary of an important change

Hi all of you!

Thanks for reading my thoughts once again.

This Monday we are having our last lesson with Sarah and her avant-garde projects.
I must confess that I feel a bitter sad because I get used to have my English training every week…
Anyway, Sarah gave us all the instruments to consider language learning a life-long- process: now it’s time to stand on our own two feet. She increased our curiosity about computer technology and social softwares and, at the same time, she taught us how to exceed our mental limits.
(She is a great teacher)

Last week we had to discuss in groups our presentations on different topics but the strange thing was that our audience was rather wide as it was composed not only by our Italian peers but some American students at the University of Middlebury as well.
All this was possible thanks to webcasts, on line conferences in which everyone connected to the Net can hear you, show the PowerPoint slides you project and send you a comment by chat.

It was an exciting experience: last Monday morning I went to university without saying a single word to my friends since I was terribly upset! I thought I was not able to speak in acceptable English and I was not very self-confident. Anyway, in life we have to risk! For this reason I take my courage in both hands and when it was my turn, I start talking quite fluently without reciting my speech from memory. It is true that my voice sometimes quavered, however, I felt calm.
Furthermore, the fact that my group spent a lot of time in organizing all the work in the wiki page and in trying to discuss the presentation before our course over Skype has been a big stimulation for me. Our work was a real team work, an experience to be remembered because we shared opposite feelings such as happiness and anxiety, relax and nervousness. All in all, we managed to overcome all of this.

My American peers responded to our generalization on American food: when you have five minutes only to present a wide topic, it is inevitable to prefer the main aspects to details!
Above all, they seemed to really enjoy our presentation; you know that food still is a cohesive cultural element…

This experience helped me to reflect on several aspects:

• audience can influence your performance;


• it is important to capture your audience’s attention;


• collaboration is not always easy: you have to respect your peers’ points of view;


• like Skype, webcast is a direct way of entering a new culture;


• technology is full of surprises (Sarah too) : )
  

To conclude our course with a flourish, we had to correct our previous wiki pages because the aim of a wiki is sharing knowledge; so, our collaborative writing was not only a task of our English course, but something deeper: it was a product that everyone can enjoy and exploit in order to compare Italian and American attitudes towards a certain problem. I really appreciated collaborating with Giorgia. Since it was not the first time I collaborated with her (we have to work a lot for French projects), I perfectly knew how neat and precise she was and our tasks sharing was excellent.

I know that at the end of an adventure you have been living since October you are supposed to say something interesting, something that might sum up in a proper way what you have learnt so far or just how you changed inside.

However, the only thing I can say is that I’m happy to have seized an opportunity like this.
What I’m going to do now is to develop a self-learning method in order to not to waste my language improvements according to this course precepts.

So, thanks to all of you for playing a part on my journey.

Take care.

Francesca

Photos retrieved on May 13, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com