Towards our final project

Hi guys!

It’s time to start working on our final project. We’re supposed to develop a topic together with a student from America and to create a wiki page about it. The project aims to be the final outcome of one-year course because, in order to work, on it we’re supposed to use some of the tools we discovered and learnt during this year.

Last Wednesday we used Skype to communicate with our American friend, Martigny, and we agreed on the topic of our final project and the way to plan, organize and work on it. The topic for our project is a comparison between the Italian University system and the American one. We pointed out some interesting points to develop and we decided that the first step will be to do some kind of brainstorming collecting as many materials on the topic as possible. This weekend we exchanged e-mails with the lists of websites that we found and we started organizing the relevant information for the wiki page. Personally, I tried to focus on a specific aspect of our project: cost, tuition and fees in the American university system and I collected some materials about it. The next step will be the one of organizing information in the wiki page. As one of the core principle of the wiki is collaboration, each member of our group (be he /she from Italy or from America) can edit the wiki page adding his/her pieces of information and giving his/her contribution to the final project. In this way, Skype, the wiki page, the social bookmarking in del.icio.us and our mailbox (just to mention a few) are the tools to manage a cultural exchange with our American friends with the objective of planning a final project regarding a specific topic in the two different cultures half in Italian and half in English.

In my opinion, our final project can be a very interesting and exciting experience, especially because sometimes it is very hard to plan something together even with people who live in the same place as you… so I think that developing a project with somebody who lives in another country thousands of miles away from you will be a real challenge. Of course, a high level of organization, a well- planned work and the contribution of each member of the group are the keys in order to do a successful job!