GOOD BYE PROF. GARFIELD

Just a few notes to say good bye to Prof. Garfield...a great teacher and a pleasant person..I remenber his lessons...I met him when I was at my first year of university..I remenber his sweet eyes and his ironic smile..-I couldn't believe that something so absurd happened to such a great person...I can only express my grief to his family.

Hope you're doing fine up there, Prof. Garfield!

holidays!

holidays...finally!

I know many of you are leaving soon..where are you going? Don't forget to let me know so that I can add your accomodations for other travellers!

Next week I'm going to try Lienz by bike..uhm, we'll see!

wish you a great time, see you soon!

Ielena

PLE

I didn't know where to start…but once I found the way I could have written million things!
I'm really happy I edited the Informal learning page on Edutech because I feel I brought forward something which will turn to be useful for my future.
We are always so busy in doing things that thinking about us, what we feel and think is difficult!
I think that you never finish learning and if you want to keep your mind flexible and active you can't stop learning, no matter how!
Our mind is a precious good we have been provided with and it is important to be aware of how to use it in the best way.
This year we have been given the chance of learning English in a practical way and I'm sure we all realized that although we grew up in this century we were cut off from the online world we have discovered lately. I found this last etivity rather stimulating and coherent with the course objectives.

So, first of all, I took notes to draw my concept map and at the end I realized that I learn by doing! As I wrote in my final paper, I learn more when I do things step by step and within a relaxed context.
In my map in fact there is a big space dedicated to people. I have friends all over the world and I learn a lot from them about their language and their culture! At the end there must be a reason why I decided to study languages, I'm talkative and curious!

First of all I divided my map into two main sections: formal and informal; I put into the first section everything related to uni (teachers, uni-mates, books, classes, lectures, labs, seminars and conferences, projects). I put into the second section all I do by myself such as reading books and magazines, watching films, satellite tv, listening to music and radio, writing emails, instant messaging, talking (on the phone or face-to-face), travelling, internet, blogs, wikis.

I made an interesting consideration: I put all the tools learnt during this course into the informal section and the reason is that during this last year we learnt as a group but I think also that we developed personal skills.

Poto from http://www.flickr.com/

Edutech Wiki

I imagine the Tulane Wiki as a sort of preliminary experience for us. It made me think to the driving lessons one takes before getting the driving license: during the first semester we got familiar with the Wiki-world; we get familiar with collective writing; we learnt how to edit other's pages and we slowly accepted other's contributions in our pages; we learnt how to organize our ideas according to the typical Wiki structure, we learnt how to quote and write references, etc.

In brief, during last semester we've been training to cope with a pubblic Wiki!

I must say that it hasn't been easy for me to add and modify information on the page I chose to edit together with Tania (Informal Learning).

First of all Edutech Wiki is no longer the "protected place" where only people from our language course could directly intervene. On the contrary, there are experts and very competent people who contribute with their knowledge.

EduTech Wiki is a very reliable source - it has been created by people working at the University of Geneva - and if you contribute, what you write has to be of some utility, besides being supported by factual evidence (references).

You can write your own opinion as well, but I suppose that this is a prominent personalities' privilege. I felt ridiculous when I wrote "According to Elena Birolo.." . I wanted to add a personal touch to the page but I think it didn't work as a classmate suggested me to remove that sentence!!!:-)

While editing on Edutech Wiki I had the impression that its official character makes you feel a bit uncomfortable about your own contributions but also more responsible for what you add, modify, or delete. Even references and language used are chosen more carefully because you want to be on the equal footing with all those experts!

In our Wiki there were few people (us) contributing and what's more, we personally knew each other. To a certain extent the context was familiar, while Edutech Wiki is much more formal. Although we had to be impartial and objective also in our Wiki, last semester I wrote for us and for our peers in New Orleans, here I add my contribution for anybody will need to find out something about Informal Learning!

(photo from Flickr)

YouTube

In the last weeks we learned how to filter information in the web, exploit its potential saving time and energy. It was very interesting and useful but using YouTube is great and makes a lot of fun! I must admit this has been the best e-tivity so far.

I knew that you can find really everything in YouTube and as soon as I had the change to visit this site I was very curious to look around. This time I got pleasantly lost because I saw many funny and weird videos! Youtube is user friendly as users can watch any video and grade it, while registered users have the possibility to upload as many videos as they want.

YouTube shelves its videos in broad categories; this means you have to know what you're looking for if you want to find something eye-catching. Tags, as usual, are fundamental as they function as filters and help finding what you really want to see.

There are videos for every taste: some are really hilarious, some nasty, some sweet, some serious and professionally competent. However, this tool should be carefully used and controlled especially after some recent facts happened in schools. YouTube and sites like it are said to encourage bullying among teenagers, who film fights or similar acts with their phones, upload videos to the net and are imitated by other teenagers.

This is surely a negative consequence of this exponentially growing website. There should be maybe more control to the quality of uploaded videos. In fact, according to Forbes, "YouTube is slowly cultivating a more mature fan base thanks to its vast archives of some 8 million video clips, with 65,000 additions daily". (from http://www.forbes.com/2006/09/28/youtube-internet-video-tech-media_cz_cs_0928tubesidebar.html)

As far as language learning is concerned I think it is possible to find many useful videos. I found, for example, a series of videos teaching the basics of German, a sort of survival course. It was elementary, simple but pleasing. The teacher was serious and kept repeating sentences more than once first in English, then in German. Nevertheless, there were courses for many other languages, for example Chinese, Japanese and so on.

The world is getting smaller, technology "invades" every field of our life, different cultures meet (and clash, sometimes) easily. There are new ways to communicate and to learn and nowadays we are given many tools and resources to learn everything online. Learning a language as autodidact, for example, is much easier than in the past.

On the other hand, for those who learn a language in the traditional way, there are web pages, radio, online TV, online magazines, computer programs and now even YouTube as support to their learning. The matter consists basically in finding efficient resources that really help you learn.
However, when your skills are rather advanced you can test your listening comprehension skills on YouTube, for free! YouTube is useful for many other things, too. For example in order to show how to do practical things, as Sarah did to show to us how del.icio.us worked. Or else, it might be useful for people who want to upload videos for relatives or friends that live far away.

A very positive aspect to point out is that you understand immediately how YouTube works, it's easy, funny, quick and free! In the future you might have to purchase if you want to use it, as it is so successful, but until it is free I think YouTube is a very good tool. It is fun (and personally I think that enjoying learning a language helps a lot) and learning is "visual". Moreover you can listen to a portion of a video over and over again until you get the sense of it.

youtube: Robbie Williams in Berlin

I couldn't decide so I uploaded both of my favourite Robbie Williams' songs!
He's absolutely a great performer and on stage he can really entertain you!
His songs have been the perfect soundtrack to many important experiences I've done in the last five years.

Last summer I went to his concert in Milan with my friends! "Angel" was the last song at the concert, the crowd got litterely cazy! The week after I went to Berlin with my best girlfriends and surprise surprise...Robbie Williams had in concert at the Olympia Stadium!!

We didn't manage to get the tickets :-( but we stand in front of his hotel for one hour wishing to see him! My friends were very patient in that occasion but I'm sure they had an amazing time too among those crazy teens!!! ;-)



Here is a flash of Berlin, die Musik: Zweiraumwohnung
videos from http://www.youtube.com

Feeds

Every class is a surprise!!!How often have we written in our posts that the web is huge?!

Now we are learning how to expoit it efficiently.

This week we got to know with feeds aggregators, in particular bloglines.

I had never heard about aggreagtors and once again it's a revolution for me!

As Steven Bell wrote "news Aggregators:
1. Requires Little Time to Learn
2. Available at No Cost to Faculty
3. Improves Productivity and Efficiency (time on task)
4. The Procedure Itself is Simple and Requires No Real Technology Skill" (taken from http://staff.philau.edu/BellS/rss.htm#one)

We cannot but agree with him!!

Bloglines is an aggregator and collects websites of your interest. However, the most useful aspect is that it informs you when the websites you chose are updated. This is the special feature of aggregators, otherwise there would be no difference between them and bookmarks ;-)

Instead of visiting each single website, you enter your page on bloglines and all you want to know about is there. You feel like the Big Brother! Just one click and you can read and see all the updates in one single page. This is amazing, especially for those websites where information are updates regularly, i.e. newspaper on-line, blogs and the like.

However, there are still many website that don't use RSS feeds (I wanted to add "Die Zeit" and "Der Spiegel" to my "News from the world" playlist, but I couldn't), so I thought that this might be a rather new way of surfing the net!? I hope everybody in the future will know about aggregators, RSS because it is really conveniece. I recommend it to everybody!!

I'm not a computer expert and I'm really glad I'm learning all these "little" tips and tricks because we all know technology is extremely important. However, you have to learn how to exploit it properly if you want to take advantage from it. Every time I find out something new I realize that I'm using my skills and time more efficaciously and consciously. I'm learning how to find and filter sources more easily.