My personal learning environment

This week we were asked to develop a mindmap of our Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Sarah quoted different definitions of it and explained us that there is no general agreement on a standard definition.
Generally speaking, a PLE indicates the way we learn, how and where we collect information and organize it.

It took me a lot to think about my PLE and how to arrange it. I decided to outline it using Word and then to scan it. I changed the layout and the type size in order to make it more readable once posted on this blog. I used also different colours for the lines of each branch to make my PLE clearer.

My Personal Leaning Environment has four branches, and the main categories are then sub-divided in several parts. First of all, I pointed out where I learn; I can find information and elaborate it on the Web or in the real world (that is, on paper, but also in everyday interactions with people).

Another branch is about how I gather information; this happens when I read, listen to or watch something. These activities can take place in a formal or an informal context of learning. The former is strictly connected with my university experience and refers to the tools that I consider expressly devoted to the language learning: textbooks, essays, dictionaries, grammars, courses at university, conferences and seminars. The second context refers to the tools that I use in my everyday life that contribute to my language learning, even if I don’t conceive them as official and conventional; they consist in songs, books that I read in my free time, TV programs, videos, newspaper articles and magazines, websites, podcasts, forums, blogs, chat rooms, e-mails, conversations with foreigners that can take place also when travelling abroad.

Another important branch of my PLE consists in the activity of storing and organizing information that I gathered. First of all, I try to keep in mind new words and grammatical rules; since it’s inevitable that I forget some pieces of information, I often make outlines, which I consider very helpful in order to improve my visual memory. When I attend lessons at university or when I read something interesting, I usually take notes to fix pieces of information and making them available when I need to read them again. For the same reason, I sometimes record TV programmes, songs, videos and podcasts, or I copy or photocopy some parts of texts. Thanks to Sarah, I recently learned how to store URLs on the Web using Bloglines and Del.icio.us. I think that feed aggregators and the activity of social bookmarking are really useful for my language learning, and in general to retrieve and save information.

The last branch of my PLE deals with the activity of formulating and expressing information, which is strictly tied up with the previous ones. It’s the last step of my learning process, and I consider it very useful since I’m forced to think about what I’ve previously learnt and then arrange and connect information. When I want to express some concept or my ideas, I deeply think about them and I communicate them by speaking or writing (using a computer or on paper).

I hope you enjoyed reading through my PLE. What about you?

Veronica

Judging online sources

photo by Swiv

There is a huge number of sources you can use choose from when you have to write a text. You can decide to use paper sources (such as: books, reviews, journals, essays, reports, articles, pamphlets, etc.), or online ones (websites). Judging sources can be very difficult and time-demanding, but it’s indispensable if you want your text to be reliable.

When I started searching materials for my thesis I preferred using paper sources since I thought that they were more reliable than the online ones. Anyone can publish anything he/she wants to on the web and there is often no way of checking or verifying what has been divulged. However, I soon changed my mind since not all online material is bad; there are a lot of interesting and reliable sites on the web and I used them as sources of my paper.

I never stop to be amazed by the huge amount of websites and information available on the Web; you just have to write a word in the apposite bar and the search engine will find all the websites that contain that word. However, search engines like Google show both relevant and irrelevant sites. In order to narrow down you researches you can be more specific when writing the key words, or you can do advanced searches (in this way, you can find for examples many academic files by eminent professors). You can also use other useful online tools, such as Del.icio.us; after having registered to this website, you can look for sites and read how people commented them. As you can read in the tips from the University of Essex, you can use also meta-search engines (like Mamma) and specialized search engines (such as Google Scholbar), which can help you to quickly find what you are looking for.

Reading through the Pardue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and the San Diego State University websites, I noticed that there are several criteria to use in order to judge the sources of information, both online or not. I must admit that I’ve used them almost always, since my supervisor clearly explained them to me when I was writing my thesis.

First of all, I always need to have clear in mind what is the subject of my paper and what I need to search for; then I have to decide where I could find what I need. This criteria are clearly stated in the Pardue (Owl): “You will need to make decisions about what to search for, where to look, and once you've found material on your topic, whether to use it in your paper."

Then I pay attention to the author of the text; if I don’t know him/her, I try to find out what he/she wrote, his/her profession and career. Sometimes it may be a bit difficult and time-demanding to find the author of an online text. It is often very important to look at the publisher or the producer of the text.

Then I read the preface and the table of content, in order to find out why the author decided to write his/her work and to what audience he/she aimed to refer. The table of content gives also a quick overview of the main points discussed in the text.

When you are searching for a website the URL can be very important since the domain can inform you about the organization that hosts the website. If the URL ends in .org the organization is no-profit; if it ends in .com the site belongs to a commercial organization, while if it ends in .edu or .ac it concerns an educational authority.

I always check the publication date, especially when I search for online sources. I try to notice when the website was created and its last update, since it’s very important to use current information.

Finally, I read through the bibliography in order to see if the material the author used is valuable or not. In the bibliography I can find further sources that I can use to broaden my research.

I found particularly useful and interesting the following five questions published by the Monash University's online library tutorial:

-Who is responsible for the site - is there a name and contact address?

-What is its rationale - is it endorsing a particular viewpoint to the exclusion of other views?

-Is there a reference list or bibliography of corroborative evidence?

-Is there a date when the site was last updated - how long ago did this happen?

-Does the site seem to be permanent or part of a permanent organisation?

Veronica