PLE - Personal Learning Environment

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PLE - Personal Learning Environment

When I heard this acronym I did not know its meaning nor its usefulness. But soon I realized that it meant once more to sit down and reflect; this time on on my learning habits, both formal and informal. I never realized that my way of learning covers so a wide range of sources - I actually learn from many online tools (Wikipedia, online newsapapers, sites of music, youtube) that are much more easy to handle and faster to respond my requests. The map I developed with a software called FreeMind (it seemed more difficult to use than it actually was :)!) summarizes my actual way of learning; even though, I think that it will soon need to be updated because things are changing so fast recently! I divided it into six main groups - tools, physical space, reflection, people, travelling and formal learning - and then added pieces of information to each one. And the more I thought about it the more I added. It was amazing!

On the whole, learning is a lifelong process because you never really stop acquiring and the way I prefer is listening to music, watching movies and interacting with people, rather than spending a lot of time on books trying to widen my knowledge.

WIKI

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During the course Edutech and Pbwiki have been two different kinds of collaborative writing. Collaborative writing means that many people work on the same web page by adding, modifying and removing information. We did it for educational purposes as we were supposed to learn using new tools and do an exchange with students of Tulane University in New Orleans.

The tulanepadova.pbwiki.com was both a language and a cultural exchange because we wrote posts in Italian and our peers answered in English; moreover, we created pages to show them our surroundings and our culture so that we could make comparisons. We had to follow some rules but on the whole we wrote about personal experiences and knowledge so it was not that difficult. Knowing that only our classmates and our American peers were going to have a look at them made it an interesting and a fruitful experience.

On the contrary, EduTech was very different. It is a public wiki by the University of Geneva focused on educational technology. When working on it we had to follow strict rules – on editing and copyright – and search the net for relevant information. This was the most difficult part because I knew few things about the topic – news feed aggregator – I chose to edit with Alida. This time I felt more free to cut and modify parts I did not like; because being a page that everybody can browse it should be well organized, precise and selective in content so that users can get what they want.

On the other hand, the pages on Pbwiki had a personal touch I did not like to change because people have different mental schemes so I just added some sentences here and there without reorganizing the whole page - I did it once and the following day it was as before! On the news feed aggregator page I made corrections of spelling and grammatical mistakes as there were many and I added the description to the Farmer’s model as it was not so clear – as my classmates suggested. This model was added by DSchneider – the administrator of EduTech – whose edit was useful but incomplete. This is the way that collaborative writing works… People give suggestions and others develop them! And it is very easy as Pbwiki's ad says: "Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich".

YOUTUBE - 1

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I heard about youtube from the news because of the content of some videos - such as violence, pornography and sex - but I never browsed the site. This free service, like many others on the net, is very useful if people use it appropriately because you can watch videos, movies, singers performing on stage, cartoons, past live events, make irony of politicians... I had a lot of fun in searching videos because I could listen to native speakers and it only took me a click of the mouse! I think that the main problem is the lack of regulation as everybody can upload them.

Net regulation is one of the most discussed issues nowadays and net industry has not drawn a conclusion yet because there are too many interconnecting factors coming into play. Think about the collision of national and local regulations all over the world, people's anonymity when publishing, difficulties in checking pages being published every second... I think that there will be no solutions or, better said, there will be an end to regulation.

What do you think about this topic?

YOUTUBE - 2

Do you know Stewie Griffin?!?! I think he is great!

He is the breakout character of the Family Guy show. He is Machiavellian and evil in whatever he does. This is probably due to the fact that his mother used to smoke marijuana while pregnant with him. Stewie is not a child like the others because he does things adults do and there are so many aspects to investigate about him - e.g. his intelligence, his ambiguous sexuality, the fact that he seems constantly carrying a firearm ... But that's not all... You can get more on youtube where you can watch some episodes. I chose two for you - the first one gives you an idea of the character and the second one is connected to actual topics... Enjoy them!!!

Annoying Stewie


Rocket man - Stewie and Elton John

HAPPY EASTERN TO ALL MY VISITORS!!!

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WEB AGGREGATORS

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You might be wondering why I chose this picture for introducing our e-tivity of the week. As I have already told you I am not very good with computers but when I am given the task of exploring new tools I get curious about them and start playing around - the way children do! I love to be astonished by new things because you never really stop learning. That's why I sometimes go into trouble... Some days ago I modified a word on the post I had already published and when I checked it your comments where no longer there, even though on 'my hidden page' I can see that you left 8 comments but I cannot get them back. I looked for FAQs about blogs on del.icio.us. but my search was not successful up to now. Maybe you can help me but I fear I lost them :(

So you might understand why I hope that web aggregators, such as bloglines, are going to be the last tool we are exploring. An aggregator allows you to monitor all feeds you saved and check their updates instead of opening every single site. This means that you are going to spare huge amounts of time especially if you need to check often for updates, e.g. because you are monitoring markets, checking student's homework, your friend's blogs and so on. What I did was adding all classmates to my feeds and create my playlist. Now I am using it in the course but being the tool userfriendly I will use it for personal purposes too. Moreover, it is up to you to decide if you want the software installed on your computer or not. I think that online versions are really good because you can look for updates from every computer and spare memory on your pc, which is very important to me because my computer is not powerful at all! All I said is possible due to RSS (Really Simple Syndacation), which is the format used by web aggregators, that allows you to check frequently updated content such as blogs, podcasts and news feeds. (That's why it appeared at the bottom of the blog!)

Hope to hearing from you soon!
alexandra

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

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I love bookmarks - real ones I mean! I have never considered collecting them but I should as I own a great huge! When I read the e-tivity of the week I did not know what social bookmarking did mean that's why I started surfing the net in order to get more information about it. So I learnt that it is a very useful and popular tool that allows you to store, classify and share sites you think are interesting or you might have difficulty finding again. Moreover, social bookmarking is more selective than search engines like google because people have already evaluated the sites!

One of the most well-known social bookmarking websites is del.icio.us. - a quite easy site to browse although it took me some time to get used to it because I am not very good with computers! Once you signed in you can search the information you need by typing keywords - called tags - and look around if some sites match your request. As all the sites show how many people saved them on their favorites you can easily assess their reliability.

But what is more is that social bookmarking has several advantages. First of all you do not need your own browser as you can get your bookmarks from everywhere - home, school, office. Second you can create your network where you can add people's names who might have found sites you really like. Third the whole website is userfriendly so it won't take you too much time to get used to it!

Some sites that might help you with your English are: language teaching, slang, listening, writing, pronunciation, essay writing, meeting friends online, misunderstandings
I wrote some notes on them that you can check on del.icio.us.

alexandra