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.

YouTube

YouTube “is a popular free video sharing website - founded in Febraury 2005 - which lets users upload, view, and share video clips Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site while registered users have the ability to upload an unlimited number of videos. Related videos, determined by the title and tags, appear to the right of the video” (from Wikipedia).

It is a great source where you can find almost everything: movie and TV clips, music videos, but also amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. Though the extraordinary amount of material the website offers, you can use YouTube for many aims, both professional and personal ones; you can look for something useful but also for something that simply make you laugh.

As for those who study languages, as we are, it is interesting because you esily find videos which describe the different cultures you’re interested in and you can listen to native speakers who talk about the most different topics as well. But I think that the most important possibility to be exploited by these kind of visitors of YouTube is that of keeping in touch with the various aspects of nations and people.

If you have some time to spend in the net, it is probably one of the websites which offers you the largest range of material to explore! Have fun!

I believe I can fly...

It's too funny!!!

Bloglines

During the last class with Sarah, I discovered how she can control when we write new posts in our blogs without going crazy. It is a new (for me!) way of surfing the net and checking new information from your favourite websites and blogs: the aggregators such as Bloglines!

An aggregator is a programme (a software or an online resource) which collects all the updates from those sites you subriscrived to and presents them in a list to make it easy for you to check your favourite sources.

After having registered in Bloglines, you can add all the syndication feeds of the websites you click most frequently (if they offer you this possibility!), and organize them into playlists, to make your life even simplier!

I think it is a very useful resource to waste less time in front of the pc, so that every website should have feeds to help their affectionate visitors, giving them the possibility of creating a unique information space or, as Wikipedia states, a "personal newspaper."

Social bookmarking

This week I’ve discovered a new way to exploit the net: there’s a website where you can easily find sites or blogs that deal with a particular topic and meanwhile you can share your favorite web sources. I’m talking about del.icio.us!

In this site you can explore the net thanks to the tags people use to describe their favourite sites and blogs, really a very useful mean to organize the great amount of material that exists in the web. And if you find something interesting worth of being suggested to other people, you can save it, introducing the url with a small description where you describe it and deciding its tags. I think everybody registered in del.icio.us should include this two lines comment in order to help the other visitors in their choices, otherweise there wouldn’t be any difference with Google!

To tell the truth, there’s a big difference between del.icio.us and Google: the first one selects the sites looking at their tags, the keywords found by people to define the topics of their favourite sources, whereas the second one offers its visitors a list of sites or blogs which simply contain the word you’re looking for, often suggesting sources that has little to do with the topic you’re interested in, simply trapping you in a long list of unuseful sources.

In the last days I chose 5 bookmarks about languages and English learning; among these I found Word Spy, it explores new words that come out from newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, giving a definition and an example citation of them... really very very interesting and useful!
Then, I looked at those sources chose by the others... Here’s the list of the sites that drew my attention and interest.

First, what we’re doing now... blogging:
- Blogging for Beginners: ProBlogger Blog Tips: Darren Rowse gives tips regarding the structure, form, and content of a blog and answers to frequent and common problems of people who start on blogging.

Then, three sites about the English language itself, its words and their use:
- English as a Second Language Glossary of Idiomatic English Expressions : a glossary of idiomatic Eglish expressions;
- Common Errors in English: the website gives a very accurate list of words that causes misunderstandings, explaining their origin and their correct use;
- The Best of British - The American's guide to speaking British...: a funny site which explains many differences in using American and British English.

Two sites more with tips for improving our oral and written skills:
- Sound intelligent, powerful, polished, articulate, and confident: Carol Fleming gives some suggestions to improve public speaking and presentation skills;
- How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily: a website which explains how to write in a simple but effective way through some slides, giving also tips for learning stategies.

Three sites that deal with our learning experience:
- Learn languages with FriendsAbroad : a language learning and language exchange web site that allows you to meet people around the world to help each other practice your languages;
- Teachit's English teaching resources many teachers offer general information, suggestions and materials about English teaching and learning;
- Open Culture: iTunes - Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection: here you can listen to some foreign lessons podcasts or download them to the iPod.

And finally...some tips for the future:
- About: Job searching: the site gives tips about how to write a successful CV.

Thanks for all the important sources bookmarked in del.icio.us!

My first two weeks of blogging

Before starting the English lessons with Sarah, I simply knew that something called “blog” existed, I had a vague idea of what these “blogs” were but I had never used them, nor thought about the possibility to create my own blog! In these two weeks I've understood what they actually are and how much they can be useful and interesting.

The big world of blogs is a labyrinth: you start your search looking for something specific but you don’t know where are you going and what you’re going to find. Before finding the information you’re looking for, you surely have to visit many blogs that seem to deal with your topic, but actually talk about something totally different! This is the impression I got with my first approach to this world...

However, if you’re lucky, you can easily find “your” blog: a collection of posts which gives you everything you want to know about that particular topic, giving you also the possibility to comment these posts and contact their authors. A very good chance to improve your knowledge and experience!

While surfing the net from one blog to another, I realized that the language used by bloggers is not the formal and specific one you find in the web sites. It is mostly informal and colloquial, slang and spoken expressions are frequent, particularly in comments. In creating my personal blog, I’m going to improve my written skills, but the language I have to face reading the others’ posts is more similar to the spoken rather than the written one.

This new experience is going to be very important first because it’s teaching me how to exploit the possibilities of the net, secondly because it’s influencing my language learning thanks to the new kind of English I’m going to deal with.

(Photo from Flickr)