About the past weeks and Prezi

Here is some thoughts and updates about the lessons the past few weeks. I'm not that sure how many lessons there has been, due to illness and trips to Norway.

Anyhow, the subject of the last lessons has been Prezi. What's that?

"Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. The result: visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery."

We were supposed to make a Prezi-presentation in groups. I found myself in a group called "Linguistics" and so the thoughts about the presentation surrounded that subject. We thought about the way kids learn languages and such, until we came up with a subject I were happy to do a presentation about: how English influences the Finnish language. After a week our group of two expanded to four and we had even more ideas. After some meetings with the group (a Saturday and a Tuesday) we had our presentation all done, without any much stress.

I took care of the everyday examples - what are examples of words in Finnish that are in English or influenced by English? I read some articles both in Finnish and English and also took some inspiration from a course in Norway I attended just a week before the presentation! There we discussed about languages and also how English affects many nordic languages, and whether it is an issue or not. Turns out it's a bigger issue in Finland than in Sweden, and that Norway has just the same problem. We were told that many nordic youngsters think they are actually better at English then in their own native language! As our lecturer, Bodil Aurstad (http://dsn.dk/om-os/medarbejdere/bodil-aurstad) pointed out, youngsters today ARE better in English than ever before, but not as good as they think. Wonder why?

Anyways, that's what our presentation was about. Some of my examples I used were "grape" (today called greippi even on the labels of soda bottles), "printer" (printteri), "mail" (meili, sounds just the same to us in Finland) and last but not least I presented some sentences which are clearly influenced by English. One is by the famous Mika Häkkinen : "Kun sä oot nopeempi kuin muut, sä voitat" which means "When you're faster than the others, you win". There are actually youngsters that have been influenced by this and uses this frequently; I was shocked to hear that. For me it's obvious not to use it, it would feel weird. Even though it's perfectly normal to me in English. It was fun to see how clear this is to me while there are many occasions that I have compounded Finnish/Swedish and English.

The process making the presentation was nice and at the end we all learned to use Prezi, although some problems in the beginning. I learned to like Prezi really much, and will probably do my coming class presentation as a Prezi-presentation.

I want to thank my group for the great job and fun meetings we had doing the presentation, I did enjoy the time. Even though it all felt unsure in the beginning everything turned out really good.

-Anni