
Hi guys!!!!! So, the first semester is over, let's have our break!!!!!!!
I WISH EVERYBODY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW 2008!!!!!!!!!
Hi girls!
I’m so sorry for being late with my PLE but I tried more than one time to download the Free Mind software onto my computer with no positive results, an error message would always appear on the screen.:(
What’s more, I don’t have my digital camera here in
Anyway, I will describe it to you so that, for the moment, you can imagine how it looks like. I chose four categories for my PLE: people, places, context, actions.
Under the category people I put foreign friends, Erasmus students, professors, tandem peers, tourists. I often chat with my foreign friends in English even if they are not native speakers. For example, I usually meet my Egyptian friend online and we have long conversation on msn.
There are many Erasmus students here in
Regarding tandem peers I had three tandem peers during my past three years University course, one of which was a Californian girl. I think that the tandem project may be a really useful resource for learning the second language as it gives the possibility to learn with a native speaker.
I wasn’t sure whether to put or not ‘tourists’ under this category but after I realized that they contribute to create my learning environment, too. Every time I find a tourist asking me for some information in the street I can check how much I have learned about my second language and how able I am to react immediately to someone else’s requests.
Then, professors obviously come to occupy this category as they followed and still follows my learning project.
As far as places are concerned I split them into virtual and real. During our course with prof. Guth we could realize that the virtual world is going almost to substitute the real world for the great quantity of information the former can offer to us.
I divided the category ‘context’ into formal and informal. These are larger categories because they contain different tools and various ways of gathering information in the second language. Sometimes there is no clear difference between the elements of the two categories so that an overlapping occurs. For example, I use e-mails most often in an informal context but it happened to me to have used the same tool in a more formal working context. The same happens with blogs, while my is a more informal blog there are blogs on the net which are written by high learned people and where you can find materials regarding specific fields, like language learning, medicine, environment, etc.
I chose to call the forth category ‘actions’. These includes everything I do in order to improve my second language (reading, writing, memorizing, taking notes, etc.). The two most useful for me are ‘giving feedback’ and ‘writing post-it’. I think that giving feedback together with receiving them may be a very efficient way to learn from our mistakes and to test how much are we able to correct others’ mistakes.
When I come in touch with a new word, I use to write it down on a post-it and to attach it on the board above my writing table. After a week or two I check if I have learned that word and if the result is positive I throw the post-it away, otherwise I leave it attached there until I don’t memorize it.
I think that building a mindmap of our PLE can be useful to organize our own learning. I must admit that it wasn’t a simple task to do because there were many things I wanted to enclose there but can’t find the appropriate category for them.
I hope you’ll enjoy it…
Bye bye
Hi everybody!!!!! Just to let you know that I'm exhausted because I've been sitting in front of the pc since two hours and at the end of my work all my post content disappeared. Wow great, I'm very lucky today!!!!! So, let's begin it for the second time... No technological tool to comment about this time....:( Anyway, I think that evaluating an online source is very important since we are always faced with a huge quantity of information and can’t expect all of them to be reliable.
I first met the difficulty of evaluating a website when I had to write my paper for the University degree. I wrote it all in English and it was about Tandem learning so my whole bibliography laws in English. At the beginning I was discouraged by the fact that I couldn’t find the author of a great number of articles which gave me important ideas on the topic of my interest. The were often articles published online but without a precise origin, which might have been for example a well-known newspaper or organization. Then, my supervisor suggested me some tips to follow for a good research and step by step, after a hard work I got it.
I, myself, usually concentrate the attention on the title of an online source to see if it may meet my content needs. But, I soon realized that most of the time titles are there to catch readers’ attention and in the end they don’t satisfy your expectations.
The author is undoubtedly an important element for judging an online source. Many times this may be anonymous or may not appear so, as suggested in the articles I read, it is useful to investigate what we know about the organization which might have substituted the author. In this way we may test the credibility of the source. Furthermore, an aid is offered usually by the small word ‘edu’ which appears together with the URL and identifies the sponsoring institution as an educational institution. This is especially useful when we are supposed to do an academic research and the data must obviously be of extreme credibility.
I usually tend to believe to newspapers articles and online news, when I’m supposed to make a research. But, reading the articles suggested, I realized that also here we must pay attention on the quality of information given. Sometimes, newspapers can be very one-sided and try to persuade people with their own truth with no acknowledgements of others viewpoints.
A thing I leave out when judging an online source is the date. I make a mistake here because it is fundamental to know when the site was last updated in order to avoid to take out very old pieces of information.
In the end I would mention the look of the source. In my opinion the structure, the content, the context, completeness and accuracy of information has undoubtedly a great role in evaluating a web source. It is surely more reliable a source containing a list of references or citations that look as if they will lead you to related material that would be good sources. In this way you have a further proof of the seriousness and credibility of the content proposed.
On the other side, when I have to evaluate a source which is not related with academic writing, let’s imagine YouTube videos I click on just for fun, I particularly pay attention on peer rating. The stars showing people’s preferences for a video or another are really not to be left out if we don’t want to waste our time in watching nonsense.
In the end I would say that in our information age, where we are bombard by an enormous number of information we should be critical and know how to sift them in the more appropriate way in order to meet our purposes.
The first is really a helpful site because it offers a possibility to listen at different kind of conversation and at different levels of difficulty. There are many exercises related comprehension. The site is easy to manage because the different kinds of conversation are divided into topics so that you may easily chose the topic which is of your interest and in which you know you must improve, for example learning more vocabulary.