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WEBCAST!!!

Last Monday my peers and I had the chance to presenat our final group work not only to our Italian class but also to some students from Middlebury College, USA. We had a webcast exchange with students we don't know at another American university and it was definiteky a great experience!

I worked on my final presentation with Francesca and Lara and we chose to make a comparison between American eating habits and the Italian ones: the result was a ppt file based not only on the information we discovered surfing the Net but also on what we learnt over Skype with our American peers from Tulane.

Whether it is in front of a small group or some larger outside the class, anxiety about speaking in public is just a fact of life: it is something I both hate and enjoy. At the very beginning of our group presentation on Eating Habits – USA vs ITALY I definitely panicked but I was able to conquer the fear and in the end some words came out from my mouth.

Nowadays speaking of food is a current topic which involves nearly everyone and above all young people: this was attested by the questions the Americans asked soon after my first speech. I did not immediately realized they were a positive reaction towards our work and in fact my mind went blank and I didn’t know how to keep on my performance without being too much superficial. Provoking reactions, let’s say of every kind, in the audience should enrich our “performing” in public even if at first it can be scaring.

Other three italian groups presented their group works and they managed to survive in an excellent way: Lucrezia, Francesca and Annalisa talked about national celebrations both in the States and in Italy; Maria Chiara, Alice and Susanne told us something about the American fraternities and sororities and the Italian goliardia; while Isabella and Svjetlana made their presentation on the immigration problem both in Italy and in the USA.

Finally we listened to Nemanja Tepavcevic's work on Il potere dell'amore personificato and that of Brooke Farquhar on Boccaccio, Ariosto e le qualità amorali delle donne. They both made a very nice presentation and it was nice seeing what an advanced Italian class is doing down in the States.

Once again I appreciated a new technology, i.e. webcast, as another step to gain intercultural competences that might be very usefyl not only in my future career but also in my life in general.

Alice