November 26th

Hello everybody!

Our last class started with Camille reporting on the last debating competition she attended, which took place in Oxford. Although the Télécom team didn't make it to the finals, she thinks it was great to be there and compete with some of the best debating teams in the world, including people from Harvard and Yale (whose team happens to have won). We then discussed a little bit about the debating activity itself, and it turned out that, although there is a French equivalent, it is most likely to be an anglo-saxon concept.

Then, Anass gave us his opinion on a video he had seen on the CNN website, about Jihadi prisoners in Abou Salim detention facility. The video basically shows the efforts of both Jihadis, the son of the Libyan dictator, Khadafi, and Noman Benotman, a former Bin Laden ally and Jihadi combatant in the process of writing a new Jihadi code so as to reach peace in Tripoli. The prison itself is rather unique: prisoners have access to computers, CNN, Al Jazeera; their families can even come visit them. Anass said that, although he did know about the situation in Libya before, he did discover some things with the video. Finally, we also remarked that, although Khadafi's son had a good English, it would be taken for granted by an American audience, whereas if an American leader spoke, for example, French, some French people might be flattered.

After Anass' contribution, we moved on to our assignment, a dictation based on the CNN video 'The future of online news':

The video itself was very interesting, but, as a dictation assignment, we came to a consensus that it was way too long. However, it didn't prevent us from learning some new words and practicing our listening skills with different accents. In the video, there were British, Indian, East Asian and Australian speakers, so it was quite difficult to understand every word of what every one of them wanted to say.

After this quick look at our work with the dictation, we read an article titled 'iPod University', by Ginanne Brownell, which reports the experiences of some universities that are putting their content online for free. We then summarized it in two sentences, and discussed about the idea; while some of us thought that the Universities didn't really have any interest in doing that, some others viewed it as a form of free publicity. Our teacher then added that Universities are meant to spread knowledge, so publishing course materials online is indeed a very efficient way of doing it.

Finally (yes, we did a lot of things last class), we listened to the first minutes of the Food, Inc. documentary. We're going to get into it with more detail during our next classes, but this little preview already showed us what it is all about: 'The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you eat because, if you knew, you wouldn't want to eat it'.

That's it! I'm looking forward to our next class!