PLE (Personal Learning Environment)

Hello people!

Well, here comes another “e-tivity” which does not involve technologies…;-)

This time we are supposed to reflect on what we do to learn foreign languages and what tools we use to improve our skills…Apparently rather easy, right? That was exactly what I thought as I read Sarah’s post, but then I soon realized the task was not simple at all.

Although brain storming, mindmaps and keywords were not new to me, I had never been asked to explain how I organize my personal learning. That is actually quite difficult since it is not just a matter of education; I think that basically you can learn in thousand different ways, so summing up this complicated process can be really challenging…

Anyway, let’s give it a try… ;-) Just click here to see how I developed my PLE mindmap

As you can see, there is a first division between what I do at university and what I do outside it; this is quite important as I think our personal “everyday” learning is essential if we really want to improve…No need to say that three hours per week are not enough to get a thorough knowledge of a foreign language…Well, probably a whole life is not enough :-)
Another thing I wanted to stress on my mindmap is that learning a language involves four abilities which all have the same weight. Our educational system tends to focus more on grammar and writing; especially when I was at the high school I often had the impression that “writing coherent texts without mistakes” was what “learning a foreign language” was all about. I am not saying writing is not important, I am saying it is NOT the only thing we should be able to do if we want to master a language. If we cannot understand when other people talk (most of all native speakers) or if it takes us five minutes to get a sentence out of our mouth, we will never be able to communicate effectively.

The problem is that listening and speaking are difficult to practice if we do not live abroad; we can write or read on our own, but for listening and speaking we do need other people. Actually, now we have much more exposure to foreign languages thanks to DVDs, satellite dishes and podcasts…So we have plenty of chances to listen to some English (or German, Spanish, French…), but unfortunately for speaking we still need an interlocutor :-)
That is why I think listening and speaking are my “weak points”; lately I have been trying to concentrate as much as possible on them, especially when I learn on my own. To stress the importance of these two abilities, on my mindmap I put a yellow icon next to them.
Traveling and communicating with foreign friends are the best ways for me to practice languages; the tools I use for this aim are basically Skype (it enables me to make free calls all around the world!) and MSN (the most famous chat program).

I would like to spend a few words about those technologies which help me organize the material I need for my learning. I must say I got to know them (Bloglines and Del.icio.us) during the course and their biggest advantage is that thanks to them you can access your favorite blogs and websites from any computer. They just make your life easier, don’t they? ;-)
In my PLE mindmap I also made a list of the tools I use to check my work when I write something in a foreign language. Some of them (like grammar books and dictionaries) are more “traditional”, whereas others are based on computer technology (advanced searches and spell checkers).
Advanced searches enable us to narrow the number of pages we usually come up with on the Web; if we apply the criteria Sarah told us we can make sure we get material written by educated native speakers. That is quite useful when we have doubts about concordances (verb-preposition, noun-verb, adjective-noun and so on).
Spell checkers are also very helpful when we type something…I always write my posts and comments in “Word” and then I copy and paste them on my blog…It is the best way to avoid silly spelling mistakes ;-)

Ok, I hope this was clear enough…Anyway, you will have the chance to ask me whatever you want tomorrow in class :-)

Have a nice Sunday!
BYE

Judging Online Sources

Hello people!!!

Well, after seven “e-tivities” in which we were supposed to take a trip through the big world of technology and explore new tools, here comes a reflective post…I must say I am quite happy, I really needed a break from registering and subscribing to different websites and blogs ;-)

There is no doubt that the Internet has become an important part of my life in these last years; it enables me not only to communicate with my friends who live far from me, but also to find a lot of information about anything just by sitting in my room. Of course I am talking about my academic life as well; when I wrote my “bachelor” thesis the Web played a fundamental role in my research (and I am sure this was your case, too). So I am quite used to judge the sources of the material I come across, but actually I have always done it unconsciously without thinking much about the specific criteria I use. Nevertheless, this is far from being just a trivial issue since (as we realized in these two months) you basically find ANY kind of stuff online, no matter if good or bad. For example, I got to know that some professors do not even want us to use the Net as a source of material for our final dissertation. Is that because they are skeptical about the information we find online? Or are they just traditionalist and still prefer the good old books? Well, maybe they fear we copy and paste everything from the websites instead of producing an original piece of work… :-D
Anyway, if I had to list the most important criteria I follow when I do a research online, this would be my idea:

1. Who is the page written by? Who is/are the author/the authors of the essay/article I am reading?
2. How is the page written? Are there any grammar or spelling mistakes? Is the author a native speaker of the language the page is written in?
3. How many people have visited the page so far? (If it possible to see it) When there is the chance for visitors to leave comments (like for example a forum), what are their impressions about the website?
4. How long ago was the page written? Is it regularly updated?
   

When I clicked on the links Sarah suggested to us, I noticed that apart from the third point (the one about the visitors’ opinion) all my clues have been mentioned on the three websites. Other useful things to keep in mind are looking at the first part of the URL (most of the times it tells you where the info comes from) and considering the author’s point of view. I had not thought about this, but it is true that sometimes his/her ideas and biases can influence the content quite strongly.
So I would add these two things to the list I made before; and of course these criteria should be followed not only when searching for material online, but also when consulting any other kind of source.

I hope I gave you some interesting cues for discussion, I am looking forward to reading your posts.

See you on Monday!

YouTube

Hi there!

How are you all? Today I am going to talk about a very famous tool we explored in the lab on Wednesday…It has been the last one we introduced this semester… Ladies and gentlemen, here comes YouTube!!!
Thank God this time I cannot say I had never heard about it before; I visit this website regularly and my mail box is often full with messages containing links to funny videos placed there. Anyway, I had never thought to register, probably because I was just interested in watching the videos rather than in posting them.
I am not going to spend many words on the videos Sarah put online for the “e-tivity 7” as I have already left my comments in the forum; I would just like to say we have a lot to learn from them, and of course I am not only talking about the language :-)

The impressions I had clicking around on YouTube are more or less the same as those I had when we explored the blogosphere, flickr and del.icio.us.: this website is a huge container filled with loads of material!! And unfortunately, good stuff is not always easy to spot.
Nevertheless, I am sure YouTube can be useful to improve my language skills since it can be a great chance to listen to some English. It can also help me learn how to do some things I am not familiar with…I am thinking for example about those videos Sarah put on our course blog to guide us through “Bloglines”: I could not go to the lesson in the lab that day, so those videos were simply vital to me ;-)
However, as is well known, on YouTube you also find pretty silly stuff, like those videos taken with mobiles by students (or should we say "baby-gangs"?) during the lessons. I think one of the negative sides of this website is that you can post almost everything you want there, which means also a lot of rubbish. So you'd better watch out and always be critical!

I was just wondering…Thanks to YouTube some weeks ago the German police managed to prevent a school-massacre; the two guys who had planned it had posted a video where they explained their intentions. If this website had not existed, maybe nobody would have found out what was about to happen.

I often ask myself why videos have become so fashionable lately…A couple of years ago nobody would have cared about them. And I also ask myself which role everyone’s right to privacy plays in websites like YouTube (IF it actually plays a role); I mean, if someone films me and then puts the video online without my permission, can they be prosecuted if I report them?

I was quite happy when Sarah introduced us this tool, though. So far I have been surfing through YouTube just for fun and I have never thought about it as an alternative way to improve my English. I guess I will keep an eye on it to see if I find something interesting and helpful (the I-Rack video was simply awesome!)

Ok, I hope it was not too long this time :-)

See you all in class!

Eleonora

Video-Bohemian Rhapsody-

Hello you guys!
Well, as you can see I decided to follow Sarah’s suggestion and I posted a video on my blog. At the beginning I could not do it as I had not understood how to do it…Sorry, it takes me a bit to get into these things :-) But at the end everything worked out!
Unfortunately, the video I chose has nothing to do with language learning…I hope it will be fine the same :-/ A friend of mine sent me this link some time ago…There you will see a man playing music with his hands. This song was written by Queen, it is pretty old but quite famous though, so probably it will not be the first time you hear this melody :-)

The guy is a phenomenon, on YouTube you can find many videos where he plays other songs…I am still wondering how on earth he can produce these sounds…And, most of all, can he really do that? On the Net you will never know if something is real or just a fake…;-)

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy it!

BYE!

Podcasts

Hello everybody! How are you all?

Well, this week we have learnt what podcasts are (this was actually quite a new word for me) and I must say “e-tivity 6” was the one I liked the most so far. Last year we did a lot of writing exercises so now I am happy to have the possibility to focus more on my listening skills; that is why I usually try to jump at every chance I get to listen to stuff in English… And podcasts are really helpful in this sense :-)
Anyway, it was not easy to find interesting material; it took me a little bit of time to choose three good links it was worth sharing with you… I hope you will enjoy them ;-)

• Business English Pod -Job interview
  This podcast is taken from a very well-structured website about business English. There you can find grammar tips, vocabulary exercises and most of all podcasts about different situations you normally have to deal with when you work. So the files are not strictly about business but also about traveling, job interviews, presentations and much more.
  If you click on the link I put here you can listen to a very good example of job interview. I particularly liked it because it is not too simple (so it was pretty a good challenge to try to understand it well!) and also because it contains a lot of words which might be useful for us in the future. We are all going to have a job interview one day or another… And it could be in English… Who knows? ;-) I think it is always worth having an idea of how we should behave when we apply for a job and these podcasts are very helpful in this way.
  Before you click on the link you can also read a brief summary of what the listening is about, so that you can understand the content better.

• Englishfeed -President Bush and English
  This is another fantastic website I found on del.icio.us. Here there are plenty of funny podcasts you can listen to when you are a little bit down… They will surely cheer you up! The one I want to suggest shows President Bush’s tendency to make up new words when he cannot express himself properly during his speeches… ;-) I can assure you it is simply awesome! Anyway, it was not so easy to understand (at least for me); as we are not native speakers we do not know if these expressions are just idioms or if they actually do not exist in English. Fortunately, those who put these files online were aware of this problem... They wrote a kind of glossary where they explained the meaning of every “bushism” :-) That really helped! Finally, another big advantage of this website is that you can also watch videos.

• Better at English -IM slang is invading everyday English
  In this website you can find interesting files about how the spoken language has changed through the years. The podcast I chose deals with a very widespread tendency, that is the massive use of abbreviations (taken from the Instant Messaging slang) which American youths make when they speak. The file’s title caught my attention straightaway since we had already talked about that in class with Sarah a couple of weeks ago. The most popular abbreviations are “jk” (just kidding), “lol” (laughing out loud) or “rotfl” (rolling on the floor laughing). I knew that young people often use them when they chat, but I did not know they were so common in speaking as well!

As you have probably already understood I think podcasts are a great way to improve our listening skills. I guess everyone of us would like to do a lot of things during the day, but unfortunately the problem is that often we do not have enough time. But we do not need to spend hours in front of our computer to listen to these files, we can just download them and listen to them while we are on the bus or simply when we have time. Anyway, the biggest advantage is that they are FREE! I really hope that we will also be able to find free material and sources online in the future… That is the main gist of the Net, isn’t it? ;-)

See you soon and sorry for this endless post :-)

BYE!

..."del.icio.us"... ;-)

Hi everybody!

How are you doing? I hope you had fun searching for blogs and websites about English…I really did :-)
As soon as I read the text of “e-tivity 5” I felt just like last week with “e-tivity 4”, which means quite disoriented and worried; but in the end everything turned out to be quite simple…Well, I am getting more and more confident with these technologies, isn’t that GREAT??? ;-)

I think “del.icio.us” is another useful tool I had never heard about before; it allows us to make a list of the websites we are mostly interested in and to share them with the members of our network. This is the big advantage of “social bookmarking“: you create a sort of “community” where you can exchange ideas and links with other people. It is a good example of how you can interact on the Web with someone who has your same interests. I also liked the possibility to narrow the search field by searching for blogs and websites only on “del.icio.us”: in this way you do not get so many results as you would do if you searched on the whole Net.

This time we were supposed to find web pages about English learning or subject matters we study; I noticed that most of us focused on English, especially on slang, proverbs and idiomatic expressions. Almost all of my peers (me included) chose at least one website which has to do with listening and pronunciation exercises; for example, in my group K there are three of us who chose “Lello”, a very well-structured website that can really help us improve our understanding skills.
So I guess the majority of us concentrated on this ability because it is the most difficult one to exercise if you do not live in an English-speaking environment…Nevertheless, we all agree it is extremely important to be able to understand as much as possible when native speakers talk… :-)
Many of us also chose the “BBC Learning English Homepage”; I think this is one of the best ways to learn English online and to test your improvements. I got to know this site since someone suggested it in “e-tivity 1” and I find it fantastic…And it seems I am not the only one who thinks so!

My first impression is that most students picked websites which are more or less similar; however, some people’s choices reflect their specific interests. For example, I put a website about Business English among my favorites, while Enrico chose a website about philosophy, which I liked a lot as it explained quite complicated matters with simple words. Nina also has a link to a page about psychology and to a great website where you can listen to narrations taken from books…That really impressed me, I never thought it would exist something similar.
One last thing: I asked myself if in “del.icio.us.“ you can organize your links into different folders as in “Bloglines”…Well, I do not think so (but I might be wrong...) and I must say it is a real shame :-( Of course thanks to tags you can filter the information as well, but…It is not the same anyway!

Ok, see you soon!
BYE

My impressions of feed aggregartors

Hi Group K!

How are you all? Are you enjoying these few days off?? :-)
In this post I am supposed to express my opinion about feed aggregators...I must say I find this task easier than the others we did before! Maybe you are asking yourselves why…Well, this time we do not need to use our imagination, nor we have to spend hours on the Net searching for blogs…the question we should answer to is quite simple: do we think feed aggregators are useful or not? Do we consider them good tools?

First of all, I must confess I have never heard about RSS feeds before; I did not know what they were and I had no idea of their advantages. As soon as I read the text of “e-tivity 4”, I started feeling a little bit worried since all the process seemed pretty complex to me (unfortunately, I was not in the lab on Wednesday). I said to myself: “How on earth am I gonna make it??” :-) But after reading all the instructions and watching the video, everything became clearer: the single steps were explained in a very detailed way, so I tried and I realized it was not so difficult after all.

I was rather surprised when I saw what these tools were able to do! I find feeds extremely useful…you just go to “Bloglines”, you log in and can subscribe to every blog or website you want; every time these pages are updated, you receive a kind of “notification”, so you do not waste time going to every blog to see if there are new posts. Isn’t that GREAT??!!??
I also liked the possibility of creating folders where you can order all the websites you subscribed to; in this way it is easier to find what you look for. At the moment I have got 4 folders: one for my Group K, one for my ex-Group G, one for other interesting blogs and one for online newspapers.

I really think feed aggregators will surely help me organize the work we do in the course, and I might find them useful in the future as well. So…I am rather happy as I learnt something new! ;-)

Finally, I would like to say it is a pity that some websites do not have feeds. I wanted to subscribe to our faculty’s page and I could not… :-(

Ok, these are my impressions. I look forward to reading yours!
BYE!

Should Halloween be imported to Italy or not?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN PEOPLE!!!

One of the tasks we have to do for next week is giving our opinion about this famous American holiday, which in the last few years has become quite popular here as well. There are different points of view about Halloween: young people seem to love it and they celebrate it, while "traditionalists" are basically against it as they say it does not belong to our culture and history.Who is right? Good question...

On the one hand, it is true that Halloween never existed here until the end of the 90's (when I was a child I did not even know what it was); on the other hand, I like it because ghosts, spooks and vampires have always fascinated me :-)

Since I am in Group K, I am supposed to pretend to be totally against it during the debate which is going to take place in class on Monday. Before starting to think about some good clues to defend this point of view, here are a couple of details about Halloween’s origins and history:

"Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).
The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the New Year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.
During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-Hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas."

(taken from http://www.history.com/minisites/halloween/)

As you can read in the extract, Halloween takes its origins from a Celtic festival, which has absolutely nothing to do with our traditions. So, why should we celebrate it? Moreover, today Halloween is a North-American holiday more than a European one…We import a lot of things from the States: clothes, food, technologies, movies…Is it now necessary to import their holidays as well?? It sounds quite nonsense. There are lots of festivals around the world we do not care about…And many people in the world do not care about ours! If we celebrate Halloween, why do we not celebrate St.Patrick’s day, either??? I do not think we should import Halloween to Italy just because it comes from America! This holiday would lose all its meaning here because we do not consider it an important part of our culture...It would be just fashion or a sad result of the globalization process.

PS: That is not exactly what I really think about Halloween…Actually, I dressed up as a witch yesterday! ;-) In spite of this, there is some truth in what I wrote before. Well OK, we will discuss it on Monday, I hope this post will give us some useful cues anyway :-)

See you soon!

My presentation (from "e-tivity 1")

Hi everybody!

My name is Eleonora and I am 23 years old. I started studying English when I was 11 and after the high school I decided to continue to improve my language skills here at university. In my free time I like traveling, jogging, watching movies and going out with my friends.
Actually, it was rather difficult to find an image which represents me, but in the end I chose the picture of a tiger. I think that this animal embodies some important aspects of my personality, since I can be quite contemplative (as this beautiful tiger looks on “Flickr”) but at the same time also very determined and strong when I set myself a goal. Orange and black are two of my favorite colors as well…they really make a wonderful contrast together… :-)

Click on the following word to see the image: Tiger

Here are some other links I would like to share with you:

• Google: you surely know this famous page...I think this search engine works very well and it is quite helpful when you look for information…I’ve always managed to find everything I needed using it. I also recommend that you create yourselves a Gmail account; this service is very efficient because it organizes all the emails you exchange with the same person in a sort of “conversation”, and that makes it easier for you to find the exact message you want.


• Ryanair: this is another website I visit quite often. I like traveling a lot, so I try to jump at every chance I get to visit new places or friends who live abroad. I traveled many times with “Ryanair” and I have always been satisfied as the prices are very competitive and the flights usually on time.


• Rugby World Cup: here is the official website of the Rugby World Cup which is now taking place in France. I started learning more about this sport last spring, when some friends of mine and I followed Italy’s success in the tournament called “Six Nations”. Although it may not seem so, this sport is very fair and both the players and the supporters of different teams usually show great respect for each other. Unfortunately, the matches are only broadcast on pay-tv, so I have been visiting this page quite often lately since it is the best way for me to see how the tournament is going on. I think it is a real pity that interesting sports like rugby, volleyball, basketball or swimming have no place on Italian television and newspapers.

That is all for now, I hope to hear from you soon!
Eleonora

PS: Thanks to Elena and Anna for the suggestions...I hope it is better now ;-)

My first impressions

HELLO GUYS FROM GROUP G!!

Well, as I said before, this is my first experience with blogs. Although I already knew what "blogs" were and how they worked, I had never thought about the function they might have in the learning process.
In my opinion now it is still too early to say whether blogs can really help us improve our language skills or not, but during these two weeks I realized that this new approach does have its advantages:

• First of all, I noticed that blogs enable me to work with everyday English, which is something new for me as we usually deal with formal academic English here at university; I think this is a good opportunity to learn useful vocabulary and idiomatic expressions that often occur in informal conversations.


• Both the course blog and our personal blog are an easy and quick way to communicate, which is something quite difficult to achieve as there are so many of us. Through the blog we have the chance to express ourselves and to read our peers' posts and comments.


• The course also gives us the possibility to learn more about the Web and other Internet technologies.

I am sure that blogs can be good tools to improve our writing skills since they need to be updated often...so the more we write on the blog, the more we practice.. :-)
I also think that reading other people's comments is an useful comprehension exercise...in the messages we might find terms we do not know or expressions we are not familiar with; when you learn a foreign language vocabulary is maybe the most important part..how can you speak and understand what other people say if you do not know the words??

Unfortunately, through blogs we do not have the chance to “hear” spoken English…this is actually something fundamental for me; the more you listen to native speakers, the better is for your pronunciation and intonation. It is also the only exercise we can do to improve our understanding skills (I personally find English quite difficult to understand when it is spoken quickly and with lots of idioms).

During these two first weeks of blogging I realized that the blogosphere is something HUGE which contains a lot of different information about EVERY topic. It is really easy to “get lost” in it, so when you start surfing through it make sure you are free for at least the next two hours.. :-) One of the main pros of blogs is that they give the possibility to communicate and exchange opinions with people from all over the world…Just a few years ago this was something impossible you could have never even imagined.
I guess that the most difficult thing when you work with blogs is to distinguish which blogs are reliable and which ones are not…in the blogosphere there is simply TOO MUCH stuff to think that all of it is good! I am sure that only experience can help in this way...

Ok, that is all for now, let me know if you agree with me :-)

BYE!
Eleonora