Evaluating Sources of Information

First of all I would like to say that I was quite surprised to find among the comments that my peers left for me last week about YouTube an observation by Mr Eric Shackle, an Australian retired journalist. I didn’t expect that someone living on the other side of the world could read my blog, I mean, I’m not that naïve, I know that people from all around the world can read it (there is a reason if we call it World Wide Web!), but I didn’t expect it and it made me very happy. Moreover Mr Shackle’s comments are useful because our topic this week deals with the evaluation of sources of information, in particular Internet sources.
Last week I was surfing the Net looking for some information about Youtube and going through various Websites I read that the oldest user in Youtube is a 78 years old man named Peter, but Mr Shackle corrected me and claimed that there is an older user. I felt a little bit stupid because I realized that I trusted those information without doing some cross-checking. Well, we can always learn from our mistakes and in the future I will pay more attention. Anyway thanks to Eric’s intervention I started to think about the way I cope with Internet sources of information and I noticed that I have a little tendency to accept whatever comes from the Internet as true and that I don’t spend enough time checking if the Websites I explore and the information they offer are reliable or not. It is noteworthy that when I read articles, news or books I always do it with a critical eye and I do care about their authors, purposes and target whereas my behaviour is different when I deal with information I find on the Net. I will be quite frank, when I look for information on the Web this is the way I proceed: I open Google, I type the keywords and wait for the search engine to find the Websites, then I check them all and focus on the those which are in my opinion the most interesting. Usually I read all their contents, check their links and only in the end I take a look to the author and if there is a copyright and a bibliography. After having read the tips I found in the three Websites Mrs Guth suggested us, I realized that the way I proceed is quite bad. The main problem is that when I enter a Website I do not ask myself all those questions (but probably I should): I use the Net because it is fast and it helps me saving time, if I stop and I start thinking about the tips it is not saving time any longer. Theoretically I’m aware that this a very superficial way to deal with information and Web material in general but practically this is what I always do.
Finally, I found the tips in the Websites cited in Bloggingenglish very useful and I particularly appreciated the considerations about plagiarism and about the search engines. I use Google all the time but it is important to know that there are other ways to get the Websites with the information we need. I was also struck by the fact the University of Essex suggests not to use essay banks: I often came across these collections of essays and I always thought it was a good idea to read them also because some of them were really well written. Anyway from now on I will handle Internet sources of information more carefully and will use all the tips.
Let me what you think, I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

The YouTube Revolution

In 1968 the famous artist Andy Warhol claimed “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” and as technology evolves, this prediction has actually become true. I think that everybody knows what YouTube is so there is no need to explain how it works; on the contrary there is a great need to discuss about it, about its potentialities and limits. YouTube is an amazing tool and the reason why I appreciate it so much is that it gives “real” people the opportunity to provide entertainment and to make their voices heard. Moreover YouTube is accessible and easy to use: it is not only for young ( I found out that there is a 78 years old man named Peter who uploads videos with the user name “Geriatric 1927” that has become a sort of celebrity) but for everyone willing to shoot a video about anything (from political speeches to the most weird human behaviour) and then to upload it.
Recently the media have been talking a lot about YouTube and often not in positive terms. I remember some videos (I don’t remember if the video was uploaded exactly on YouTube or something similar) in which teenagers hit a boy with disabilities in the classroom: newspaper and TV shows just couldn’t stop talking about it and about the YouTube phenomenon and the YouTube generation. Everybody seemed to be horrified and blamed YouTube and the Net in general for spreading these awful images making its authors really famous with a high risk of emulation. Actually I don’t know if YouTube has a sort of “filter” or if everybody is allowed to upload everything but the first thing that came to my mind hearing all the journalists arguing was that the Website (and the Net) mirrors our society: a society that is a little bit sick and that lacks civilisation, a society full of ordinary people who don’t want to be ordinary any longer.
However let’s get back to the real topic of this post, that is YouTube and language learning. Most of the people enter the Website just for fun: they only want to watch the latest most bizarre video. But the idea of using such videos to improve our English is not bad, I mean, if learners have the opportunity to better their knowledge of their second language and at the same time to have fun, that is great! I don’t have a beautiful and satisfying relationship with technology but I’m open minded, willing to explore new ways to enhance my English and if YouTube is going to help me, I will try it out. As far as I’m concerned, I think that YouTube could be an extraordinary source of material, moreover watching short videos prevent learners from getting bored but I don’t think it could be a substitute for “real” lessons nor that it could be really effective.
Let me know what you think about it: I’m looking forward to reading your comments!

The world of Podcasts

Before writing this post and choosing the Websites to insert in Del.icio.us I thought it was a good idea to investigate on the Web in order to understand what a Podcast exactly is. The term was not new to me: I think that a lot of us have been using this kind of tools but just ignored their names. I took some time to look for extra information and I read various definitions of the term but I still think that the explanation I found in Wikipedia is the most exhausting and clear. According to it, a podcast “a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndacation feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers”. Initially it was used to give people the opportunity to share their “radio-style shows” on the Net but lately it became a way to share also Church sermons, conferences, public safety messages, school lessons and so on. So podcasts are now used as a learning material and students of foreign languages can download files on their Ipods or whatever mp3player then listen to them and practice. Of course this is a great invention: nowadays technology gives us the possibility to explore the language even out of the classrooms and learners are becoming more and more independent. In the past we waited for our English teacher to enter the classroom with a tape and a tape recorder so that we could listen to the daily dialogue and then discuss about the content and then read its transcription in the book. Do you remember? I remember it. Sometimes I start wondering if in the future students will ever need teachers: will technology replace our professors? That would be scaring but it’s dramatically possible and maybe that is what is going to happen, maybe it’s happening right now while we are writing our blogs.
As far as I’m concerned I never used podcasts too much, I mean sometimes surfing on the Net I stopped and listened to some files in the BBC Website and did some exercises in some unknown “cyber listening laboratory” just to test my level of English. I have never downloaded audio files in my mp3player which were not songs but I’m becoming more aware of the utility of these tools and maybe in the future I’m going to overcome my distrust toward technology and I’m going to try it out but for the moment I limited myself to look for meaningful Websites that has something to do with podcasts and English. At first I tried with Google but as I typed the words “podcast” and “education” a thousand Websites appeared and I got scared and I immediately turned to Del.icio.us because in this way the field was restricted so I could focus only on some selected Websites. The first one is about learning Business English through some dialogues and conversation: it provides interesting exercises aiming to improve and enhance the knowledge of vocabulary and phrases dealing with business. The audio files are basically for professionals but I think they can be used by students as well. Englishcaster.com is both for students and educators: it offers English lessons podcast and other study materials. the Websites gives the opportunity to listen to, review and submit podcasts and other English study resources. Students and teachers can also give a mark to podcasts considering their quality and utility and this is quite interesting so you can take a look to the appraisal before listening to the file and you can ignore those that other users had judged as bad. The last Website offers various audio files about breaking news. There are exercises and quizzes which help students to understand the news and the main contents and in the end there is also the opportunity to read the whole text. Exercises seem to be a little bit banal considering our level of English but audio files seem to be good, moreover I liked the idea of a Website about news which was not the BBC or the CNN.

I'm looking forward to reading your comments, let me know what you think!

See you next week!

Social Bookmarking

As the course progresses I realize that the Net offers a wide range of tools aiming to simplify our researches on the Web. Last Wednesday I discovered Del.icio.us which is really a wonderful instrument as it gives the opportunity to store and share our favourite Websites and blogs. Of course it wasn’t the first time I heard about Social Bookmarking and about Del.icio.us but honestly I had never trusted this kind of tools as I always preferred doing researches on my own, without visiting the Websites other people had already selected because it could turn out to be a waste of time, as people could have stored whatever from the Web, not necessarily what I was looking for. Anyway, after a couple of hours wandering in Del.icio.us I realized it was not that bad and started to appreciate it.
It took me quite a lot of time to visit, read and evaluate the different Websites concerning language learning, also because I didn’t want to chose the same Sites my peers had already picked up – though I finally chose a couple of Websites that the girls in my group had already noticed. As far as I’m concerned, I primarily looked for special WebPages on the basis of what my weaknesses in English are: grammar and punctuation. As a consequences I came a across a couple of interesting Websites offering a clear description of the rules of punctuation in English and another one offering a hundreds of exercises of every kind and for any level. When language learning is concerned, I love interactiviness: I would spend hours doing that kind of multiple choice exercises because I think it’s a good way to test my knowledge and eventually to enhance my grammar. Then I looked for some listening exercises on the Web and a thousand of Websites appeared. In my opinion these cyber listening laboratories could be very useful for students since we do not have always the time to watch DVDs or listen to the BBC’s news, so if we want to keep up our English and test our abilities these Websites offer various tracks with different voices and their relative quizzes and solutions.
After fulfilling the first task I spent some time exploring the twenty Websites that my peers selected and I must confess I found all of them interesting and useful. I noticed that we all tried to focus on the four abilities but there is a general tendency to focus on the writing skills and as consequence to search for Websites that could help us avoiding mistakes or that just help us enhancing our abilities and writing effective pieces of paper. Silvia for instance came up with this interesting Website explaining how to write more clearly, think more clearly and learn complex material more easily. I can’t say exactly why this Website captured my attention, probably because the Power Point presentation was simply appealing and as I started reading the various sections I thought that I agreed with its creator Micheal A. Covington and his tips could turn out to be really helpful for me, since when I have to write something in English I am always over concerned about what I have to say, how I have to express my opinions, what the best way to organize the text is etc. Obviously I’m obsessed with errors too and Sara/Zara found this wonderful Website about the most common errors in English. I decided to signal it in Del.icio.us too because I found it amazing: there is a long list of words or couple of words that students as well as native speakers often confuse or just ignore the real meaning.
Elena's choices are instead clearly oriented towards dictionaries. Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries are among the most important tools a student needs and on line dictionaries are a meaningful invention since they are fast, clear and help us saving time, so I really appreciated her choice, most of all because she picked up the dictionary of idioms and idiomatic expressions. Last year we have been doing a lot of translation and it often happened that we came across metaphors and expressions which were culturally bound and which were difficult to translate in English. I remember professor Scott claiming to check always if there was the correspondent idiomatic expression in English. However idioms are quite fascinating and it is interesting to see how they change in Italian and in English and as a consequence I guess I will be using it a lot. Among Letizia’s Websites the one that caught my attention the most is the one about “ Mother Tongue annoyances: how to lose ums and ahs from your speech”. This Website, or better this blog, is really practical: it gives different suggestions for speaking more fluently and feeling more confident when speaking in public. I read the whole post and I warmly recommend everyone to check it out because it might be helpful for our future debates on Monday!
I’m looking forward to reading all your posts and comments about Social Bookmarking and I hope you will appreciate my choices. See you next week!

All Hallows' Day

As I realised I know very little about Halloween I decided to spend some time surfing the Net looking for information about it in order to gather some ideas for the discussion we will have on Monday. I started from Wikipedia and then I visited other websites: some of them focused on the origins and the evolution of the famous festivity but the majority focused on business and their purpose was to sponsor expensive parties and sell gadgets. I have been reading a lot about Halloween and its religious connotation but in my opinion this celebration has lost all its spiritual meaning and it has become just a commercial holiday, another occasion to party and spend money on disguises. I just read that today Americans spend more or less $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday, can you believe it?
The situation in Italy is quite different: most of Italians do not know anything about it and consider it a sort of minor and weird carnival, in other words in our country the celebration hasn’t the resonance it has in the Anglo-Saxon world. However some kids play trick-or-treat and adults go out and party: personally I went out with my friends and we went to a club which was decorated with candles, pumpkins and skeletons. So we can say that the celebration has already been imported and a lot people organise parties like in the UK or in the United States but still a lot of people feel it doesn’t belong to our tradition. Actually I just found out that the Romans had two festivals which were very similar to this Celtic celebration and that they melt with it when the Roman conquered the Celtic territories: “Feralia”, a day in late October when then Roman people commemorated the passing of the dead and another day in which they honoured Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Anyway when Christianity started to spread all over Europe all pagan festivities and symbols were erased or their names were eventually changed by Popes in order to turn them into Church-sanctioned holydays. In this way the Celtic/Roman festival of the dead became a day to honour saints and martyrs. So if we look back we might discover that Halloween is not totally alien to our tradition! I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all these information about the Pagan world but I remember having read a lot about it in the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and that I was really astonished when I realised how the Catholic Church managed to destroy the Pagan traditions which however survived throughout the centuries.
Honestly Halloween really fascinates me: it is the night in which the boundaries between the world of the dead and that of the living people blurry and in my opinion there is nothing bad if we start disguising like spirits (in order not be recognized by ghosts who will mistake us for fellow spirits). Celebrating Halloween could be just another way to exorcise the death and everything that has something to do with it, anyway I can’t wait to discuss it with you all on Monday!

Feeds and Feeds Aggregators

Today I started using Bloglines for the first time and I must confess it is an amazing tool. As usual, I was little bit sceptical at the beginning and on Wednesday I kept on asking myself and my peers about the real effectiveness of a Feeds Aggregator but then I understood that this website could turn into a very useful and irreplaceable instrument for us. In fact, thanks to it we do not waste time on typing in the Urls of our peers’ blogs: we just enter Bloglines and in a couple of seconds we can see if there are any new posts and comments and I really think this is great! Moreover I had no difficulties in subscribing and blogs and playlists are quite easy to insert (I said “quite” because in the lab we work together, in small groups, so it often happens that we help each other and on this occasion, if it wasn’t for my peers’ support I would probably be still there trying to understand what I was supposed to do with Bloglines). Anyway we discussed a bit about the utility of Feeds and Feeds Aggregators and the main point was that we had generally two or three blogs to add so it seemed to be nonsense to throw away two hours in the lab to register in bloglines: wouldn’t it be easier to put those blogs as links in our personal blogs? However we realized that we could made different playlists, give them different names and put in also the blogs we use to read constantly or websites we like to visit and that are daily updated. I guess I will immediately start using this new tool and get familiar with it and see what it offers.
Let me know what you think about it and what were your initial impressions in the lab: I’m looking forward to reading your comments!