Interpreting isn't always an easy task

Hellooo!

I'm going to talk about music again and in particular about the difficulties of interpreting it. I think that music, all genre of music, makes part of everyone's life. Who doesn't have at least one favourite song? ;) Well, I think the answer is quite obvious because music is a great part of everyone's life, we are musical human beings!

Few days ago I came across with the problem of misinterpretation of songs. We were talking (me and my peers in my English class) about Coldplay's song Viva la Vida. The band has yet to make public their interpretation, the right one. When I listened to it I immediately thought about a love song. Through the use of sacred metaphors the author wants to represent a man that had everything from life but stupidly has lost everything. Then, reading some people's comments I thought that this song is a hymn of joy for J.W.Bush's fall in the latest US elections and for Obama's win (or perhaps I like very much this interpretation and I convinced myself of its truth!).

Songs interpretation is sometimes very difficult. I surfed the Net for a while searching for "misinterpreted songs" in the history. I found out two interesting blogs presenting some songs that have been and still are misinterpreted. Derek Powazek writes about the American Top 10: Most Misinterpreted Songs while Vicki Santillano writes about Eight Commonly Misinterpreted Songs. Go and have a look at them if you wish.

What struck me the most was the misinterpretation of The Police's song Every Breath You Take. This song is not about love, affection and devotion but talks about "a controlling character-person who keeps on watching every single thing the ex-girlfriend does" (Powazek, 2009). I always thought it was a love song...gulp! Now I realize that I never paid too much attention on it because I took its meaning for granted.

This is the video of this song performed in Torino in 2007. I found it on YouTube but I was there too! A great band and a wonderful concert!




Bye bye!
Chiara ;)

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Music is life!

Hello everyone!

I love music and I put it into my PLE because I think that by listening to the music we can learn new vocabulary and pronunciation in a foreign language. Very often I don't understand all the words I hear in a song and so I go and check them on the Internet. It is just a very easy and funny way to learn something new and something more about a foreign language. I think that teachers should somewhat use lyrics of famous songs to teach the grammar or simply to encourage their students to deepen their learning of a language. It would be a funny and easy way for teaching and I'm sure it will be really appreciated by every single student. (Why school should always be so boring? ;)

I don't know very much about "brand-new" singers since I'm fond of a kind of music that is quite "old", like my friends kindly say! (I don't think music ever becomes old..., do you?). However, listening to the radio I found out a Lily Allen's song that I appreciated. It's name is The Fear and I think it is a nice song because it talks about the way our society behaves nowadays. It can easily apply to the latest Italian political events and to the way people use their body instead of their brains. Listen to it if you wish and in this website you can find its lyrics and many more.



Bye byeee,
Chiara

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Mind mapping my future

Hello everyone!

This is going to be my very last post for the English course. We have done a long travel from last October. In particular, now we are all well aware of the fact of having a lot to do even after our graduation. Indeed, languages have to be kept alive into our minds because unfortunately they tend to slowly disappear.

Some months ago we started reflecting on our learning purposes, on our next linguistic goals and on the means for reaching them. Then, during these months we found out new computer tools useful for training our linguistic skills. I think we did a great job together this year and that it will be very useful for our future needs.

We'll have a lot to do to keep in mind the languages we studied at the University. Now, we have to make one step further building our Personal Learning Environment. A PLE is a kind of a new approach to language learning. Indeed, using different computer tools we can train our linguistic skills. I think that a PLE recognizes the fact that the learning process takes place at different levels, in particular the informal learning level is of great importance in everyone's learning process.

As far as my PLE is concerned, I began to put down my ideas of what I think are the main tools I used until now to learn a second language. It is only a first draft because a PLE can be expanded in every moment. In fact, it is important to add new tools and ways of learning we find out during the time. I divided my PLE into 5 sections: formal learning, informal learning, who, where and how. 'Formal' and 'informal learning' are divided in turn into 4 sub-sections, i.e. the four abilities: writing, reading, listening and speaking. The section 'how' is also divided into 3 sub-sections, i.e. gathering information, acting on learning and processing information.

In my PLE I decided to focus my attention on the four abilities since I think that we use different tools to develop each of them and that each of them is equally important as far as our language learning is concerned. Furthermore, in my opinion our PLE's mind maps should give an important role to 'how' we want to consolidate our linguistic learning, i.e. the means to reach our targets.

Bye bye,
:) Chiara

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It's my life!

Hello everyone!

We're dealing with a serious task this week: privacy. Nowadays the information we put on the Internet is easily accessible by everybody and we have to be really careful about what and where we write.

Last November I joined in Facebook because a friend of mine moved to Madrid and suggested me to keep in contact with her through this social network. So, I became a member myself. At the first time, I only "friended" with her and few others who live abroad or far away from me. However, a lot of people immediately "asked my friendship" and of course I accepted. After a while I realized that I knew things of other people, and vice versa they knew things about me, because we wrote them on Facebook and not because we were friends in the "real life". So, I decided to be more careful about what I was going to write.

What about the pictures we publish? Are they covered by copyright or everyone can use them? After reading the article about Facebook and privacy One Friend Facebook Hasn't Made yet: Privacy Rights I'm not sure I'll publish anything more... . According to Adam Cohen (the author of this article) : "in the Internet age, people -especially young people- do not care about privacy the way they once did". Perhaps we don't feel it like a problem that people know how we feel today or what time we usually go sleeping. However, we should worry a little bit more about the way our data are widespread and used without our explicit consent.

Facebook isn't a borderline case I fear. We should be really careful about putting personal information on the Internet. However, we should also improve our knowledge of Web technologies and so I don't think the solution to our fears is to avoid using the Internet. On the contrary, we should protect ourselves by attributing authorship to our writings. For this purpose we can use Creative Commons, the non-profit organization that realized several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. I'm a beginner in this field and I'm talking about things I never tried myself. However, a lot of people use these free licenses and so I think we can do it as well!!

Bye bye,

;) Chiara

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