My second Skype exchange: a kind of "chain reaction"

Hello everybody,

on Monday I had my second Skype exchange with my American peer and it was even more stimulating than the first one. The reason lies in the fact that the guy asked me a question I was not able to answer simply because I wasn’t prepared in that particular topic. My conversation partner asked me, between the North and the South, which one has more environmental groups. Given my “information gap”, I surfed the Internet for a while – the Web-sphere is always helpful…! – and, even though I didn’t succeed in finding out specific information about the numerical superiority of environmental groups in one of the two areas, I picked up the website of the Legambiente, which is the most important Italian environmental association with its 1,000 local branches located in different places all over Italy.

This website has many links. Two of them, in particular, grasped my attention: “calendario delle iniziative” and “scrivici”. The first one is a real calendar with all the meetings of the current year. When I saw that a campaign on recycling is taking place in these days, I clicked on the second link and wrote an e-mail to the association, whose head office is in Rome, in order to request more detailed information about the initiative. I’m waiting for the answer…

The most interesting aspect of the whole issue is the fact that the question asked by my conversation partner triggered a sort of “chain reaction”: functioning as an input, it pushed me into searching for the piece of information I lacked and, though I didn’t find out specific sources dealing with the distribution of environmental groups in northern and southern Italy, I picked up an important Web source which can help all of us to be constantly informed about the most significant initiatives that are taking place or will take place in the near future.

Another meaningful aspect is that, after writing the link to the site on the “Notice Board” of our wiki, one of my Italian peers wrote me a comment saying that she visited the website and found it quite interesting. Therefore, what at the beginning was my lack of information turned out to be a positive way of enriching not only my knowledge fund, but also my peers’.

To sum up, I think that one of the most positive aspects of Skype exchanges is that we can all benefit from every single conversation, that is, not only from the exchange with our American conversation partner, but also from the other exchanges: each of us can learn from the experience made by other students. Therefore… the more we listen and talk to our peers, the more we learn…!

That’s all for now.

Maria Chiara