My PLE

What about a personal learning environment? I have to admit that I found quite difficult to understand what this expression refered to, but finally I succeeded in creating my own! And at the end it has not been so complicated as I expected...
I concentrated my reflections on my language PLE and the volleyball one beacuse I think that these are the two areas where I mainly applied in the last 10 years (without considering all the everyday activities that I have obviously been learning since I was born!).
I divided my PLE into three main sections: people, formal learning and media & internet.

PEOPLE:
As for languages, a costant presence have been teachers and schoolmates, sometimes friends, relatives and people met while travelling, and more recently collegues in some working experiences and people contributing to the web.
As for volleyball, I thought first of all about trainers and my teams, and secondly friends who share my passion and adversaries.

FORMAL LEARNING:
As for languages, books and tests of course, courses and conferences at the university, tasks and researches, listening exercises, a theatre experience and some projects at the high school.
As for volleyball, the place of my formal learning is the gym with the trainings and the matches.

MEDIA & INTERNET:
As for languages, radio programmes and songs, tv programmes of foreign countries or dealing with some specific topics, but most of all the Net with its search engines, blogs, wikis, online newspapers, instant messaging, e-mails.
As for volleyball, volleyball matches on tv or some interesting web site or video in the Net.

All considered, although I was a little bit sceptical when Sarah explained this task, it has been a nice reflection on my “learning tools”, I had to thought about how I have learnt up till now and I obviously asked myself how I am going to go on learning because surely there are a lot of things that I still don’t know...

Wiki

The last e-tivity Sarah proposed the class, was that of contributing to a wiki: EduTech Wiki . It is a wiki about Educational Technology and related fields and was built at an educational technology research and teaching unit at University of Geneva. Everybody, after having registered, can write in the pages that already exist or create new ones. I decided to contribute to the Tagging page and in the last weeks I tried to complete it.

Last semester, during Sarah’s classes, we worked using a wiki, therefore we have already experienced this collaborative writing. There is, however, a big difference between these two wiki experiences!

The Tulanepadova was “our” wiki for some specific reasons:
- we (students and Sarah) were the only ones who could contribute to the pages,
- we all more or less knew each other and our language skills, technological experiences, “cultural” background,
- we all knew what we were supposed to do in that space,
- we always had the possibility to talk face to face in class about the e-tivities we had to do using the wiki.

On the other hand, I found some difficulties in contributing to an open wiki, such as the EduTech one, because it is very very different from our small Tulanepadova! The most important differences I found are:
- really everybody can contribute and the only way for knowing something about them is to check their profile, if they have written it,
- you don’t know what the others want to say about the topics,
- although there are some rules for the writing, not everybody follow them.

As for the editing of the pages, I didn’t feel good in changing or deleting what my peers wrote in the first semester in our wiki, and in the EduTech Wiki I found it even more difficult. If I find grammatical or typing mistakes, I will correct them, but if I think that something is wrong or inadequate, I won’t have the courage of deleting or changing it, mainly because I don’t know who wrote it (and he/she could have a greater knowledge than me about that topic!).

All considered, the world of wikis is very interesting but very dangerous as well. You can exploit the sources wikis offer you, you can contribute if you think your knowledge could be useful, but you have to pay attention both in using the information you can find in them and in writing something to develop some topics.