The End...

Dear friends,
this is the last post of this long year…a very exciting period. Doing the ICC assessment I’ve tired to sum up all my feelings about the exchange we experienced this semester…so if you want to know more take a look at it! I really thank those of you who were in my group both during the first and the second semester: thank you for your collaboration and your patient! Good luck to all of you and…have a nice summer!!

Issues on Immigration

Immigration is a very hot issue for our country especially if we consider that Italy has always been more a country of emigrants than of immigrants. Personally I do believe in the great importance of cultural diversity and I’m extremely fortunate in being in contact with a lot of good persons who came in Italy just to have another chance, they work honestly and live regularly (not breaking the law). The real problem here is the illegal immigration and the fact that a lot of people look to Italy as an easy place to get into unnoticed. To the point, searching the net, I found a very interesting article which clearly explains not only the reasons why this is a huge problem for our society but also why the previous governments didn’t succeed in controlling it:
“One tactic the Italian government used to get these people to come out of hiding was to hold amnesties for any illegal immigrants, a time where they could apply for Italian citizenship and not get punished for having been there illegally. This worked on one level, since this reduced the number of workers in the underground sector, thus reducing the size of this unrecognized economy. Between 1986 and 1998, the Italian government held 4 amnesties, granting citizenship to about 700,000 people. But this did not solve the problem, it actually ended up attracting more migrants (…)Unfortunately, not only did these amnesties cost the government a lot of money, they made Italy's immigration policies appear lenient”.
“Another way these immigrants find ways into the country is quite creative; when their small boats are met by Italian coast guards as they are approaching the Italian shores, the immigrants find a way to make their boat sink, or cause the motors to stop working, so that there is no way they can be turned back. At this point, they know that the coast guard will have to rescue them by bringing them inland.”
“Some of the most visible problems being caused by this immigration are regional conflicts between groups of Italians and immigrants (racism, violence), fluctuating unemployment rates, increase of workers in unrecognized economic sectors, and the fact that the country is paying for a large amount of foreigners to be incarcerated in their prisons.” (taken from Illegal immigration in Italy)
During the last exchange we were supposed to discuss immigration with our American peer, Kristen…unfortunately, we had some problems with our connection and we spent almost all the remaining time talking about our final project and deciding on the topic it will deal with. Anyway, thanks to the forum I knew how Kristen considers this phenomenon and tomorrow we’ll probably compare our ideas about this very ticklish question.

The Right to Vote

Peers,
this week, for the second time, we (me, Martina and Allyson from the States) spent our Skype exchange talking about politics and politicians since in Italy we’re all living a crucial event: the election process is coming to an end (luckily I venture to say!)… we will know who will be the man by Monday! Considering that many people say they won’t vote because they don’t trust candidates’ good faith, our debate focused on the great importance of the right to vote because of the need we all have of being represented. I do believe in this powerful choice especially because in the past this right has been limited to a very small number of people. Without doubt I’m going to vote the next weekend even if I perfectly know that we, as voters, have to face a very complicated electoral system: too many candidates means an extreme confusion.

Final Project

Friends,
during these days I spent a lot of time thinking about my final project and meditating on the cultural topic my paper will deal with. I’m really interested in going into the American healthcare system, writing about issues on euthanasia. To be more precise I’d like to understand how the Americans perceive euthanasia: is it considered the right to die for patients terminally ill, or just a way to kill someone? Here in Italy, as we all know, euthanasia is an illigal practice; from this point of view we're still heavily influenced by the Church. I perfectly know that this is a very complicated subject but as you all know…nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Discussing terrorism

Hi peers,
last time with Anne, my partner from the US, I spent an enjoyable hour with her discussing terrorism issues and something US and Italy have in common… the election process! What I found really interesting was to see how much different things are: here in Italy terrorism is often related to all the bloody actions made by some active groups belonging to the extreme left wing, while in the US terrorism seems to be related only to Muslims… especially after the 9/11. As a matter of fact, Anne pointed out a meaningful word, that is “stereotype”: she definitely think that they all need to blame someone so that Americans often tend to assume that all Muslims behave in an aggressive way. Talking about this terrible moment it was natural for me to ask her what she thought about Bush administration and if she think he did something concrete against terrorism. Considering that a lot of people criticize Bush political action, her answer surprised me: she and her parents are Bush’s supporters because of both the decisions he made to face that situation and his encouragement to the nation; my peer said Americans needed to trust in someone and to believe that US was still the most powerful country in the world even after that attack.

I N T E R C U L T U R A L C O M P E T E N C E

Since I rated myself using the YOGA form I realized my need of improving my intercultural competence and the great importance of cross-cultural preparation to deal with differences in a constructive way. I must say that our classes didn’t offer us great opportunities to develop our intercultural competence, as a matter of fact the Skype exchange is the first concrete intercultural project we can experience. I do think that the “language proficiency” section was probably the easier to self-evaluate, while the “awareness”, as it’s an abstract concept, was something quite difficult to me: for example I had no idea about how my social identity is perceived from the host country; what’s more is that this assessment tool showed me how much narrow-minded I’m... I do believe that I really need to take into consideration other perspectives! What I liked most of this very useful tool is that it truly allows you to be conscious of some of your limitations, then to overcome them and to reach new objectives.

I'm a skyper!

Hi friends!
The first Skype exchange was something really amazing! First of all this new tool seems to be a sort of bridge to the U.S. students in Pennsylvania…they are so far from us but so willing to share with us their experiences!
I spent an hour talking with Anne, a very nice girl. Managing the conversation was easier for me than for her because Anne’s smiling face was on the screen so that I read her lips while she was talking (a considerable advantage!).
We had a quite long talk in English about our lives as students: we both tried to point out the similarities and the differences between the American and Italian educational systems. As I wrote on wiki, what struck me was an intelligent question she asked me when we switched into Italian: “Does meritocracy is important in Italy?” I answered that it should be; actually it isn’t. Arguing about this topic took me ten minutes: finding the proper words to express my opinion clearly using simple Italian vocabulary wasn’t such an easy thing! At the end she simply said: “Do you mean that in Italy people often take advantage from other people?” …well, I think she’s very acute!
And what about students and professors relationship? I definitely think that here in Italy professors often tend to emphasize their superiority which is closely related to their background, while in the U.S. students consider professors like parents or friends: according to Anne professors are always there when students need a help or even just when they need to confide in someone.(not only during their classes!)
I perfectly know that this chat was probably full of stupid mistakes and the greatest thing is that I felt there was no need to worry: for the first time the most important thing was communicating making my partner understand all my thoughts and opinions. I must admit that this virtual exchange was truly significant both because I was directly connected with the U.S. and because my partner wasn't acting as a judge but she was (and she'll be) simply an attentive and helpful interlocutor making me meditate on my pronunciation and oral fluency.

My P. L. E.

Dear friends,

as you can see from the title I’m writing about my Personal Learning Environment. I think that during these years we all enjoyed the same experiences so the great part of the elements I cited are probably contained on your tables as well. What I tried to point out with my work is that learning as a process is a sort of continuum: there are no definite borders between what we learned both in a formal and informal context; the most important thing is to put together (exchange) all the information we have in order to increase our knowledge and the Internet absolutely helps us! I really enjoyed this activity and while I was writing down all the sources that have improved my English during my life, I realized that I never finishes to learn so there was always something new to add. My biggest change is due to the online world: before doing this work I had never realized how many things in the net helped me with my English and most of them come from our blogging experience.
The world around us is ‘full of English’ we only need to grasp it using suitable criteria.

alessia

Ps: M e r r y C h r i s t m a s to you all!

Searching the web: criteria

Snoopy typing a thesis...

Dear friends,
we all know that a thesis declares what you firmly believe and helps you to focus your search for information. I think this is a very scrupulous work: you need to look at a great number of sources before saying “I know enough about this subject”. Writing a thesis is a sort of craftwork: you’re supposed to bring together what other people said about your topic; this process involves the so-called “intellectual honesty” which means that you should always declare who said what you’re reporting and where readers can find this piece of information. As regards books there should be no problems because you can easily check the author and the date of a specific publication. All troubles emerge when you’re looking at a website: in this case you need criteria in order to test the validity of your source. Here I suggest you several significant steps to organize your work:

- The Internet gives you a great variety of data so use a searcher engine ( e.g. “Google”) as a filter. Clicking on the links Mrs Guth suggested us I found how useful is the URL: you can immediately realize if your source is serious or not;

- website administrator: pay attention to the essential references (e.g. e-mail address; phone number) of the person who supervises the way the website functions;

- check when your website was last updated: ask yourself if the website is updated regularly and if the information you need is suitable.

- Del.icio.us.com: why don’t you benefit from what other people said about a website? Even just to have an idea about it take a look at the notes describing the content of the webpage.

Even after doing what I listed above there are still problems about content, style and completeness of the text. Moreover it’s possible to find texts without pages so…what a chaos if you’re writing your footnotes! And what about the author? It’s really difficult to know if the information is the original one or if it has been copied. Peers, have you found proper solutions to all these difficulties? I’m waiting for your replies!

kisses
alessia

Reflecting on YouTube.com

Girls,

This week I came across a new and endless tool: Youtube.com Suddenly a completely new world appeared in front of my eyes: a huge list of videos dealing with any kind of topic, from all over the world. Something bizarre, don’t you think? I searched a great number of words in English and French putting tags in the search bar; well, I always found a video dealing with what I was looking for…this activity was funnier than last weeks!

I think that the most incredible thing is that this site enables users to share their own experiences with people all over the planet; as a matter of fact you aren’t a passive observer of what is going on because you can leave a comment getting in touch with somebody who lives really far from you. And what about “private” groups linking a close number of persons? I think this is a considerable advantage for people living abroad of being in direct contact with their own families.

As educational tool Youtube is great as well: if you are looking for chunks of conversations, movies or simple monologues in English, here you are able to find what you need; for a languages student, as we all are, there’s nothing better than listening at these things. Obviously all that glitters is not gold: among all this good things I found a sort of rubbish dump made up of meaningless videos, sometimes even morally harmful, which have nothing to do with all the things I mentioned above; personally I think that all depends on the way this tool is exploited.

Well girls I’m really waiting for reading all your comments!

yours alessia

Podcasts: learning using technology

Dear all,

today I'm gonna talk about podcasts. We have been asked finding, at least, three mp3 files we found useful in improving our listening skills. First of all searching these websites was a very hard work for me because I never entered such sites! After long hours here's what I found and what I'm glad to share with you all:

-Business trends;

-Placing a business order;

-Breaking news.

As you can see clicking on the links above, I was mainly interested in business conversations because of the lack of information I have in this field. To be more precise the first two sites are a sort of on-line guide conceived for helping learners of English as a second language; here you find great suggestions to face some typical business situations properly, such as talkig about your business in the future and placing a business order. My list ends with a link to an interesting website dealing with news in English; it provides simple, daily news casts in order to improve lerners' listening skills.

I'm always discovering new things and podcast is probably the best tool I learned so far: audio files are excellent in helping who need correcting prononciation and comprehension. Don't you think so?

Peers I'm waiting for all your comments!

See you,

alessia

Social Bookmarking: something del.icio.us!

Picture by: WWCPT

Dear cyberspace friends,
how are you going this week? I’m here to update my blog with a new post about social bookmarking. Do you all know what is it? Being relatively new to the world of blogging I must admit that I had never heard about it before this week. I’m not very familiar with this complicated computer science; as one of our classmates said last week I often feel like a child: amazing things appear from everywhere. Searching the Internet I realize how important bookmarking is:

- it’s accessible from everywhere so that you don’t need your PC;
- it’s called “social” because your bookmarking can benefits other people; that’s the reason why I think it’s all about sharing;
- it’s a sort of filter because you’re choosing from what other people have chosen;
- thanks to the notes you can immediately see the arguments a site deals with and how it's considered by users.

I definitely think that surfing the net and blogging are time demanding activities. Well, this week we learned exploiting a new tool taking from it a great advantage: saving in time without getting lost while doing a search.

This week we have been asked to take a look at our peers’ bookmarks and to post here a comment. Here are my feedbacks:

Write and presenting a thesis
Dear Giovanna, I chose this site from your bookmark because as you can see looking at your network I chose it too. I found it really interesting both for its topic and for its intelligible structure. Reading the introductory paragraph you realize immediately this website is conceived just like a guide providing helpful suggestions to graduate students. Thesis is something scares me because I know time is running out!

Frequently asked questions
Dear Cate, good choice! I think most of us has problems with English grammar and I’m sure this site is going to be useful in my next English activities; I know I’ll certainly come across things I don’t know. It caught my attention because of its user friendliness: if you need to clear up all your doubts just click on the link and…here there’s your answer!

Job Searching
Dear Roberta, this is the site I preferred among the five you chose probably because I have never worked! To write a proper CV it’s not something so easy to do: I think you should be able to sum up your educational background and other details. Obviously it should be effective, concise and complete at the same time…what a hard work! About.com provides us a great variety of CV’s samples and clear instructions. Therefore thank you!

BBC learning English
Dear Stefania, this was the site I appreciated the most! How many things you can learn reading a newspaper! “vocabulary from the news” and “English as it’s used today” are the sections I consider extremely useful. I also saw there’s a blogging service for learners of English… this reminds me something…! Good job!

Using English
Dear Marta, great site with lots of great information... Much appreciation for both the sections "English language reference" and "Tools and resources". I particularly appreciated the fact of choosing resources and tools for students of English as a second language. All excellent information... well-put!

Ps: friends, let me know if you like or not the new title of my virtual space!

alessia

Feed Aggregators (e-tivity 4)

Hi my dear friends!

Here I'm again with a new post about RSS. What are they? Before starting this course I didn’t know anything about that, and I do believe that almost none of us could use them properly. But now that we’re all working smoothly in the blogosphere, we’d better exploit this useful tool in order to improve our skills and, above all, the quality of our time. Actually, after logging in bloglines.com and choosing whatever site you want, subscribing to it, you have the chance to know all the new posts and the updated sections of the aforementioned sites in real time. That enables you not to waste time because you can monitor all the sites you chose directly from one page, and there you can read the actual changes and updated versions of it. You can also create categories where you put your favourite sites.

As far as I’m concerned, I decided to create two folders, one concerning the sites of my colleagues, Marta Tosato, Giovanna Sperotto and Roberta Fumani (group H), and another one about cinema, my big passion.

I’ll let you know very soon how I found this device, but I’m sure I won’t have problems with it!

See you
ale

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
Picture by: iamxiuxao

For further information about halloween click here: Wikipedia

My favourite blogs (from e.tivity 2)

“Desperate Housewives” is one of the most enjoyable and brilliant US shows I regularly follow, so that’s the reason why I chose to analyse this blog. First of all, I definitely like knowing all the news relating to the serial, and here I can find succulent news and spoilers about the 4^th season, new to the Italian audience. Then, I love the photos published, which show Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria (two of the most fascinating actresses of the soap), the former in the throes of taking off her shirt in a park, and the latter in a commercial. There’s also some gossip about one male character; moreover, I could watch the videos of the new episodes: just fantastic! In short, this blog helps the reader get to know his/her favourite stars, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves the show.

After each post there are some tags (clickable words) referring to some relevant topics just mentioned in the post itself: I found them useful, especially if you wish to further investigate a particular subject you are interested in.

The language is informal, sometimes very colloquial and idiomatic. The personal pronoun I is written i, the form she’s is replaced with the simpler shes, going to becomes gonna, etc. Punctuation is neglected and sometimes reading becomes awkward and difficult to understand (e.g. “[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt Shouldn’t there be some law that prevents Marc Cherry from telling Eva Longoria she can’t get pregnant?”). There’s a frequent use of acronyms, e.g. OMG, standing for oh my God, STD, meaning sexually transmitted diseases (referring to a character in the show), IDK, that is I don’t know, etc. One person in a post wrote the symbol $ rather than money: the tendency to lighten and simplify the writing is clear throughout the whole blog. While the blog’s owner tries to integrate the link into the text, using a clickable word, the bloggers don’t use this device: they write the link at the end of the post, putting down the url.

The 2^nd blog I decided to take into account is far more thoughtful: it deals with father’s rights, child support and custody. The blog publicizes a new book, “Taken into custody”, exposing the injustices of American Family Courts. It’s interesting to focus on this matter: it’s not very popular here to talk about that and it seems as if it were a taboo.

The first thing which struck me was that the links are integrated into the text and have the aspect of one or more clickable words (sometimes a whole sentence), so the reader immediately knows what topic is hidden behind the link. Sometimes, the clickable words are in a different colour (red or blue) and bigger than the rest of the text in order to catch the reader’s attention. What is important to remark is that language choices change as opposed to the previous blog: here they’re much more specific (the semantic field is different and relates to child rights, custody and support) and the language is formal; some posts have a journalistic approach (the documents answer the questions who?, what?, where?, when? and how?) because they report what has happened. The bloggers’ posts respect grammar rules and punctuation: in this sentence I even noticed a semicolon, rather odd in a blog! (e.g. “[…] The Author has the rare talent of being able to see the problem for what it truly is; being able to describe it pointblank, pulling no punches, and telling it exactly the way it is.”) As opposed to the other blog, here the bloggers use inverted commas to cite reference books.

The two blogs I analysed are totally different in style and approach: the first one is about TV, a frivolous matter which shows a careless style, and a very informal and colloquial language; the second one is a reference guide to all the people who want to know more about child custody and support: the language tends to be formal and the bloggers suit their way of writing according to the blog in which they write. There’s a sort of “hidden convention” which links all the participants in a blog.

Have good surfing!

My first two weeks of blogging

My dear friends, during these two weeks I had a lot of fun; I enjoyed this course very much! Finally an interactive course where we're supposed to exchange our background and different points of view. I think that learning from each other is absolutely great because it makes you reflect upon the most common mistakes usually made by non native speakers as we are! I must admit I'm completely new to this specific kind of activity. Actually, many friends of mine often asked me to become a blogger and to take part in this endless world ...well, suddenly this happened and here I'm with my little corner As You Like It. I definitely hope most of you will share with me my virtual space, giving me some advice to improve my English and avoid gramatical-error and stupid mis-spell.

I wish to hear from you soon,
ale

about me...

Hello everybody!

I’m alessia f. a member of the excellent group H. It’s an enormous pleasure to be here and share this experience with you all! This is my first time on a blog and I really hope it will be great.

This image. Guess what it is.

Yes, you’re right: it’s the heaven’s door. It put you in direct contact with happiness. Don’t try to withstand your desire: just bite it and be happy! Are you worried about your weight, spots and wonderful teeth? In this case you are definitely wrong! Life’s so short that the best thing you can do for yourself is just taking care of you. Your mood is the only important thing and chocolate is your treatment. Your world (made up of books, exams and boring professors) will immediately become colored and you’ll feel better in that very instant, so be responsible and eat as much as you can of it.

This image. You are probably wondering why. The reason is that chocolate has a lot to do with me and my personality. Firstly, it looks simple but gives you great sensations just like I do with the people I know. Secondly, most people cannot imagine life without chocolate and I hope that the people I know cannot imagine life without me as well. Thirdly, like chocolate I hope to make friends feeling better. Furthermore, one of the most important things for me is taking care of myself, especially of my inner life, and chocolate absolutely touches my soul with its delicious taste.