martedì 19 maggio 2009

My Personal Learning Environment


We started this semester by looking for articles, books and blogs about the so called Personal Learning Environment. The vague idea I had of it then, now has a clearer 'shape': that of my own PLE mindmap.
To develop my personal PLE, I started from a definition suggested by our teacher in her blog: “a combination of the formal and informal tools and processes we use to gather information, reflect on it and do something with it, which is essentially what we mean when we talk about learning” (Martin, 2007).

I decided to divide my map into two main branches: formal learning and informal learning. Then I made a brainstorming of all the activities and tools that I use, consciously or not, to learn, both in formal contexts, namely at university, and in my everyday life. Of course, as this mindmap refers to language learning, I tried to focus on language acquisition activities and tools. Many of them seem at first sight to have nothing to do with language learning, but when I write, for example, "Online newspapers" or "Movies", I obviously mean that they are in English (or in French).

After this first step I tried to categorize these activities and tools according to their function. One group is made by those tools I use to "gather information", and the other one by those that help me to reflect on this information and do something with it. I think this second phase, which I called 'processing information', is very important in the process of learning. When you 'do something ' with the information you have, you absorb it, that is, you fully understand it and you remember it. For example, there's no point in reading and learning by heart a lot of grammar rules if you don't apply this knowledge by writing and speaking, making mistakes and correcting them.

While building my PLE mindmap, I realized that there's one tool that has a major role in my learning, at least in the last years. Of course, I'm thinking about the Internet. This is why I chose to visually separate it from the other tools and to link it to other, more detailed, subbranches. The posts of this blog explain why I consider the Internet an effective learning tool. I included my personal blog among the 'processing' activities because it is where I reflect upon what I learn.

Creating this mindmap was itself a way of 'doing something' with what we learned in this last English course. It reminds me of what is called Metacognition. "KNOWING HOW TO LEARN, and knowing which strategies work best, are valuable skills that differentiate expert learners from novice learners. Metacognition, or awareness of the process of learning, is a critical ingredient to successful learning." (Julie Halter, SDSU)

Although we are at the very end of our university career, we will keep on learning thanks to different experiences in our lives. Regardless of the amount of knowledge that we gathered during our school years, we can now claim to be 'expert learners'.

domenica 10 maggio 2009

The dark side of the Web

After exploring the infinite opportunities of the Web, we should consider as well its dangers and threats. We often came up in class with the question of safety in the Web and this week we tried to see more into detail what the problem consists of.

Users may run into the crime identity theft which is called Internet Fraud when it is made through the Web. Moreover, we are not always aware of the amount of personal information we enter in the Web when using tools such as social networks or when making operations like online purchasing.

It is true that in these cases attentive users should know the risks they are running because almost everybody know of the existence of Internet criminals and hackers. What is really worrying and disturbing is that we are literary spied on the Web. For example, Facebook Beacon is a part of Facebook's advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook and from Facebook to other websites.

This underhand trade of information makes me quite mistrustful of the Web. However, I use the Internet a lot for many purposes and will keep on doing it. I can imagine the Web as a parallel and virtual reality in which, like in the 'real reality', there is criminality and illegality. What I can do to be part of this online community and to defend myself from frauds is exactly what I would do in the real community. The main defence is knowledge. We need to get as much information as we can about who are dealing with, what are their purposes and how they operate. Secondly we need to know that there are tools and behaviours to prevent frauds. The Internet itself is a good source of information on prevention, (see for example this site).
Finally, we should always use our critical sense and our experience. Indeed, the more we get acquainted with the Internet, the more we learn to recognize what is unreliable and dangerous.

domenica 3 maggio 2009

Google Docs


As the course goes on, I am realizing that SHARING is the 'fil rouge' of the various acrivities we are doing and of the different tools we are using. Google Docs is another example of the possibilities people have to exchange information and collaborate through the web.


Thanks to Google docs you can keep your documents online and share them with others who can in turn work on it and edit them. Here again, as for Delicious or blogs, there will be a small community of users interacting on subjects of common interest.


This system can be useful for students who have to collaborate for projects and work groups, or simply may want to check each other's works. It would be great if teachers too learned to use this tool to communicate with students, to correct their texts and send the feedbacks, for example for the final thesis.


I have to admit that I still need to practice using Google docs, but I think it will be a useful resouce for my future work, whatever it will be. Although I have the impression that this kind of tools are still perceived as too informal or 'uncontrollable', I believe they represent the future of communication, which is destined to become more and more open and dynamic.