MY PLE- Personal Learning Environment-

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