Italy from the Inside

February 8, 2008 · Filed Under Italy · 5 Comments

Whilst hunting about on Technorati, I came across this blog - Italy from the Inside, and there is some interesting stuff there.

It’s also written by an Italian Microsoft employee, in English. Yet more proof that a) Italian’s go places and b) they certainly can, and do, learn English.

I shall be pointing my Media Relations and Marketing students towards this blog. Yet more inspiration.

Tags: blog, English, interest, interesting, Italia, Italian, Italy, learn, Microsoft, Writing

I was going to post a few photos

February 3, 2008 · Filed Under Milan · Comment

But I can’t. I did want to show you some photos of a little event I went to today which is being held at Milan’s Triennale exhibition centre. This event is for 2 to 6 year old children and is called ‘Vietato Non Toccare‘ - information in Italian. ‘Non toccare’ is ‘Do not touch’, and ‘vietato’ means ‘forbidden’, so ‘Vietato Non Toccare’ is ‘Not touching is forbidden’, or, perhaps a nicer translation would be simply ‘Do Touch!’.

This event is in course at the moment and its purpose is to encourage young children to touch and experience their environments. There are lots of activities, such as climbing in and out of big boxes, opening and examining other boxes, creating stories from pictures, and colouring and drawing. I guess the whole set-up acts as a kind of natural sensoral activity to stimulate the learning process.

Learning process or not, our little four year old loved it, as did the children of two friends of ours who came to the event. In fact, it was quite difficult to drag our sprogs away. Just the thing for a cold and damp Sunday morning in February.

I also thought that the event might have been just the thing for taking a few nice photos, so went armed with my camera. Now, I noticed that at the entrance to the building, there was a sign that basically said ‘no photography‘. Shame, I thought, but I will abide by the rules.

Only, the parents in the children’s play event area where taking photos right left and centre, so I thought, what the heck, I will too. I did take a few snaps until one of the young men running the event said ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t take photos’. I looked a little perplexed and then pointed out that everyone else was. He accepted this and said that he was going to tell the others to stop snapping away.

He did try to stop the happy parents from snapping away, but nobody listened to the poor chap and everyone kept on photographing their children having fun, as most parents would do. Yours truly got his camera out once more, and was told off a few more times, albeit very nicely. My bolt on flash unit is a bit too noticeable and rather too powerful, and does not lend itself too well to the taking of semi-clandestine photos, I noticed. One of the parents there did ask if I was covering the event for some magazine or other. I was hardly fading into the background.

Anyway, the reason why I should not have been taking any photos, and why this post will remain photoless, is that Italy’s privacy laws effectively state that children under the age of 18 cannot be photographed without the photographer having first obtained the parents’ written permission. I, and the other 20 or 30 parents could have been arrested for what we were doing. Now that would have been an event.

Worth checking out, the ‘Vietato Non Toccare‘ event runs until the 30 March. From Tuesdays to Fridays it is open from 5:00pm, whereas at weekends and during school holidays there are a series of 90 minute sessions at the following times: 10.30 - 12.00 - 2.30 - 4.00 - 5.30. It’s a nice way to keep the little ones occupied and there are supervisors too.

Bring the kids, but leave the camera at home, possibly!

PS Some of the photos I should not have taken seem to have come out quite well.

Tags: child, children, event, fun, Information, Italia, Italian, Italy, kids, learn, Me, Milan, nice, photo, photographer, Photography, play, young

New Fields

January 28, 2008 · Filed Under Work · 1 Comment

This is interesting. Well, it is for me. I’m putting together a short English course which will revolve around the theme of sports management. This is a new ‘field’ for me, but through the magic of the world wide web, I’m starting to get an angle on this quite specialist management discipline, and, more importantly, just what aspects of the English language people working in this relatively new environment will need to know.

That is the challenge for me. First I need to obtain an overview of this sector, and once I feel I’ve more or less understood what I think I need to understand, I can then boil it all down into what should be the most useful elements. I already have a standard game plan, which I have developed over quite a few years of observation and as a result of working out what works, and what does not. But this standard game plan is not going to help me on this occasion, at least not much.

I’ve yet to work out the specific goals, if you’ll excuse all these terrible puns. But what I have learnt is that sports management is not solely a case of maximizing income for football teams and their players, oh no. It also has a community related function, and the targets are not always financial but quite often social. As you may realise, playing sport can have quite a few social benefits, such as reducing obesity and all the associated medical costs, and if someone is doing some sport or other, he or she may not be tempted into petty crime. This keeps people out of prisons and can make the streets safer for everyone.

Of course, there is a big difference between the personality driven sports businesses and the business of encouraging people to take up sport, and a line between the two types of sports business probably needs to be drawn. Professional sports revolve around income, just like any other business, whereas amateur sporting activities are more like health education programmes. At least I think so. And at an amateur level although business practices can be used to run things in the background, for those on the field, the business aspects need to be kept well hidden, so as to keep all sporting activities as interesting as possible.

I shall be interested to discover how many of the sports management course participants are going to be focusing of the business side of sports as opposed to the social aspects.

This is going to be an interesting new course.

Tags: Business, challenge, cost, English, health, interesting, learn, Me, People, Sport, team, Work