Happy Easter to all of you!

Beyond television

image from notna

This week our American partners are enjoying their spring-break so there was no Skype exchange last Wednesday :( By the way, we can use the time at our disposal to discuss on the wiki and to find an interesting question about America and the way of living of its inhabitants. It seems a very easy task, but I'm pretty confused: there is so much I would like to know about a country that I started dreaming of when I was just a child and watched Superman’s unbelievable adventures on the TV. Yes, the TV. In spite of the coming of the Internet, a very powerful technology that has revolutionized the whole concept of “communication” by providing a way to know everything happening in the world, I think that television still remains the most influential of all the tools of knowledge. Why? Because it is something that everybody can use easily, whenever they want, without the need to read the directions; something that posses an infinite range of strategies to let a message pass and spread; most of all, something that has become part of our own culture and has accompanied us everyday since we were babies. For those of us who don’t have the chance to spend part of their time travelling around the world, television is also their eye on reality: using a remote control, you can dive in the depth of the ocean to discover beautiful submarine landscape and just a moment later you are walking in a fashion house in Los Angeles, wondering whether Brooke and Ridge will get married for the third time or not. TV series and films offer us portrays of American life, but is this reality? Are American men as lazy and slovenly as Homer Simpson? Are all Californian girls blonde, rich and spoilt? Is life in a university campus all about parties, brotherhoods and initiation rites? I don’t think so, yet I have to recognize that my idea of America is partially influenced by the stereotypes I learn from television. Reading my friends’ answers to the questionnaires on the Cultura website, I could observe that many of them share the same idea of what life is like in the USA and this is another proof of the way in which TV programmes are able to handle our opinions and expectations about the other. Therefore, I think it could be interesting to ask Dickinson students if they watch the same programmes and if TV really reflects their own life. As one of the members of my group pointed out, it would be interesting to know if shows and films influence the way in which Americans view Italians as well and, if so, what aspects of Italian culture are emphasized. I’m sure that both of us, our American colleagues and we Italian students, would discover to look at each other through glasses made of prejudices and commonplaces that this exchange can help us to remove. The meeting with Chiara Olivi is a clear example of what I’m talking about: in my opinion, she’s a very nice and outgoing girl, devoted to her studies and eager to know everything she can about the world, just like anyone of us. We have to abandon old preconceptions and be ready to recognize that reality has many more shades and facets than what TV let us perceive.

It was breathtaking but...I want to do it again!!!!

images by longdemon_vr

Here I am, the day after…Well, honestly, guys, I was afraid I would have not survived to tell it anybody, but I did and now I want to say that the first Skype exchange was absolutely AMAZING!!! My hands still shake if I think of it!
Let’s start from the beginning. Last week Sarah asked us if we preferred to participate to either an exchange with American students from Dickinson or a similar project with students living in Poland. In the first case, we were supposed to use Skype to communicate in real time with our partners for an hour or so; given that they have been studying Italian for a couple of years, we would have to speak both English and Italian during the conversation, as if it was a sort of tandem learning. In the second case, the two groups would communicate by writing their comments on a wiki and a forum, using English as Lingua Franca to compare Italian and Polish culture with the Anglo-Saxon culture. I was torn between the two opportunities: they were both very interesting, but the second one suited better my timetable…Most of all, I was afraid I was not up to the task of chatting with an American girl or boy for so long! I always get nervous when I have to speak English, I try to smooth my pronunciation and I forget what I wanted to say and vice versa. “I'll be so tense and worried”, I thought while I was trying to decide, “that I won’t be able to open my mouth and say a word!!!” Then I remember one of the complaints that I wrote in my mid-term paper: “I never have the chance to speak English and I feel that my oral skills are not improving”. I had no excuse: the opportunity that I was looking for was right there in front of me, I just needed to raise my hand to grab it and so…I did it!

Last Wednesday I talked with Leah Barreras and it was really thrilling! After introducing ourselves, we started talking about everything that came to our minds: Leah is nineteen, she moved from New Mexico to Pennsylvania to study History at the University of Dickinson and next year she’s going to come to Italy, in Bologna, to improve her knowledge of Italian. I tried to give her a description of our course, the subjects we study, my plans for the next future…So, without even realizing it, I was speaking English! It was unbelievable! And Leah seemed to understand what I was trying to say (even more unbelievable!) We also talked about the education system in our countries and our experiences at university: she was astonished when I told her that some of our courses are attended by hundreds of students and that in the same day we have to move around Padua to reach the place in which the lesson is held! Things seem to be more organized in America, according to Leah’s words: young people have to write an essay and an application form to get into university, classes are very small, students have free and easy access to the Internet and can often rely on the economic support of the State to finance their studies. The conversation was becoming fascinating and I felt sorry when we had to quit because the time was over!

I read that the topic of our next chat will be the comparison between Italian and American elections, very challenging! I hope I have the vocabulary necessary to say something sensible!

A baby-woman

photo by birthday24

I'm a little bit late but it doesn't matter, I just want to write few lines to say that I'm now 24! Yes, last Sunday I celebrated my birthday! The party was great, but I feel a little bit weird: if I think of me now, I've got the impression that I'm not so different from the young girl who attended high school five long years ago, with her pen-case full of colorful pencils to write her thoughts in her friends' diaries. I'm still eager to be thoughtless and spend a wonderful time with my friends, talking and laughing and screaming and playing...Then I try to look better and everything is clearer: although I often don't realize it, I've grown up and I'm no longer the same. I'm more mature and reflexive, I think about my future and I rely more and more on myself to overcome the little obstacles of my everyday life.

So, I'm almost a woman, but, as you can read in the photo I chose, I don't forget the naive and crazy part of me. It is still a fundamental part of my personality and, who knows, maybe I will be a joker even in my eighties!!!

Freerice: an ambitious goal

all pictures by Google images

Are you looking for an original way to assess the wideness of your vocabulary? And are you interested in helping poor people who have to fight against famine day after day? Strange but true, now you can combine this two interests of yours just with a click!!! Surfing the Net I ran into a very interesting website called FreeRice: it is a sort of quiz, in which you can choose among four options the correct definition of the word you read on the screen, but each time you give the right answer you donate a handful of grains of rice to the people living in the developing countries. I think it's a wonderful idea!!! I was afraid that it could be the umpteenth fraud, so I visited the website carefully and I discovered that this game is part of the United Nations World Food Program. FreeRice was launched just few months ago, in October 2007, but since then almost 20 billions of grains have already been donated to feed people from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Uganda and many other countries in which hunger is still a major problem. Please, take a moment to watch this video and understand the importance of this project!

Here are the answers to some of the questions you may have about FreeRice taken directly for the website:
"If FreeRice has the rice to give, why not give it all away right now?
FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 20 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.
Does FreeRice make any money from this?
No, it does not. FreeRice runs the site at no profit.
Who distributes the donated rice?
The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Wherever possible, the World Food Program buys food locally to support local farmers and the local economy.

Will the rice I donate make a difference?
The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. To a mother or father watching a loved child die in their arms from hunger, the rice you donate is more precious than anything in the world."

And don't forget that learning new vocabulary can have inimaginable benefits for us who are supposed to use languages for our job as well!!! So what can I say? Have fun saving people, but watch out: words are not so easy as you may think...:-D

Exams scare me!

picture by Google images

I chose this picture because I found it quite realistic and perfectly suitable to this period of the year, don't you think so? I apologize for having abandoned my beloved blog for a while, but exams have started and the time to devote to this pleasant activity is not much... By the way, this morning I have taken the exam of "Letteratura inglese contemporanea": the program of the course was really interesting and dealt with the literature produced in English language by black people living in the former colonies of the British empire. The exam was oral, so it was a good opportunity to practice my oral skills once again - and it's never enough!!! I was SOOOOO NERVOUS, guys, you can't imagine! I was literally trembling when the teacher asked me the first question, but, luckily, I knew the answer: the more I talked, the more my self-confidence increased and at last I passed the exam! I'm very happy right now, but I know that there are still many other tests to come for all of us, so...broke our legs, guys!!!

It's ice skating time!

photo by Goolge images

Guess who has brand new ice skates???? Yes, it's me! The course has just started and I decided to attend it again to learn something more about this fascinating sport (and to show off when I go skating with my friends on the weekends!!! ;-] ). The teachers suggested that it was time for us to wear something more similar to real skates than the old "ski boot-like" skates that you can borrow at the ice rink, so now you can see me dancing on ice as I was fleet-footed! Of course, my style has immediately improved... If you want to have just an idea of what I can do now, have a look at this video...

video from youtube

Well, I hope you didn't believe a single word of what I said!!! The new ice skates hurt really bad! I know that I have to use them as much as I can so that the leather will soften a little bit and it will fit the form of my feet, but in the meanwhile the result is more or less this....

photo by protoflux