My thoughts in soap bubbles

About the exchange...

2008-05-14T04:04:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in different cultures, so I've found this exchange very exciting. I chose to be part of the exchange with Dickinson college USA for two reasons: first of all because the guys were mothertongue speakers and secondly because we were supposed to use Skype. This programm was not new to me and I use it quite often at home. That’s why the idea of talking "live" with someone from the other side of the world has aroused my interest a lot. Moreover, I was really curious about how those American people studied Italian, what was their level, how was their pronunciation and so on. We had many interesting topics to talk about, which made differences and similarities between our cultures very clear.
I felt quite comfortable during this exchange.Luckily I never had incidents or misunderstandings due to cultural differences. I think that intelligent people are more willing to overcome them than to limit to them. Moreover, I could make friends with Kristen, my American peer, and other people of my course I did not know before. I really appreciated when my American peer called me during the weekend just to hear from me and have a little talk together. That made our relationship more interpersonal and less mechanic. Another thing that I liked a lot was our meeting with Chiara, one of the Dickinson students who was in Padova on holiday: we had the chance to know directly someone we could only meet virtually (and she gave interesting useful answers to our questions).
During the exchange I asked many questions about life, culture and many other topics (not only the assigned ones). I love analizing differences and similarities between my culture and others. I had the chance to speak a lot (which never happened during five years of university) and learn many different things from the conversations with a native speaker.
Since I have many friends who come from different countries and have such opposite backgrounds, I am quite used to re-consider my own culture. Apart from comparisons, I’ve also learnt many new things about USA that I didn’t know before (or knew superficially). The most important topics we discussed are: family life, school system, university life, politics, electoral system and elections, immigration and multiculturalism, cinema and stereotypes (Italy-America and North-South America). Moreover, I’ve learnt something about customs and conventions of talking with people.For example, I realized that the typical Italian way of repeating "thank you" and "sorry" hundreds of times may sound terribly tedious, or that Italians tend to greet a lot, while the Americans tend to limit to a short "hi" and "bye". Another thing that I noticed is that sometimes when I tried to correct my peer's mistakes she was afraid to talk and when I asked her to correct mine she didn't do it. At that point I spoke to her directly and asked her if she was offended or intimidated. Her answer was no, of course, but since that I tried to limit my corrections, even if I would have appreciate her correcting me. As far as I am concerned, I tended to ask whatever I could. Many people are shy or do not want to bore with silly questions, but I've learnt not to care about it and ask. That's why when I couldn't understand something I asked my peer to write it down or to repeat it slowly.
In conclusion, my exchange experience was good. There were just a couple of things that made me feel uncomfortable, but I think they didn't affect my learning process. So I'm really happy I had the chance to take part in the project.

Double reflective blogging post

2008-04-04T02:03:00.000-07:00

Well, since I’m having serious problems with my connection at home it was quite impossible for me to do some of my work. However I’m willing to write this double reflecting blogging post. Why double? Because I’m going to put together my two past Skype experiences.
I haven’t changed my American peer yet, so I always spoke every time with the same student. This made everything a little more easy for me because I could get used to her accent and her way of speaking. I’m quite happy because I could understand…let’s say 90% of what she told me.
As far as the topics are concerned, I have to admit that we didn’t talk much about the assigned topics and we often shifted to something else (mainly personal experiences). In my opinion this is not that bad, since my goal is that of practising my oral and listening skills. Moreover, it’s sort of a challenge for me to change constantly from a topic to another, without focusing on a particular range of words and expressions.
I love Skype. I think it’s a very good tool for practising. I noticed that my peer appreciates a lot when I write things down to explain her the mistakes or just to let her see how to write things. This happens when speaking in Italian most of all: I don’t like translating my sentences in English, I prefer writing what she cannot understand, so she can get the meaning by herself. And this is what I ask her to do when I don’t get some of her words.
I hope I can get the best from this exchange and I hope I can also give back what I can to help people learn Italian, as well.

...reflection on my mid-term paper

2008-03-17T01:03:00.000-07:00

I was really impressed when my teacher Sarah gave me the evaluation grid with her comments on my mid-term paper. I know I spent some time reflecting on my learning process and I tried to give my best while writing it, but I couldn’t imagine somebody would think it was “excellent”.
I went through it and I noticed that there were few errors but a lot of things I could have written in a better way. As the teacher pointed out, my style was quite informal. I’m aware of this, because I wasn’t expected to write it like it was a formal essay. At the same time, I’m aware that I often tend to write things down informally, so this is something I need to improve. I noticed some mistakes about punctuation (especially commas) and some related to vocabulary.
Two comments were identical: they said that it’s not good to start a new paragraph with a linking word that strong links to the previous sentences, because it indicates that I was continuing on with the same idea, instead of proving my will to start a new paragraph.

...exchange Italy-USA

2008-03-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

Last week we started our exchange with Dickinson college. I remember that day for two basic reasons: first of all, an awful weather! The day before seemed a spring day: it was quite warm, sunny and my mood was positive (allergy apart!). But, the following day…my God…it was so cold and windy! Moreover, it was raining and I couldn’t keep my umbrella open for the wind, so I walked around Padua searching for the lab and I got there all wet! Consequently…a little bit of fever and a crazy headache for the next two days!

Secondly, we started this exchange through skype. That day my peer was a nice sweet girl from L.A., California with Chinese origins. Well, for both of us it was our first time doing such a thing, so we were a little embarrassed at the beginning, but then we chatted for about an hour.
Although we were asked to talk about education, we needed time to introduce ourselves, so we just talked about the campus and the opposite situation we have here in Padua, where all the university buildings are among those of the city. We talked half in English and half in Italian. I noticed we had more difficulties in talking in Italian, but I think she was good, because she told me she has studied Italian only for a year and a half. I tried to slow down and I think we managed to understand each other, technical problems apart. Nice experience!

...let's reflect, PLEase!

2007-12-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

This time I was asked to develop a mindmap of my PLE, that is to say my Personal Learning Environment. For those of you who have never heard of a PLE before, it can be defined as ““a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it” (Martin, 2007).
In other words, I had to reflect on my personal approach to my language learning process and draw a mind map summarizing my analysis through personal categories.
Here is my PLE:

I divided my PLE into two main sections: FORMAL and INFORMAL LEARNING. Each one has some branches. The first one is divided in TRADITIONAL LEARNING and E-LEARNING, depending on whether the learning process is based or not on the use of technology. Informal learning branches out in PEOPLE (learning from the interaction with other people, either native speakers or not), WORK (using and improving the language for a job), TRAVEL (improving the language abroad) and ENTERTAINMENT & LEISURE TIME (learning in my spare time through readings, TV/DVD, music and internet).

This activity has been very useful for me. I wasn’t used to reflect on my learning process in such a way and I think this is something I will keep up. Once you are aware of what you are doing and conscious about your “modus operandi”, everything seems to be more meaningful and easy to approach.

...surfing the net as detectives

2007-11-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

Communication has been improving a lot up to now. Nowadays we have many possibilities to exchange information, which I think is a real privilege for us as people of the 21st century.
Man has been working hard to improve knowledge and to find ways to spread and share old and new information. In particular, telecommunication is spreading so fast that we can hardly be informed about every enhancement.

Internet is one of the best inventions for communication in my opinion. It provides many different sources of information and everybody has the chance to express freely and add a personal contribution to general knowledge. Today the amount of information on the net is really huge, almost unlimited, and Internet has become one of the most used sources for research.
But this freedom can become dangerous when the information you find is confusing, wrong or even voluntarily misleading. So it becomes necessary to judge what you come across and verify if the source is reliable or not.

Apart from books, I often use Internet when I need to do research. Of course, I’m well aware that I may find all kinds of information, so I always need to check if what I’m reading can be trustworthy. I usually do this by doing extra research on the author of the essay I’m reading or the organization which published the article. Usually big names grant us reliability.
Another way I learnt is to focus on the domains: for example, if you look for documents which end with “.edu” or “.ac.uk” you’re quite sure that they come from British or American Universities (especially if they are “.pdf” files).
Sometimes the layout of the website can be useful, as well. Usually, sites which are clear, clean and well structured are more likely to be official or at least “more serious”. In detail, I tend to trust more those websites which add bibliography (or give a short biography of the author) and those with useful official links.
Moreover, another thing I tend to check is if the site is regularly updated or has been recently updated: you could come across interesting contents which are no more valid just because they’re old or they have changed.

The pages I read about judging online sources gave me the opportunity to reflect about the criteria I use and understand how important it is to pay attention to them. I had the chance to learn some new criteria concerning the accuracy of information and the main goals of the site and the author, which I will surely use in the future. However, the aspect that mostly caught my attention is authorship: I discovered the “Internet Directory of Published Writers”, which I think can be really useful if you need to be sure that the article you intend to use for your work is reliable and relevant.

...do YouTube? I do...

2007-11-27T02:41:00.000-08:00

Hey mates, I’m so sorry I’m late in posting this e-tivity but I wasn’t at home during the weekend and I couldn’t find a way to even post a message because the connection didn’t work for some days.

This post is about YouTube, one of the most important websites of the net, which was thought to watch and share videos by simply uploading them for free. What made YouTube so interesting at the beginning is that everybody can watch the videos there, no matter what kind of files they are. Afterwards, people started appreciating it for the huge quantity of material this site can provide. You can find videos about every kind of topic; you just need to write a word on the search engine and click on it to choose from a very long list of links to files of all sorts.

I started using YouTube as soon as my friends told me about it. I can find whatever I need, believe me. Sometimes searching is not really easy…or better, immediate…but if you search with the right words and choose carefully from the list, I’m sure you’ll get what you desire.
In particular, I starting searching this site for rare music videos and pieces of concerts. Moreover, I searched for films and TV shows. There I soon realized that you can find videos from all over the world and I often love to compare the voices of American or British actors with those of their Italian or Spanish dubbers (I had real fun watching cartoons by Walt Disney in various languages, as well!).

I think YouTube can also be a very useful site to improve your language skills. Many videos (and I would say the majority of them) are in English, so they can be very useful to get your ear used to normal-speed English conversations or learn new words and expressions.
I visited TeacherTube, a sort of branch of YouTube, which provides only educationally focused videos and I think it’s really interesting. I didn’t know it existed, but I immediately bookmarked it. I think I will visit it a lot because it gives us the chance to go straight to what we need as learners. In this way we can save time from searching and choosing on the general YouTube search engine.

In my career as a language learner, YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/ has been one of the main tools to learn while having fun!

...podcasting

2007-11-19T03:11:00.000-08:00

When I first read the title of our e-tivity 6 I was a little worried. I started thinking: “Podcasts…what are they? Will I be supposed to use another tool for feed aggregation, posting or doing something still unknown to me?”. But soon I realized that I had already listened to that word before. But where or when? I still can’t remember. Maybe I just used podcasts without knowing what they exactly were. Anyway, the most important thing is that NOW I have a clear idea of what a podcast is: it is a media file which can be downloaded from the net to your personal computer or mp3 player. In this way you can listen to or watch it whenever you prefer or just when you need it. This kind of file is spreading a lot lately and many sites offer their own podcasts about a huge amount of topics (radio or TV shows, private messages, university lectures, amateur music groups and so on).

Apart from music, TV and radio, I think that podcasts can be really useful for us as English learners. A huge quantity of them is in English (I would say the majority of them), so you can find whatever you need to improve your listening and comprehension skills. Moreover, by doing that you can improve your pronunciation, as well. So…no excuse! This is a real revolution in learning a foreign language in my opinion. Some years ago the only way to listen to mothertongue speakers was going to their country. Now everything can be found in the net. In particular, if you go to sites dedicated to ESL learning you can even choose the topics you prefer and avoid those you find boring. Isn’t this great?

There’s only one thing I don’t fully understand about downloading these files onto my mp3 player: do people walk around the city or go jogging with English listening exercises on their mp3 player? It seems a bit unusual to me. I think I’ll prefer the streaming option.

While searching for podcasts, I found three useful sites for ESL learners. They are quite similar because they all offer material for ESL learners and teachers. I think they’re useful because they’re all good sites and provide a lot of podcasts and other activities. They are:

www.eslpod.com
Here you find more than 300 podcasts on various topics with related explanations. Actors speak quite slowly, so the audio files are not that difficult (even if sometimes it doesn’t seem a natural conversation). There are full oral explanations given by a guide who makes words and expressions clear to the listener. Listening to the guide is like being in a classroom with a mothertongue teacher.

www.listen-to-english.com
This is a blog with many podcasts about interesting and unusual topics. The texts are clearly read and there are also some vocabulary notes or quizzes related to the audio files. Moreover, you can read the transcription of the text. The site is updated every week with a new post (text + podcast).

www.podcastinenglish.com
The site offers many audio files, divided in 3 levels. You can listen or download them and you have related transcriptions, worksheets with answers and vocabulary tasks. Many audio files are interviews and everything sounds spontaneous and natural. People interact a lot and it makes the files interesting to learn communication devices.

...social bookmarking: tag to live, live to tag

2007-11-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

Last week we learnt another interesting tool, which can be very useful for our e-learning process. It’s de.licio.us, a website created for social bookmarking. Your question will probably be: what’s social bookmarking? Well, instead of bookmarking your favourite websites and blogs on your own computer at home, you can use this site to post them in a sort of community, where everybody can save the URL of the sites they found interesting while surfing the net. In particular, we used de.licio.us to create a list of many useful links to English e-learning resources. I think it’s a good chance to compare our results and find out interesting websites we can just visit once or we can use more frequently as reference sources to improve our English skills.

I was asked to choose one from each of my classmates’ bookmarks and go visit it. Many of us picked the same websites (the most common were those of BBC or on-line dictionaries) or focused on the same topics (for example, many of us posted feeds concerning listening activities). I read all the notes my peers wrote to introduce their sites carefully. I think we all chose useful sites and blogs and I was really happy when I realized that everybody selected at least one fun study site. I think that the best way to improve a language is to play with it and use it in a relaxed entertaining way. Then, after choosing and visiting one site for each peer, I decided to write down my personal top five, giving you the links and a brief summary. In this way, if you’re interested in one of them (or maybe all of them…who knows?) you can go straight to the source. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

ELISA suggested:
http://www.elllo.org/
This site offers many recorded conversations and interviews about various topics. It is a very useful website for those who need to improve their English listening skills. After listening to each audio file you can test yourself through a related quiz and you find the complete transcription, as well. This can be very useful for self-study, because all the tools you need are provided by the site.

GIOVANNA suggested:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
This website is an on-line writing lab. It suggests you how to write different kinds of texts properly, such as academic papers, professional and technical texts. You find many downloadable PowerPoint files concerning different text-types, and there are also good links to grammar resources.

VALENTINA suggested:
http://web.ku.edu/idea/index.htm
It’s so fascinating to see how the English pronunciation changes from one country to another! In this website you find many recordings of native speakers coming from all over the world, so you can listen to many example of different accents and pronunciations or, as they call them, “English language dialects”. Just click on the continent and then to the country to download the mp3 and the transcription.

EVA suggested:
http://www.readprint.com/
This is an on-line library offering a wide variety of free books ready to be printed. You can look through a long list of authors to find the author you desire. By clicking on the name, you’ll go to an introductory page with biography, notes and a list of downloadable works divided into fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays.

ALICE suggested:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
This site is an acronym and abbreviation dictionary. In the introduction they say that it is “the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms”. I think it’s very useful when you don’t understand their meaning or when you want to check if they are the same in English and your own language (they are often common mistakes!).

...halloween

2007-11-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Halloween takes its origins from a Celtic pre-Christian celebration and does not belong to our own culture. I think that the majority of Italians ignores its real meaning: it’s just a chance to dress up, go party and have fun. Children are more involved because they love dressing up as witches, zombies or vampires and spend the night outside, asking for candies from house to house. But this is not what Halloween really is and represents in Anglo Saxon countries.
Actually, I’m not against Halloween and I’m convinced that we can celebrate it, but we need to know much more about it, in order to become aware of what we are doing. This can help us focus on cultural differences and keep our own tradition alive.

...order, please!

2007-11-03T03:28:00.000-07:00

This picture is called “Order please!” and I chose it to introduce this post about tidiness.
During our last lesson in the lab I discovered the existence of a new technological tool: the feed aggregator. Well, since I’m not used to blogging I think it’s quite normal that I had never heard of it before. Nevertheless, I have to say that it is very useful and easy to manage.
Before last Monday I had already bookmarked each blog of my group on my pc: you know, I love traditional approaches, even if I understand that, apart from my blog, I need to update also my technical knowledge. In fact, this tool allows me to see if the blogs I subscribed to have been updated by simply looking to an easy page, where I can find all the new information that has been added. In this way you can save a lot of time! Otherwise you should go to your bookmarks, select each single blog and see if it’s been updated (with the risk of finding every time the same old stuff!) With Bloglines (the program we used) you can also organize all your blogs and sites in different playlists, so everything is more clear and neat. So, if you want to tidy up your virtual mess, check it out to www.bloglines.com!

...two weeks of blogging

2007-10-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

First of all I have to admit that I am really hopeless at computers, so I was a little scared when I found out that this course was about blogging, posting comments and using tools that I had never heard before. But after two weeks everything seems to be more clear and easy to me (but don’t even try to ask me how to change the colour of the layout or to centre your picture, please! Hahaa…).
The only problem is that my computer wants to dare me to fight as usual. After I understood more or less how to post my messages, things turned to be more difficult: the ADSL connection started working badly. That’s why I couldn’t be punctual in posting my things. But an angel fell from the sky…well, he wasn’t an angel, really, but a technician from the telephone company who repaired everything without asking me too many questions. Now I think I have what I need to win my computer and go on constantly with my e-tivities.

Joking aside, I enjoyed searching for blogs. I knew what they were, but I was not used to visit and read them. I thought they were just a sort of personal diary where people could write about their own life. But this is not true. Blogs are much more: you can find blogs about every kind of topic that comes to your mind. They can be informative and very professional, even if their language is often informal. I started becoming familiar with the etiquette, but I still like simple concise blogs. If they’re too sophisticated or they contain too many things, they turn to be confusing to me. I loved analysing the different kinds of styles people used, because they can tell you more about the writer, since everybody has its own personal way of writing or organizing things.

I had never considered blogs to be a way to learn and improve my English. After two weeks I can say that this new way of working and writing can be helpful and stimulating for many of us. Moreover, it’s going to be a hard work to keep on writing, reading and commenting blogs every week, especially for people like me, who prefer chatting in front of a cup of coffee, watching people directly in the eyes, instead of staying hours and hours in front of a screen. But I will devote myself to blogging, I promise. But at the end of the lesson, can we sit at a café???

...something about me

2007-10-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

Here is the message I wrote to introduce myself to my classmates:

Hi everybody! I’ve chosen this picture because I love singing. Better, singing has become part of my everyday life...that's why I’m always humming tunes: on my way to school, at the supermarket, while doing the housework or cooking and, of course, under the shower, where sometimes I “give my best”! You know, the shower is my favourite stage, but my parents cannot stand my concerts anymore: they keep on telling me to lower my volume or to rush out of that place and hurry up because I’m late! This is what has constantly been happening in my “career” as a bathroom singer. As you can imagine, I had to find a solution. I decided to look for something which could allow me to shout and sing freely, but sound good: so I started taking lessons and singing in a big gospel group and other choirs. Since that moment I’ve become really fond of gospel and black music in general. The only problem is that now I sing and hum more than before…poor parents!

...welcome, bubble readers!

2007-10-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome everybody! I'm Federico and this is the blog I'm going to use during this last year of university to post my E-tivities. I hope you'll enjoy sharing opinions and posts with me.

I called my blog "my thoughts in soap bubbles". You don't know where a soap bubble will go or the people it is going to meet during its way...so I liked this image to describe my messages: they are words inside soap bubbles...flying free. I really cannot know who is going to read them or who is going to write me back. I just know where they start, but their way is out of my control. Let's see what will happen.

Hugs, Fred.