Hi guys!!!!! So, the first semester is over, let's have our break!!!!!!!
I WISH EVERYBODY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW 2008!!!!!!!!!

My own way of learning

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 Padua and I have to wait for a friend of mine to borrow me hers. I hope to attach the picture of my mind map till tomorrow evening!

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 Padua; it happens to me that sometimes I meet them in a bar or in the square (some of them are my roommate friends) and enjoy my free time exchanging my experiences with them.

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