My personal learning environment

My personal learning environment is very various. The first distinction I can made is about formal and informal instruction.

The formal instruction has two categories work and education.
What I mean for the category of education is books I have to read to pass the exams, courses I have to attend, when I have to speak in English with my professors and colleagues.
I put as formal education even my job, because sometimes I help my mother in the office or in the fair and I speak in English with the customers.

The informal instruction is divided in three categories: people, media and entertainment.
Interacting with people is the first category. For example it happens to meet some tourist in the streets and to give them some instructions for a place or to meet someone in a pub and to start a conversation with them, or to talk with Erasmus students, to travel around the world.
The second category is media. Sometimes I watch the television in English, in la7 channel the news of CNN are transmitted. I listen to the radio, I think it is English radio and I like to listen to the speaker and see if I understand the conversation. I like to read English review, journal and newspaper and I think that the language of gossip review is very interesting and difficult to understand. The web is a tool that I used also before our second year English course, but this course helps me to use the web in other different way: I do not know what are podcast, now I know that it could be a new way to improve my English I like YouTube, and also delicious is very good to find material online.
The third category is entertainment. I listen to a lot of music in original language and interview online and not online, movies and only one or two times I went to the theatre in original English language.

I can say this is my personal learning environment but I do not know how to download Freemind and put my scheme…

LOOKING FOR GOOD SOURCES

It is not easy to find all the information you need about a theme. In the website of the university of Essex it is said that some problems can arise (the web material change daily, the name of the author sometimes felt, it is difficult to locate the text in the exact part of the web page, the information of the web addresses are sometimes cumbersome; but there are some solutions (you can put the date you make the access, you use the smallest unit of responsibility, you can write the heading and use a footnote). However I think that these solutions are not definitive, something sometimes is missing compared to a book bibliography.
The second URL speaks about the quantity of information of the web. Sometimes there too much things and other times the quality is not good, so you are obliged to evaluate the sources.
The third website has some questions regarding the evaluation of sources. It gives importance to the publisher of information and to check the credentials and affiliations of the website. The third and fourth points are the date of the sources, which clearly should be updated and the information should be authentic. The last thing is the point of view of who gives the information.
All these are very good criteria which I can use for my research. I think the most important thing is the website: obviously for my thesis I will use web sites of English and American universities… because the writer should be an expert of the theme. The second thing is the date of the text, because the opinions may change so rapidly, so the website must be updated.
I think all these criteria useful because I write a lot of times in my previous posts that I feel lost in the big world web… but I consider these two things the more useful.