In my last post on PLE I wrote I had had some problems in understanding what it exactly is and that I finally understood it is about learning by the means of computer tools...well I was wrong!
I asked my mates and my teacher to explain me with their own words what it is and they told me it is about one's learning environment in general, about all that contributes to one's learning. I think this idea of learning is much more complete and exhaustive!
giovedì 17 maggio 2007
martedì 15 maggio 2007
PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
During the last lesson of our English course our teacher introduced a new topic: Personal Learning Environments (PLE). Unfortunately, I couldn't attend that lesson...I say unfortunately, because it hasn't been easy for me to understand what PLE are. At the beginning I thought a PLE concerned all that contributes to one's learning, but reading more carefully the articles about it I understood PLE are about e-learning.
According to Wikipedia "Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, managing both content and process, communicate with others in the process of learning and thereby achieve learning goals.
Important concepts in PLEs include the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social networks that can cross institutional boundaries, and the use of networking protocols (Peer-to-Peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of resources and systems within a personally-managed space."
That means, if I have been able to catch the point, that all we learnt thanks to our English course has contributed to constitute our Personal Learning Environment.
What I like most of this way of considering learning is the fact that both formal and informal learning episodes are to be taken into account in the learning process, indeed I think we learn a lot also from informal learning processes. For example, I think we learned a lot from the 'experiments' we made at home trying to understand how technological computer tools work.
Another thing I find very interesting about Personal Learning Environments, is that they imply the use of social software in order to share knowledge and resources beyond institutional boundaries.
I think that if a person is able to organize and manage its own PLE in the right way, s/he can really enrich his/her own knowledge.
According to Wikipedia "Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, managing both content and process, communicate with others in the process of learning and thereby achieve learning goals.
Important concepts in PLEs include the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social networks that can cross institutional boundaries, and the use of networking protocols (Peer-to-Peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of resources and systems within a personally-managed space."
That means, if I have been able to catch the point, that all we learnt thanks to our English course has contributed to constitute our Personal Learning Environment.
What I like most of this way of considering learning is the fact that both formal and informal learning episodes are to be taken into account in the learning process, indeed I think we learn a lot also from informal learning processes. For example, I think we learned a lot from the 'experiments' we made at home trying to understand how technological computer tools work.
Another thing I find very interesting about Personal Learning Environments, is that they imply the use of social software in order to share knowledge and resources beyond institutional boundaries.
I think that if a person is able to organize and manage its own PLE in the right way, s/he can really enrich his/her own knowledge.
giovedì 3 maggio 2007
WIKI EXPERIENCE
Photo from flickrThis week our teacher wants us to reflect on our wiki experiences. Indeed during this school year we have had two different experiences with two different wikis!
The first one was last semester with our 'personal wiki'. Our teacher created a wiki for our English course in which me and my mates collaborated with other students from New Orleans.
The course had two purposes: realizing a cultural exchange between American and Italian students and training us to collaborative writing, both purposes were realized by the means of our wiki.
It was difficult at the beginning because we were not used to collaborative writing.
We had always written our personal papers and had always been given notes on our personal job. It was difficult to get used to the idea that we were going to be evaluated on the basis of the whole wiki and not only on the basis of our pages. Moreover, our personal pages were not our, in the sense that though we created one page each, we went on editing our mates pages, so every page 'belonged' to everyone!
But step by step we got used to that and we learnt to appreciate collective writing, understanding that more people together can do certainly better than one person alone!
Our second wiki experience is still going on: this time we are collaborating in a 'public' wiki. I write 'public' wiki because, though all wikis are public, this is a wiki that already existed and many people contributed to editing it before us and are still editing it.
It is completely different, because in our wiki we felt free to write almost everything we wanted and were not so scrupulous when writing our quotations sources nor when quoting something.
In this wiki, on the other hand, we know we have to be careful and precise in what we write, we feel responsible for the pages we edit. It is a comletely different way of writing cllectively!
venerdì 6 aprile 2007
MY IMPRESSIONS ON YOUTUBE
Phtos from flickr
This time I have to say I was really amazed by this website! I think it is wanderful! You can find videos on whatever you want, both professional and personal! As you can see I put in my blogs two music videos from YouTube, I made this choice because I love music and I've spent so much time in the past at watching Mtv (I say in the past bacuse now I have no time to do it anymore!)! In my opinion a good song, can communicte more than one thousend words!
I put the video of 'Wanderwall' because Oasis have been my favourite group since secondary school and thanks to their songs I also learnt many English words I didn't know before: I know almost all their songs by heart!
I decided than to put a second video, 'Everlasting love', which has no particular meaning, I simply love that song and moreover it is part of the soundtrack of a film which I think represents me: Bridget Johns!
Let's go back to You Tube now. As I was saying before, this website is really great but besides being nice to visit in your freetime, it could be really useful to encrease your knowledge of English language and culture! What a better example of the video titled 'Irak'?!
Through the videos published in YouTube you can have a real insight in English and American life and culture!
mercoledì 4 aprile 2007
martedì 3 aprile 2007
venerdì 30 marzo 2007
MY IMPRESSIONS ON FEED AGGREGATORS
Photo from flickrA new mission for us this week, but I'm getting used to that, I'm becoming more self-confident, or maybe just resigned! Anyway this week task was not so difficult, on the contrary, to tell the truth, it was easy!
Most importantly I learnt another thing I didn't know and which is really useful especially for us because we are working using just the Net!
I think that having a programme that can keep you informed on all the new posts that are put on your favourite websites in real time is simply wonderful!
As I alredy said in my presentation I don' like spending much time surfing the Net and so I'm sure I'll use feeds aggregators as much as I can also after this English course has finished!
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