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.

I LOVE YOU - TUBE!

Hi group H!

I used to surf on YouTube because I find it very interesting. First of all I find some old 80s videos that I did not see since many years on Mtv. Then I find a lot of interviews of famous singers or a lot of funny videos… the videos put by our teacher are so funny! However, this is my first time I put a comment on YouTube.
This is the first time I use YouTube for university’s purposes, so I find a lot of videos that can improve our English especially in TeacherTube. The interviews themselves can help us to understand better English.
I choose to give you a video of my favourite song because I like music. The group is called Transvision Vamp, it is a pop group of the 80s and the song is called I want your love. I think the singer is very cool, she is Wendy James and I hope that you will like her way of singing and acting (she sings almost crying) and of course the song! Sorry but I can't put the video..I do not know why (may be is it too heavy???!!) I will ask to Sarah but on Monday because I am in Paris for work..sorry. I give you the URL.
Have fun!

PODCAST

Hello everybody!

I was looking for podcast and I find a lot of very interesting video documents… I did not now the mean of this word “podcast” before the English lesson (hihi) and being a little afraid of that I listened to a lot of podcasts which I found in the web. I think that there is a lot of interesting material even if the website is not only from England or USA because there are a lot of good teachers who teach English as a second language all around the world. Unfortunately, for the use of some podcasts you should be a member and so you have to register and may be to pay something.. But a lot of other podcast are free so that you can improve your English without spend money ;-) …..

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Here I am! So I surf my network in delicious and I like this social bookmarking! Yes, it’s me!!! As you know I’m quite poor with computer but this time I understand that this activity is very important and above all useful because I discovered some websites that can help my pronunciation, my grammar and of course my English. Now, I will talk about your websites, group H.
My peer Giovanna puts in delicious a website very interesting, it’s about the most used words in English. You can click on the word, for example “the” and it appears a grammar explanation with a text regarding “the”, there is an exercise where you have to fill in the gaps and at the end you can find some articles regarding the topic.
My peer Alessia puts a website regarding a glossary of linguistic terms, I think it is useful especially if you have to pass Scott’s exam…!
The website of Caterina is very fun and different to the others because you can play with English,it's a vocabulary quiz!
Roberta puts a website about a dictionary of slang, I think slang is really fascinating but I do not understand a word, so thank you Roby I hope to understand something more…
Agendaweb.org is the website, found by Stefania, which gives you a lot of exercises to improve your English.


See u tomorrow ladies!

BLOGLINES AND TECHNOLOGY

Bloglines is something useful to “aggregate” the blogs or websites you like or visit.
We use it to put together the blogs of our group’s member and to check what feeds of our group we have still not read…
I think I will improve with technology; I have to say I was quite useless at technology but now I’m trying!
I have a question; in bloglines I can read the blogs of my peers, but why can’t I leave a comment? I don’t know if it happens only to me… it seems a little bit strange because this aggregator is useful to see if there are new posts, but should I have to use the blogger site to leave a comment? Someone can give me a reply so that I understand if it happens only to me?

Thanks...