My Personal Learning Environment

I think that another suitable title for this post could be “Me versus Technology”. I think I spent more time downloading the programme and uploading it to the Wiki than building my personal map. I know that there were other solutions, for instance taking a picture of it or upload in to Flickr but I was curious and I wanted to see how Freemind works; moreover I’m obstinate and I absolutely wanted to insert my map in the Mindmap Gallery. I tried to do all this, but I still don’t understand if the whole operation was really successful or not.
Anyway, let’s talk about my PLE: I loved it, I mean, it was very interesting to reflect on the ways I learn English…unfortunately I think I was a little bit influenced by the way Martina Garbinato (a student that attended the English course last year) organized her map. Obviously I didn’t want to copy but I realized that our maps are quite similar. I don’t think it’s necessary to describe it in detail (just double click on the image if you want to make it larger) but maybe it’s a good idea to illustrate and explain some of my choices. As you can see the map is quite simple: on the right side I put three links about the way I gather, check and store information whereas on the left side there are only two links about "space" and "people". The people involved in my Learning Environment are of course my colleagues at University, my friends and also my American relatives. I have a dozen aunts, uncles and cousins leaving in the Unites States who like Italy a lot and come over to visit us once or twice a year. Our families are very close to each other so I often exchange e-mails with my cousins and sometimes we talk on the phone. I know it’s not a lot but I think it’s wonderful to have a contact with native speakers so I consider myself very lucky. Besides some of my friends took advantage of the Erasmus Project and went abroad for three and six months in English speaking countries. When they came back we started to exchange SMS in English because they use to do to it constantly in this language while they were away. We started just for fun but then I realized that it was really interesting and useful too: you have compress the meaning of what you want to say and find the right words to express it. I inserted “SMS” in the subcategory related to “virtual spaces”, together with the Internet, which is becoming more and more important as far as our learning process is concerned. We have just experienced how helpful tools like Bloglines, YouTube, Del.icio.us and the whole Blogosphere can be, we should, however, never forget that traditional tools are important as well. In fact, as regards my informal training I put books, newspaper and movies, right next to blogs and in the section related to the way I check information I put online dictionaries as well as more conventional monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.
In my opinion this E-tivity was really interesting and I appreciated it a lot: it’s a good idea to think about our personal learning process and the tools we employ to acquire information, so we can stop, consider them one by one and eventually reflect on the way we can improve them and as a result improve our English. Anyway I’m a little bit scared about my presentation on Monday: I hate to talk in public but I will try to overcome my shyness and be more self-confident.