...Looking back at my PLE...

Hello people!
Well, I thought it was finished, but actually we are yet to have our finest hour:-) In fact, we have not talked about our PLE anymore, and I do agree that it might be interesting to see how it has developed during these months. So I stepped back to my oldest posts and had a look at my mindmap…The first thing I noticed was that no big changes took place, although I cannot say my PLE is exactly the same as six months ago.

If I had to draw my mindmap again, I would keep the main division between my learning at university and outside it. As I explained in class, I am convinced that what we learn at university is not enough to reach a high level in English (of course I am not saying it useless or unimportant!). Unfortunately, we usually have large numbers so if we really want to practice the language we have to do it by ourselves. I would also keep the division into the four branches which correspond to the four different abilities. They are clearly not the same so I think they should be considered independent parts of a whole. I mean, you can be very good at writing but extremely bad at speaking or vice versa. Personally, I still feel more confident in writing than in speaking or listening, although thanks to the exchange I had the chance to practice a lot ;-)

As regards my learning at university, I think that this semester the comments on my peers’ blogs did not play such a big role as in the first part of the year. Furthermore, the ‘Padova-Albany’ forum disappeared from my mindmap, or better, it was replaced by the ‘Padova-Dickinson’ forum :-)
In the section called ‘tools’ there have been no significant changes: I still use both 'bloglines' and 'delicious' and I had already been using 'Skype' for a while before starting the exchange. However, this semester I got to know other two useful tools to keep in touch with my peers and foreign friends: 'MySpace' and 'Facebook'. Another important source of learning was of course our WIKI PAGE; it was a great occasion to practice my writing skills but also my ability to work in group. I know it may sound trivial, but organizing and planning some work together with other people is something we will surely have to do in our future job… And we’d better learn to do it now since it is far from being easy :-) That is why I think that working in group has been a fundamental part of my PLE lately.

I think people still play the most important role when it comes to communicate in English in my free time. Over the last months I had the chance to ‘meet’ new foreign friends I can practice with (I am talking about my American peer as well) and I am really happy about it. As I stressed when I presented my PLE, we do need people if we want to speak the language. We must get some kind of feedback; we cannot just talk to ourselves in front of the mirror (that would not be so fun I guess!). The only possible way to improve our speaking skills is meeting non-native speakers of Italian (I know it is extremely useful to talk in English also during class with our peers, but it is quite awkward as we are all native speakers of the same language).

In the next future I hope I my mindmap will keep growing… And I am not only talking about languages. At this time next year I will be probably (and hopefully!) working…And God knows how many new things I will have to learn then…

Lately I have been thinking about the meaning of the word “learning”, and I have realized I have always associated it with school/university rather than with the world of work. No need to explain that I was quite wrong… ;-)

Ok, that’s all folks. Good luck for your exams and have a nice summer!