...surfing the net as detectives

Communication has been improving a lot up to now. Nowadays we have many possibilities to exchange information, which I think is a real privilege for us as people of the 21st century.
Man has been working hard to improve knowledge and to find ways to spread and share old and new information. In particular, telecommunication is spreading so fast that we can hardly be informed about every enhancement.

Internet is one of the best inventions for communication in my opinion. It provides many different sources of information and everybody has the chance to express freely and add a personal contribution to general knowledge. Today the amount of information on the net is really huge, almost unlimited, and Internet has become one of the most used sources for research.
But this freedom can become dangerous when the information you find is confusing, wrong or even voluntarily misleading. So it becomes necessary to judge what you come across and verify if the source is reliable or not.

Apart from books, I often use Internet when I need to do research. Of course, I’m well aware that I may find all kinds of information, so I always need to check if what I’m reading can be trustworthy. I usually do this by doing extra research on the author of the essay I’m reading or the organization which published the article. Usually big names grant us reliability.
Another way I learnt is to focus on the domains: for example, if you look for documents which end with “.edu” or “.ac.uk” you’re quite sure that they come from British or American Universities (especially if they are “.pdf” files).
Sometimes the layout of the website can be useful, as well. Usually, sites which are clear, clean and well structured are more likely to be official or at least “more serious”. In detail, I tend to trust more those websites which add bibliography (or give a short biography of the author) and those with useful official links.
Moreover, another thing I tend to check is if the site is regularly updated or has been recently updated: you could come across interesting contents which are no more valid just because they’re old or they have changed.

The pages I read about judging online sources gave me the opportunity to reflect about the criteria I use and understand how important it is to pay attention to them. I had the chance to learn some new criteria concerning the accuracy of information and the main goals of the site and the author, which I will surely use in the future. However, the aspect that mostly caught my attention is authorship: I discovered the “Internet Directory of Published Writers”, which I think can be really useful if you need to be sure that the article you intend to use for your work is reliable and relevant.

...do YouTube? I do...

Hey mates, I’m so sorry I’m late in posting this e-tivity but I wasn’t at home during the weekend and I couldn’t find a way to even post a message because the connection didn’t work for some days.

This post is about YouTube, one of the most important websites of the net, which was thought to watch and share videos by simply uploading them for free. What made YouTube so interesting at the beginning is that everybody can watch the videos there, no matter what kind of files they are. Afterwards, people started appreciating it for the huge quantity of material this site can provide. You can find videos about every kind of topic; you just need to write a word on the search engine and click on it to choose from a very long list of links to files of all sorts.

I started using YouTube as soon as my friends told me about it. I can find whatever I need, believe me. Sometimes searching is not really easy…or better, immediate…but if you search with the right words and choose carefully from the list, I’m sure you’ll get what you desire.
In particular, I starting searching this site for rare music videos and pieces of concerts. Moreover, I searched for films and TV shows. There I soon realized that you can find videos from all over the world and I often love to compare the voices of American or British actors with those of their Italian or Spanish dubbers (I had real fun watching cartoons by Walt Disney in various languages, as well!).

I think YouTube can also be a very useful site to improve your language skills. Many videos (and I would say the majority of them) are in English, so they can be very useful to get your ear used to normal-speed English conversations or learn new words and expressions.
I visited TeacherTube, a sort of branch of YouTube, which provides only educationally focused videos and I think it’s really interesting. I didn’t know it existed, but I immediately bookmarked it. I think I will visit it a lot because it gives us the chance to go straight to what we need as learners. In this way we can save time from searching and choosing on the general YouTube search engine.

In my career as a language learner, YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/ has been one of the main tools to learn while having fun!

...podcasting

When I first read the title of our e-tivity 6 I was a little worried. I started thinking: “Podcasts…what are they? Will I be supposed to use another tool for feed aggregation, posting or doing something still unknown to me?”. But soon I realized that I had already listened to that word before. But where or when? I still can’t remember. Maybe I just used podcasts without knowing what they exactly were. Anyway, the most important thing is that NOW I have a clear idea of what a podcast is: it is a media file which can be downloaded from the net to your personal computer or mp3 player. In this way you can listen to or watch it whenever you prefer or just when you need it. This kind of file is spreading a lot lately and many sites offer their own podcasts about a huge amount of topics (radio or TV shows, private messages, university lectures, amateur music groups and so on).

Apart from music, TV and radio, I think that podcasts can be really useful for us as English learners. A huge quantity of them is in English (I would say the majority of them), so you can find whatever you need to improve your listening and comprehension skills. Moreover, by doing that you can improve your pronunciation, as well. So…no excuse! This is a real revolution in learning a foreign language in my opinion. Some years ago the only way to listen to mothertongue speakers was going to their country. Now everything can be found in the net. In particular, if you go to sites dedicated to ESL learning you can even choose the topics you prefer and avoid those you find boring. Isn’t this great?

There’s only one thing I don’t fully understand about downloading these files onto my mp3 player: do people walk around the city or go jogging with English listening exercises on their mp3 player? It seems a bit unusual to me. I think I’ll prefer the streaming option.

While searching for podcasts, I found three useful sites for ESL learners. They are quite similar because they all offer material for ESL learners and teachers. I think they’re useful because they’re all good sites and provide a lot of podcasts and other activities. They are:

www.eslpod.com
Here you find more than 300 podcasts on various topics with related explanations. Actors speak quite slowly, so the audio files are not that difficult (even if sometimes it doesn’t seem a natural conversation). There are full oral explanations given by a guide who makes words and expressions clear to the listener. Listening to the guide is like being in a classroom with a mothertongue teacher.

www.listen-to-english.com
This is a blog with many podcasts about interesting and unusual topics. The texts are clearly read and there are also some vocabulary notes or quizzes related to the audio files. Moreover, you can read the transcription of the text. The site is updated every week with a new post (text + podcast).

www.podcastinenglish.com
The site offers many audio files, divided in 3 levels. You can listen or download them and you have related transcriptions, worksheets with answers and vocabulary tasks. Many audio files are interviews and everything sounds spontaneous and natural. People interact a lot and it makes the files interesting to learn communication devices.

...social bookmarking: tag to live, live to tag

Last week we learnt another interesting tool, which can be very useful for our e-learning process. It’s de.licio.us, a website created for social bookmarking. Your question will probably be: what’s social bookmarking? Well, instead of bookmarking your favourite websites and blogs on your own computer at home, you can use this site to post them in a sort of community, where everybody can save the URL of the sites they found interesting while surfing the net. In particular, we used de.licio.us to create a list of many useful links to English e-learning resources. I think it’s a good chance to compare our results and find out interesting websites we can just visit once or we can use more frequently as reference sources to improve our English skills.

I was asked to choose one from each of my classmates’ bookmarks and go visit it. Many of us picked the same websites (the most common were those of BBC or on-line dictionaries) or focused on the same topics (for example, many of us posted feeds concerning listening activities). I read all the notes my peers wrote to introduce their sites carefully. I think we all chose useful sites and blogs and I was really happy when I realized that everybody selected at least one fun study site. I think that the best way to improve a language is to play with it and use it in a relaxed entertaining way. Then, after choosing and visiting one site for each peer, I decided to write down my personal top five, giving you the links and a brief summary. In this way, if you’re interested in one of them (or maybe all of them…who knows?) you can go straight to the source. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

ELISA suggested:
http://www.elllo.org/
This site offers many recorded conversations and interviews about various topics. It is a very useful website for those who need to improve their English listening skills. After listening to each audio file you can test yourself through a related quiz and you find the complete transcription, as well. This can be very useful for self-study, because all the tools you need are provided by the site.

GIOVANNA suggested:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
This website is an on-line writing lab. It suggests you how to write different kinds of texts properly, such as academic papers, professional and technical texts. You find many downloadable PowerPoint files concerning different text-types, and there are also good links to grammar resources.

VALENTINA suggested:
http://web.ku.edu/idea/index.htm
It’s so fascinating to see how the English pronunciation changes from one country to another! In this website you find many recordings of native speakers coming from all over the world, so you can listen to many example of different accents and pronunciations or, as they call them, “English language dialects”. Just click on the continent and then to the country to download the mp3 and the transcription.

EVA suggested:
http://www.readprint.com/
This is an on-line library offering a wide variety of free books ready to be printed. You can look through a long list of authors to find the author you desire. By clicking on the name, you’ll go to an introductory page with biography, notes and a list of downloadable works divided into fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays.

ALICE suggested:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
This site is an acronym and abbreviation dictionary. In the introduction they say that it is “the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms”. I think it’s very useful when you don’t understand their meaning or when you want to check if they are the same in English and your own language (they are often common mistakes!).

...halloween

Halloween takes its origins from a Celtic pre-Christian celebration and does not belong to our own culture. I think that the majority of Italians ignores its real meaning: it’s just a chance to dress up, go party and have fun. Children are more involved because they love dressing up as witches, zombies or vampires and spend the night outside, asking for candies from house to house. But this is not what Halloween really is and represents in Anglo Saxon countries.
Actually, I’m not against Halloween and I’m convinced that we can celebrate it, but we need to know much more about it, in order to become aware of what we are doing. This can help us focus on cultural differences and keep our own tradition alive.

...order, please!

This picture is called “Order please!” and I chose it to introduce this post about tidiness.
During our last lesson in the lab I discovered the existence of a new technological tool: the feed aggregator. Well, since I’m not used to blogging I think it’s quite normal that I had never heard of it before. Nevertheless, I have to say that it is very useful and easy to manage.
Before last Monday I had already bookmarked each blog of my group on my pc: you know, I love traditional approaches, even if I understand that, apart from my blog, I need to update also my technical knowledge. In fact, this tool allows me to see if the blogs I subscribed to have been updated by simply looking to an easy page, where I can find all the new information that has been added. In this way you can save a lot of time! Otherwise you should go to your bookmarks, select each single blog and see if it’s been updated (with the risk of finding every time the same old stuff!) With Bloglines (the program we used) you can also organize all your blogs and sites in different playlists, so everything is more clear and neat. So, if you want to tidy up your virtual mess, check it out to www.bloglines.com!