Please introduce yourself here to start our international collaborations. Thank you for your interest.

Dr. David Stoloff
Professor, Education Department
Eastern Connecticut State University
Willimantic, CT 06226
stoloffd@easternct.edu

Safir Kassim
As a teacher of Psychopedagogy and reading comprehension at the University of Mascara (Algeria )I would be very pleased to communicate and exchange knowledge and experiences that could be benificial for my students to enrich their linguistic competencies and learn from the others cultures.

Professor Kassim:

Thank you for your interest in collaborating. We appreciated the information that you have sent our group on Algeria. Our group posted their projects at

http://sites.google.com/site/carcioa/home/lap-130--leading-edge-technology-spring-2010/culture-quest-projects/index-page

We would appreciate if you or your students might have some comments on the presentations. We were wondering if you know if there is any connection between your city Mascara and the term mascara - that we know is a make-up - particularly to darken the eyes.

Thank you very much for your international friendship. Hope to hear from you again soon.

David Stoloff

Dear Professor,

I have seen the projects that I found wonderfully presented with adequate informations and interesting comments.Yet, there are some mising information on make-up.

By the way, mascara (make-up) linguistically speaking are cognate (true cognate) but has nothing to do with the name of the town Mascara with capital letter. It is simply a linguistic simplification of the word Muaskar ( Mascara (Muaskar) was the capital city of Emir Abd al-Qadir, a leader of the Algerian resistance to early French colonial rule.
Mouaskar means "the military headquarters".

Thnks to dding me in intercon :)
Kassim

Professor Kassim:

Thank you for clarifying about the term mascara. We had some cultural stereotypical notion that women in Algeria would be expert in mascara use - particularly for the eyes.

I did some research and found that you are 6 hours ahead of us, that Mascara is in the Atlas Mountains but not so far from the Mediterreanean Sea.

I would be happy to add your students as writers to this wiki - they might add comments to the University of Mascara webpage in this wiki. It would be interesting to see how our students would interact on this wikispace. If you are interested, please send me their email address and I will add them to the wiki.

Thank you very much for the information and for your collaborative spirit. Hope to hear from you again soon.

David Stoloff

Hello,

My name is Danielle and I worked on the University of Algeria's culture quest project, topic was the clothing. It was great to see how the different parts of Algeria were all connected to its culture. Please introduce yourself if you have any comments about the project, or if you have any questions about America's cultre.

Thanks,
Danielle

Hello,

I am Erin Zenzie and as Danielle already said, I also worked on the University of Algeria's culture quest project. My topic was on Algeria's climate and geography. I never knew how similar the climate between Algeria and California here in the United States are! I learned a lot from the other people in my group about Algeria.

Thanks,

Erin