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Dear Friends,This week we have been asked to create our PLE. It is a mindmap in which we have to write down all the sources that have improved our knowledge during our lives. My PLE just deals with my English learning process because I thought that general learning was too difficult to include. Indeed one never finishes to learn and there is such a great amount of sources that you cannot enclose them in a paper.I divided my mindmap into two different groups: FORMAL and INFORMAL.
I started by working with the first one. I was sure there could not be many elements to write down because if you think about formal learning what comes to your mind are teachers, school and university. But, as long as I was developing this part of the paper ,I realised that there was a lot more to add. So I decided that the informal learning group should contain three minor groups: people, places and tools. I'm not going to write you everything I included in my PLE because I believe that most of the elements I cited are cotained in your tables as well. What I want to tell you is that I was really surprised by the fact that the more I was writing the more I wanted to add.
The group that made me realised my biggest changes was the one called tools. It is made up of other sub-groups and one of them is dedicated to the online world. Wow! I had never realised there are so many things in the net that have helped me with my English learning process! it is unbelievable the number of sites and applications I wrote in my list! Most of them come from our experience in this English course thus making me understand how much my "life" has changed in the last months!
The Informal group was the one that caused me the biggest problems. Each of us knows that everyday we learn something from the people we meet, the places we see and the actions we carry out. Therefore it is more difficult to list them all. And again, once I started writing some ideas on my paper, many others were ready to be included. There are so many places and people that can be useful for you to learn a different language. You may or may not agree with me but I also included discos among the places in which you can learn! I believe that meeting foreign people and talk to them is one of the best ways to learn a different language. Tools are a subgroup of informal learning too. Internet, telephone, television music and many others are major sources of teaching and learning.
I found that the idea of making us create a PLE sounded a bit strange at the beginning. Now I can understand how stimulating and useful it may be to sit down and reflect on the possibilties we have to improve our knowledge.
Everyday we should learn as much as we can from what is around us!
Alida
Image from flickr
Everybody surfing the net could come and read what we had written but they could never leave a comment or other information. When i first entered Edutech, I understood that it was completely different. Indeed this is a wiki created by the University of Geneva. It deals with Educational Technology and it is useful both for teachers and students. This wiki has little to do with the one we created, indeed everybody can come here and edit the numerous pages it contains. Obviously there are some rules to follow and that's why Sarah made us read them before starting to do anything. We all had to choose a page to edit and improve its content with new information. Alexandra and I chose to edit the News feed Aggregator page. We thought it may be interesting because feed aggregators is one of the topics we have experienced throughout this year.
Wow..it was not such an easy work..you have to take into consideration many things: the rules, the fact that aybody can read it and that here is a webmaster that may decide not to accept what you have written. In addition I feel a bit responsible because I did not want a student to get confused about this subject just because I had written mock information on the page.
By now I can say that "our" page has improved since the first time we had a look at it. It seems to me as if it looks better and more interesting.
By the end of this course I've understood that collaborative works and experiences are something useful and positive. There is nothing wrong in giving your help to someone who needs it!
Alida
Before starting this course I had never heard about wiki, and now, I can even state that I've used more than one type! This is amazing!
During last semester we developed a wiki called Tulanepadovawiki. I found it extremely interesting for several reasons. First of all it was our "bridge" to the U.S. students in New Orleans. I must thank our professor for giving us the opportunity to keep in touch with people so far from our country but so willing to share with us their thoughts and ideas.
Moreover I liked our activity on the wiki exactly because it was something I had never seen before. The fact that you can create a page in which many other people can leave additional information, was something completely new to me. At the beginning I did not feel very comfortable to go into my colleagues' works and edit what they had written so far. It seemed to me as if I had no right to go there and change what they had considered worth writing. At the same time when I opened my page and saw that someone else had decided what was good or not, made me a bit disappointed. As time passed by I started appreciating the fact that my friends' interventions could be seen as something positive; something that could improve my work instead of making it worse. This new approach made me face all the activities on the wiki with a new mood. Editing the others' pages became something that could help them and make their works easier. I remember exactly when I edited Viola's page about the Latin Dances! I spent some time in thinking how I could add something nice and original that she could appreciate as well and...eureka!...I started searching for audio files that might be suitable and finally I added them on the page. (I found some good ones on ODEO).
I believe that the initial efforts were due to a cultural question. We, italians, believe that we do not need anybody's help when we do something. The reason is that we do not want to share our victory with the others......Maybe these are just stereotypes but the truth is that we have never been taught to take an advantage from collective writing or other types of collaboration during our school career. That is why it took us some time to appreciate this kind of activity.
But additional troubles were still to come! If I had thought that giving a contribution in that wiki would have been difficult, I hadn't come across the Edutechwiki yet!
In "our" wiki we were the only ones who could edit and create pages.
