Judge your sources!

Many times I've been looking for information through the web in order to retrieve useful material to complete my scholastic and academic tasks but very rarely I've been checking the reliability of the sources. I'm a very lazy person and I have to admit that looking at the links Sarah put in e-tivity8 I went a little bit crazy! There were so many things to read! However I found a lot of useful tips I had never thought of before. I didn't know anything about meta search-engines like Mamma which helps you collect the returns of other search-engines, so that you can have a more complete view of what the web offers. As regards essay banks, I came across some of these material collections many times but I never dared to use them for my purposes because you never know who wrote those things and, as it is pointed out in the University of Essex site, essays banks are a "short-cut to plagiarism". I always prefer to complete these kind of tasks on my own and not thanks to someone else.

After reading "Practical steps in evaluating internet resources" I also realised that the publishing body is important. A site's affiliations and sponsors, as well as the possibility to send messages to the webmaster, are fundamental to judge the officiality of a web page. Another thing I never do is to check the authorship of a certain document: it never occurs to me to search authors' reliability with a search-engine like Altavista. So I tried to put in the name of Bruce Harley, who is the person who maintains the San Diego state university site and the first return it gave me was his personal home page where there are all the necessary information to contact him.
I think that all these tips help us not to run into bad and useless information and materials and if at the beginning they seem to be time demanding they are steps that have to be taken if we want our works to be valuable.

WeTube!

In YouTube anyone can post a video and everybody can see it. Is it a bad or a good thing? I think it can be both. There are so many videos you can watch to know what's happening in the world, for learning purposes or just for fun. But there are also a lot of stupid, useless and vulgar videos you can run into while you are looking for something else. So, the important thing is to learn how to filter this huge amount of information. However, YouTube is great: you can upload your own videos and share them with the rest of the world.

I think we can definitely use this tools to improve our language skills, watching and listening to videos in English, which don't necessarily have to be specifically about English learning. The best for us would be to search a wide range of topics in order to get in touch with various aspects of the language. I took a look at TeacherTube and I saw that there are many interesting channels like World languages and Writing but also videos about science, sport and cooking.

The video I chose is taken by "An Inconvenient truth" and it talks about global warming which, in my opinion, is one of the most urgent issues to be solved.

Listening to podcasts

Before this e-tiviy I had never thought of downloading an English podcast in order to listen to it with my Mp3 player. Actually, I didn't know they existed. I always listen to English music and watch films in original language but I found out that podcasts are something different. Lots of lyrics talk about the same things and haven't a wide range of vocabulary and verbs. As regards films, I tend to pay attention to actors' mouth movements when I don't understand something and I don't think this is a good habit. With podcasts you can (and you have to) focus only on what you hear and if there's something you don't understand you keep on listening to it over and over again till you get the meaning clearly.

After spending some time on the web I found three interesting sites about podcasts. The first is English as a Second Language Podcast. It provides audio files about everyday life situations, entertainment, business and so on. Some of them teach you how to describe common medical emergencies in English, or what you should say when you arrive for business appointment, for example. Others are about American culture in general and talk about its folklore, its cities or give some advice if you want to travel to the U.S.A. Each podcast has some explanatory written sentences that let you know what it talk about and which idioms you will learn listening to it.

The second one is The Bob and Rob show and it contains weekly English lessons with a large range of topics: animals, culture, education, health, food. In each podcast Bob and Rob talk about these topics as they were two friends having a everyday conversation. Therefore they are very fluent and the register is very colloquial; what is more you can listen to different accents, grammar, idioms and slang both in British and American English.

The third one is Voice of America which provides podcasts in special English, for people whose first language is not English but I think it is useful also for more advanced learners because its articles are very interesting and some subject are quite complex. There are different topics (agriculture, health, education) for each day of the week and the latest new from around the world. The podcasts have short sentences, a limited vocabulary and a slow pace of speaking but I think that it represents a useful exercise for us too to improve our English. Maybe it will not help us in our listening skills but it represents a good source of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions.

All things considered, I think that podcasts are useful to learn English because they give us the opportunity to listen to people speaking in English, which is something we don't do very often. The more we plunge in all the aspects and different ways of get in touch with English, the better we'll learn it.

It's Del.icio.us!

Social bookmarking? Before last wednesday I didn't know that bookmarking could be social. What does it mean? Well, you can share all your favourite sites with the rest of the world and anyone can see what yours are. By putting a brief description of the site you chose you can let everybody know what it is about and in this way, when you check other people's choices, you know which are worth visiting and which are not. Are you looking for a website that talks about environment, for example? You put "environment" as tag word and you'll see a list of the most clicked sites about this matter. One may ask what's the difference between "Del.icio.us" and "Google". The answer is simple: the first one gives you a list of sites that are of some interest because someone chose them and decided to share them with other people, whereas searching through the list provided by Google you could waste a lot of time before finding something useful. With del.icio.us you can take advantage of other people's experience and optimize the time you spend on the net.

I visited the sites the other members of my group put on Del.icio.us and I found some interesting and useful things for us who are studying English. I really liked "World English" posted by Elena and Marta and I have to say that I lost myself exploring it. It is full of useful things like readings, grammar exercises and tests, vocabulary activities and also puzzles and quizzes. The "Classic short stories" posted by Martina is so nice! There is a very large number of stories written by the most famous authors all around the world but they are written in English, of course. I really enjoyed searching through them and printing those I liked the most. Then I visited "Study abroad programs" posted by Sara because my dream is to go abroad and spend there a lot of time to study English (the first of my "Top places list" is the United States).

All things considered I think that social bookmarking is a very useful tool for my activities on the net because it speeds up my searches and I can use it also when I'm not at home in front of my computer and I have to use a public workspace.

Halloween!

Before writing a post about Halloween I decided to look for some information because the only thing I knew was that Anglo-Saxon people like to dress up and carve pumpkins on this occasion (a bit stereotyped belief) but I didn't know anything about the religious and cultural background of this holiday. I looked for it in Wikipedia and I found out a lot of interesting things: it originated in Ireland and it was a sort of autumn festival called "Samhain Night". Later, it was brought to America by Irish people following the Irish Potato Famine.

Then I asked myself: and what about Jack-o'-lantern?. It can be traced back to an Irish legend, too! It was a man who tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil made him eternally wander the earth at night.

After knowing all these things I started to wonder about its meaning in our country. Does it make sense to celebrate Halloween in Italy? I don't think so. Despite the fact that I really like most of the things that come from the States I believe that this is only a pretext used to make people spend their money in decorations, disguises, and other things. This commercialization exists also in the United States but I think that, at least, they take this celebration seriously, because it is part of their culture. They prepare this holiday with care and dedication and they organise many events, such as the "Universal's Halloween Horror Nights" in Orlando and Hollywood or the "Village Halloween Parade" in New York.

Does any of these things exist in Italy? The answer is obvious and all things considerd I think that we should be aware of our traditions rather than badly copy those of other countries.

Feeds and feed aggregators

Before last wednesday I didn't know anything about feeds and feed aggregators. Now I think that a tool like Bloglines is very useful to keep a precise and updated list of the websites and blogs a person is most interested in. Every time I found something interesting I used to bookmark the site on my pc but when I looked at the list created in this way I couldn't see if there was any new information. Feed aggregators keep the list updated for you and in this way you know which sites are worth visiting and which ones you can pass by because you already know that there's nothing new. Then there is the possibility to create playlists, which is a very useful way to organise information because you can divide and collect different types of information. For example I have a playlist for our English course, one for online newspapers, one for blogs regarding environmental issues and one for my hobbies and passions, like cinema and TV series. I hope that I will be able to enlarge my lists in bloglines, in order to be able to get as much information as possible in a quick and easy way.