Hi girls! I=m really sorry that I didn't write this post sooner but 1st I got wrong with the deadlines and 2nd I had some problems in writing down my Ple because in the previous lesson I was absent (health problems). As I have already said I had some difficulties while I was thinking at my PLE, first because I didn't really understand what I had to write and second because when I made up my mind I found that there were too many things that could be written! The general knowledge we acquired during our life is huge and it depends on thousands of things that are not only linked with what we have studied but also with our family, the schools we attend and the people we meet. I learnt it while I was adding information to the page called Informal Learning in EduTech Wiki. Before writing this page I didn't know that there was also an informal way of learning things, but this is what we have done duriong all this course!
Our knowledge is like a plant, we have to take care of it and nourish it day after day.
I divided my mindmap in FORMAL and INFORMAL. In the first part I dealt with school, university, and private courses I took during my life and the Informal part gave me problems because I didn't know what to write in this area. Then I thought at what helped me outside the "academic world"during this years and I filled the schema.
What is important to say is that culture and knowledge are privileges no matter the way we learn them!
sabato 19 maggio 2007
lunedì 7 maggio 2007
Wikipedia
This second part of the semester during Prof Sarah's English lessons we concentrated particularly on blogs. Nevertheless, once we had to fulfil a page on Edu Tech Wiki. This task reminded me the first part of the semester when we worked only on wiki pages. I had an hard time during the first semester because I didn't really know how a wiki worked but I lukily knew the HTML computer language that helped me to write in our wiki site.
A couple of weeks ago I had to face Wikipedia again. I had to add new information to a stub page about Informal Learning and I found it easier because I knew how it worked.
I think that it is completely different when you have to add information to a public site instead of to our Tulane wiki site because you feel more responsible. You are writing something that is going to be read by thousands of people and you cannot get wrong.
Talking about the difference between writing on a wiki page and on a blog, I think that writing on a blog is less academic and also more amusing because you feel free to write whatever you want in a colloquial English, whereas when you are writing on the Wiki you are not asked to give your personal opinion and you have to quote other people's thoughts, findings or researches.
Eventually, I do not mean that blogs are better than wiki pages. I'm only trying to point out that they are different and that it's important to know how they both work.
A couple of weeks ago I had to face Wikipedia again. I had to add new information to a stub page about Informal Learning and I found it easier because I knew how it worked.
I think that it is completely different when you have to add information to a public site instead of to our Tulane wiki site because you feel more responsible. You are writing something that is going to be read by thousands of people and you cannot get wrong.
Talking about the difference between writing on a wiki page and on a blog, I think that writing on a blog is less academic and also more amusing because you feel free to write whatever you want in a colloquial English, whereas when you are writing on the Wiki you are not asked to give your personal opinion and you have to quote other people's thoughts, findings or researches.
Eventually, I do not mean that blogs are better than wiki pages. I'm only trying to point out that they are different and that it's important to know how they both work.
mercoledì 11 aprile 2007
YouTube
Few days ago an article on BBC News talked about web experts calling for a code of conduct in the blogosphere.
This need is due to the bad experience that the female blogger Kathy Sierra had. She was the victim of death threats and photomontages in very poor taste in her blog.
This is not an isolate episode, in Italy, too, bad episodes of bullysm have become famous thanks to their online publications in websites such as YouTube, www.metello.com, http://scuolazoo.blogspot.com or http://www.padovarulez.com.
I think that websites like YouTube can be really nice and also useful because they give you the possibility of watching American or English TV programms and listening to colloquial English. They are an efficient tool in order to learn foreign languages but their use has to be clever and respectful. There are some limits that cannot be exceeded.
Tania
Ban cyber-bullying clips
Today I was reading Il Mattino (our local newspaper) and there was an article about the online harassment of English teachers filmed by students and put in Youtube. Then I went to The Guardian and found the article....have a look...
Debbie Andalo and Press Association
Tuesday April 10, 2007
Websites such as YouTube and ratemyteachers.com should ban video clips of teachers or pupils who have been the target of cyber-bullying, the education secretary, Alan Johnson, will tell a teaching union conference today.
Mr Johnson will tell the National Union of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) conference in Belfast that such websites have a moral and social obligation to take action on the new form of harassment.
He is due to say this afternoon: "Cyber-bullying is cruel and relentless, able to follow a child beyond the school gates and into their homes.
"The online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer."
New powers for teachers to confiscate mobile phones in the classroom, which came into force last week, will go some way towards preventing pupils from "maliciously" filming teachers or pupils during lessons, he will say.
But the education secretary will also say that websites could help to reduce cyber-bullying by refusing to accept the video footage in the first place, because "without the online approval which appeals to the innate insecurities of the bully, such sinister activities would have much less attraction".
He will tell the NASUWT delegates: "I am therefore calling on the providers of these sites to take firmer action to block or remove offensive school videos, in the same way that they have commendably cut pornographic content. By removing the platform, we'll blunt the appeal."
The NASUWT is the latest of the teacher unions to call on the government to take action to stamp out cyber-bullying.
There have been similar pleas from the National Union of Teachers, and last week the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) urged Mr Johnson to hold talks with internet site owners to see what they could do to prevent pupils posting adverse comments or videos about teachers on their sites.
If that had little impact on reducing the cases of cyber-bullying, the government should bring in legislation to force websites to police postings on their sites more effectively, the ATL said.
Mary Bousted, the ATL's general secretary, said: "We are particularly pleased at the secretary of state's quick response to demands from ATL that the growing problem of cyber-bullying in our schools and colleges be tackled.
"We now urge mobile and internet providers to keep to their side of the bargain and better protect our members from this type of bullying by providing easily accessible complaints procedures to register concerns and ensure that this growing problem in our schools is stamped out."
The charity Beatbullying said sites should collate video clips which are used to bully individuals in case they can be used in any future criminal prosecutions.
A spokesman said: "The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) says that YouTube has a 'moral obligation' to delete offending video clips, however we argue that this moral obligation extends to reporting criminal activity to the authorities or at least storing the clips as potential evidence in a criminal investigation.
"Deleting this potential evidence could be interpreted as perverting the course of justice. YouTube would do well to modify its current policies before the state forces regulation upon them. "The most important thing for those involved in creating these offensive videos to remember is that if you upload a criminal or immoral video onto YouTube, you are leaving a digital fingerprint of your crime."
Mr Johnson will tell the National Union of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) conference in Belfast that such websites have a moral and social obligation to take action on the new form of harassment.
He is due to say this afternoon: "Cyber-bullying is cruel and relentless, able to follow a child beyond the school gates and into their homes.
"The online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer."
New powers for teachers to confiscate mobile phones in the classroom, which came into force last week, will go some way towards preventing pupils from "maliciously" filming teachers or pupils during lessons, he will say.
But the education secretary will also say that websites could help to reduce cyber-bullying by refusing to accept the video footage in the first place, because "without the online approval which appeals to the innate insecurities of the bully, such sinister activities would have much less attraction".
He will tell the NASUWT delegates: "I am therefore calling on the providers of these sites to take firmer action to block or remove offensive school videos, in the same way that they have commendably cut pornographic content. By removing the platform, we'll blunt the appeal."
The NASUWT is the latest of the teacher unions to call on the government to take action to stamp out cyber-bullying.
There have been similar pleas from the National Union of Teachers, and last week the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) urged Mr Johnson to hold talks with internet site owners to see what they could do to prevent pupils posting adverse comments or videos about teachers on their sites.
If that had little impact on reducing the cases of cyber-bullying, the government should bring in legislation to force websites to police postings on their sites more effectively, the ATL said.
Mary Bousted, the ATL's general secretary, said: "We are particularly pleased at the secretary of state's quick response to demands from ATL that the growing problem of cyber-bullying in our schools and colleges be tackled.
"We now urge mobile and internet providers to keep to their side of the bargain and better protect our members from this type of bullying by providing easily accessible complaints procedures to register concerns and ensure that this growing problem in our schools is stamped out."
The charity Beatbullying said sites should collate video clips which are used to bully individuals in case they can be used in any future criminal prosecutions.
A spokesman said: "The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) says that YouTube has a 'moral obligation' to delete offending video clips, however we argue that this moral obligation extends to reporting criminal activity to the authorities or at least storing the clips as potential evidence in a criminal investigation.
"Deleting this potential evidence could be interpreted as perverting the course of justice. YouTube would do well to modify its current policies before the state forces regulation upon them. "The most important thing for those involved in creating these offensive videos to remember is that if you upload a criminal or immoral video onto YouTube, you are leaving a digital fingerprint of your crime."
Tania
lunedì 2 aprile 2007
Bloglines
According to Wikipedia RSS is “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed readers or aggregators: the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.”In class we have used Bloglines, a new aggregator for blogs and other news feeds based on RSS and Atom technologies.
However, unlike other aggregators that download posts directly to your own computer Bloglines gives you the possibility of accessing your feeds from any computer, not just the computer on which you have installed another type of RSS reader. In Bloglines blog entries are downloaded and updated directly on the server.
In my opinion aggregators such as Bloglines are extremely useful in order to reduce the time needed to regularly check websites and blogs for updates, therefore, the final result in a sort of personal agenda always updated.
However, I think that I won’t often use aggregators out of this class because I don't have a blog. I do not regularly take part to blog discussions and I keep in touch with my friends abroad only using Messenger, Skype or Bebo. Therefore, I surf the net just only when I am looking for some specific information.
Tania
lunedì 26 marzo 2007
Social bookmarks
At the beginning I found del.icio.us (as you have already read in the previous post) pretty difficult because I didn't know what to do, how it worked and even reading a lot of times Prof. Sarah's instructions I didn't understand the purpose of the task and the website. After working on del.icio.us I found it extremely useful because on the one hand it gives you the possibility of finding only what you are looking for instead of getting lost in a huge amount of websites, links, etc; it works like a filter and it's a sort of sponge. On the other hand it's really handy because you can save your favourite websites, look for them in every computer (if you don't forget password and username:-))) and share them with other people. If I only knew del.icio.us before!! I lost so many hours in front of my computer looking for websites that could be useful to my dissertation!
In order to read my classmates' choices I went to del.icio.us--->your network, where I immediately found the websites they saved. Considering that we have looked for topics related to our English classes I found them really useful to our studies even if they don't reflect our personal interests (this is the task, though!).
The most clicked websites are about:
In order to read my classmates' choices I went to del.icio.us--->your network, where I immediately found the websites they saved. Considering that we have looked for topics related to our English classes I found them really useful to our studies even if they don't reflect our personal interests (this is the task, though!).
The most clicked websites are about:
- how to write and present essays, thesis or dissertations (e.g. Elena's choice; Ale_aia's choice)
- English or American pronounciation and accents, (I think that the Speech accent archive website chosen by Viola is really interesting because it can be used by native or non-native English speakers to analyse the accents of different English speakers);
- grammar and punctuation: with regard to this topic Erica Buzzaccarin's Good grammar and Punctuation is really helpful because it's an online writing lab with exercises on punctuation and different grammar skills;
- English slangs and colloquial English; (e.g. Alida's choice or Martina's choice);
These are the most frequent topics looked for by our class, however, I think that Martina's Online Etymology Dictionary and Acronym and Abbreviation Dictionary are among the websites that I prefer because their topics are different, clever and curious!
Tania
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