Viva La Vida???

I’ve always appreciated the music played by Coldplay since their first hit Yellow, which is one of my favourite song!!!

Viva La Vida is certainly more complicated than Yellow. I remembered that the first time I listened to it I started wondering if the song had only one meaning or everyone was free to give the song a personal meaning. Indeed, there are many possible explanations.

In my opinion, the song talks about the unpredictability of life: things change very quickly and everything we made can be lost in a tick of time! For this reason, it’s necessary to reflect upon what we do in our life, trying to create something that will last more than a “castle of sand”. Moreover, we should surround ourselves with people who really care about us and won’t suddenly change their mind leaving us alone like a “puppet on a lonely string”.

Sometimes understanding the meaning is not essential. I can appreciate a song for other reasons, such as the melody and, as I’m studying English, the words used in the lyric: I always learn at least one new word in each song I listen to!

Ilaria.

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My next target: Keep On Learning!!!

Now I’m realizing that I’m at the end of my University career! I’m attending the very last English lessons and in a week nobody will tell me what I should do to improve my skills. After the end of the academic lessons, the risk of feeling lost and losing my linguistic knowledge is very high! For this reason, I think a mindmap of my PLE is very useful because it will remind me about all the means I can use to keep on practicing the English language.

My PLE focuses on four aspects: tools, activities, context and people. First of all, my mindmap aims to show where I can improve my English (context) and it provides a list of all the activities that I usually do: reading, listening, writing and gathering information. Then, there is the part concerning the formal and informal tools that I can use to do the different activities. The majority of the tools that I wrote on the mindmap are connected to the Internet, which I think will play an important role in my future learning activities. Finally, there is a part focusing on the people that helped (e.g. teachers) or will help me (e.g. classmates, future colleagues at work, friends…) to better my skills.

This mindmap is not fixed and there is still the possibility to add something, especially concerning the tools I can find on the Internet. I hope my map will change and extend as I improve my skills. I really hope this map will help me to keep on learning and making progress!!!

Ilaria.

What happens to my personal data???

Nowadays Internet is part of our everyday life. We use it every day without reflecting on how much it is changing our way of living. On the Internet we buy things with our credit cards, we keep in touch with friends through emails, we write blogs exchanging personal opinions and feelings with other people, we upload photos,… In short, every time we use the Internet we put a little part of us online! Indeed, our personal information is always required, for example when we want to create an email account or have access to a particular website.

I’ve always wondered where my personal data are stored and who can have access to them. I don’t really know what happens to them! They could be stolen and used by someone else with bad intentions. That’s why I usually try not to register on websites that seem to be unreliable. But sometimes it’s impossible to avoid the registration.

I don’t think people should avoid using the Internet because they’re afraid that their personal information can be spread without their consent. Internet is a very useful tool and everybody should have the possibility to take advantage of all the service it offers! I mean, why should I avoid using a social network like Facebook that, for example, allows me to stay in contact with friends who are abroad? Just because I don’t know what happens to the information I put on it? I believe these kinds of website have the duty to respect the privacy of users, who should have control over their personal data and for example be asked if they want to allow other people to have access to their information (as suggested on the article about Facebook and Privacy Rights).

There should be some more specific rules concerning personal data online. In the meanwhile, we can protect every little part of us we put online by attributing authorship to our writings, photos or videos and pay attention to the amount of personal data we share online by considering if it’s really necessary to make them public.

Ilaria

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Let's google our docs!

This week I had the opportunity to learn something more about Google Docs. I had heard about it before, but I never tried to use it… Maybe because I was waiting for somebody to teach me how to use it: I didn’t know it’s so easy to work with Google Docs! I decided to have a look at Take a tour to see what we can do with this tool. I think the most interesting activities we can do with Google Docs are the following:

* have access to our documents from any computer;
* invite people to work on a document and make changes together, in real time;
* avoid problems concerning local hard drive failures or power outages: documents are saved online;

* use templates to create our documents.

Then, Google Docs is really easy to use because it’s based on familiar symbols and toolbar buttons. I think this is enough to convince everybody to google their docs!
Ilaria.

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What kind of style???

I’ve always had some problems with citations! Writing references to our sources is supposed to be an easy task, something that we do without thinking because we have done it many times. Actually, writing references is far from an automatic activity for the majority of students! I think the problem is that every book we read uses a different style and as a consequence we tend to be a little confused. The two websites that Sarah mentions in E-tivity 6 are clear: each of them provides the basic guidelines for citing sources and offers some useful examples. We just have to choose which style we prefer and follow it. It is necessary to make an explicit choice because the two styles are quite different from each other: we can’t use both of them at the same time. For example, there are some differences concerning references to books. According to the APA style, it is better to use initials for the author’s names and italics for the title of the book. The year of publication is written immediately after the author’s name. On the contrary, in the format elaborated by MLA, the author’s name is not abbreviated, the title is underlined and the year of publication is put at the end, after the publisher. Moreover, I noticed another difference concerning in-text citations. If we use APA style, we need to specify the year of publication when we quote or paraphrase from another work, while, in the format by MLA, the year of publication is not required and the number of page is not preceded by “p.”
I think it’s really important to choose one style and use it in every academic paper we write. If we change the style every time according to the advice of the teacher we are writing for, we risk mixing different styles and we’ll never learn to make references properly. This is my case: for my BA thesis I used the style preferred by my supervisor, which was more similar to APA style than MLA style. However, there were some differences: for example, for the in-text citations I used to put the direct quotation between inverted commas and then the author’s surname, year of publication and number of page in brackets (Author, year of publication: n.page).
All things considered, I prefer APA style because it’s more similar to the style I used in the past. Thus, I’ll follow the guidelines provided by the website, I’ll memorize them and, in this way, I hope writing references will be easier for me!

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Research Article Analysis - part 2

The research article I’m analysing consists of a well-structured text that has an hourglass shape. There is an abstract that introduces the topic and an introduction in which the author talks about the SMS technology in general and outlines the focus of the essay. The introduction is followed by the body of the essay that consists of 3 parts and provides a series of arguments based on statistics and useful examples. Finally, there is a conclusion that summarizes the main points that result from the survey. In each part of the article, the arguments are linked in a logical way by using metalinguistic signalling devices: for example in Introduction 1.2, note the use of the conjuncts “nonetheless”, “in fact” and “however”. The use of these links allows the author to achieve cohesion. Expressions like as “we suggested at the start” and the use of “this”/ “these” (e.g. “on this basis”, “in these types of messages”) are used to make reference to something that is written before in the text. In this way, the different parts of the text are connected. As a result, it is easy for the readers to follow the author’s flow of ideas. In general, the writing is clear and simple and can be understood by common readers. However, it has to be noted that a certain level of knowledge about SMS technology and linguistic features of technologically-mediated discourse is required in order to understand the references made by the author to other works and studies.

I think any kind of text, even blog posts, should follow this kind of structure because it really helps readers to understand the text in an easy way. However, it is often difficult to respect a fixed structure when we write a post because, on our blogs, we tend to be more spontaneous. Generally, I first introduce the topic of the post; second, there is the body of the post where I support my ideas and finally I always try to conclude establishing a contact with my readers, for example asking them for their personal opinions.
We can avoid using a specific structure on condition that we organize our ideas in a clear way, for example using conjuncts and coordinators, because the reader should always find it easy to follow the flow of our ideas!

I don't want to be a "plagiarist"!!!

When we talk about “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPR) we usually refer to those laws that were developed to respect the rights of the inventors of new tools and machines or of the artists. What about ideas and words used to express ideas and opinions? Even words and ideas have their original source and it’s really important to respect it! If we don’t attribute words and ideas to their original source we become guilty of plagiarism. For this reason we must pay attention to the words we use every time we write something that is not a shopping list! This means we must avoid plagiarism not only in our academic papers but also in our blog posts. Sometimes we find something really interesting in other people’s blogs that is very difficult not to copy and paste, especially when we realize other people express what we think in a better way. In an article published by The Boston Globe I read that blog plagiarism has become a very widespread phenomenon: every day, people read and steal other people’s blog entries, no matter how personal or famous a blog is. We should avoid doing so. I think a blog is something that we create to have the possibility to say what we think using our own words: copying someone else’s words doesn’t make sense! We can refer to other people’s opinions and ideas without using their words, for example paraphrasing or summarizing them. We can also use quotations and make explicit reference to the original source. Moreover, we should tell the reader where the photos or images we use on the blog come from, writing links to the source. In short, in our blog posts we should follow the same rules we usually respect when we write an academic essay. To have a general idea about the good way to write in our own words, have a look at this website “ABC of quotations and your own words and references versus plagiarism”. In this way, we obtain something that is personal and reflects our way of thinking and express our opinions.
Then we should protect our blog from other people’s plagiarism! As far as this problem is concerned, “Plagiarism Today”, a blog dedicated to the issue of plagiarism online, says that plagiarism can be reduced in many ways, for example by putting a copyright notice on the blog. We really need to protect our English blogs: we are working hard on them, nobody can copy them without making reference! Do you agree with me?

Ilaria.

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Was that research article reliable???

On the internet, it’s really difficult to find exactly what you are interested in, especially if you don’t know how to do your search. When I was preparing my Tesi Triennale on SMS language, I didn’t know all the tools that are available on the Internet (I’m discovering them now!) and so I really wasted a lot of time in surfing the Net. But I think I was lucky because I found a very effective article that is still published on TXT2NITE.COM, in the sms forum of the website. This essay, “Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people's text-messages”, is written by Dr Crispin Thurlow and it is an analysis of text messages sent by teenagers. The research article starts with an abstract that explains the aim of the research: the essay aims to examine the linguistic forms and communicative functions in a corpus of 544 participants' actual text-messages. It’s a quantitative study based on a quite large corpus of text messages. The data arising from the analysis of this corpus are interpreted taking into consideration many aspects, which can concern for example the socio-linguistic context, the technological characteristics, and the linguistic features. At the end of the article there is a conclusion that summarizes the significant observations emerged from the research.

I think this research article can be considered an authoritative source of information. First of all, we know the name of the author and we can easily found further information about him, about his status and his publications. Secondly, there are many references to other authors, books and surveys. In this version of the essay, we can also find a detailed bibliography. Then, the whole essay is protected by copyright.
If you are interested in this topic, you can certainly use this research article as a reliable source in your academic papers. This kind of articles can be very useful, especially in this case: there aren’t many academic works (I mean “traditional books”) dealing with SMS language, so the sources found on the Internet become really precious!

Ilaria.

What kind of information do we find on the Internet?

How do we evaluate reliability and authority of information we find on the Internet? This is a good question!

It’s important to think about it; we really need to have some criteria to follow in order to filter information on the Internet. The list we elaborated on Wednesday can be really useful to our research. Taking into consideration that list, I tried to evaluate the sources of information about "personal learning environment" that I found using Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Scholar.
I noticed that some blogs can be considered valuable sources of information: they show more “serious” graphics and layout than those showed by other personal blogs, they offer information about the author (even biographies), and they’re protected by copyright. I think blogs can be seen as the starting point of our research because reading blogs we can find the name of other authors, websites, books… It’s an easy way to know what other people think about a specific topic.
Then I used Google Books. The information I found is certainly reliable. Indeed, using this tool you find books and books satisfy almost all the criteria of our list!
For me, the most useful tool is Google Scholar. On Google Books we can find only parts of books, while on Google Scholar we find complete essays, journal articles, PDF documents … Moreover, it’s easier to choose what interests us because these kind of documents usually have an abstract: we just need to read it to understand if the document is what we’re looking for.
Taking into consideration the above observations, I decided that, from today onwards, my research on the internet will consist of 4 steps! I’ll use:
1. Google (especially Wikipedia) and Google Blogs to have a general idea and see what other people can tell me about the topic of my research
2. del.icio.us to find detailed information about authors, websites, books…
3. Google Books to see if a specific book is published online and to read bibliographies that allow me to find out other books, authors…
4. Google Scholar to see if I can find some complete documents published online.

I hope this method will work!!! :-)

Ilaria.

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del.icio.us: store and share wherever you are!

Hellooo!
I started to use del.icio.us last Wednesday and I soon found out it’s a very useful tool! I was in the lab at LAIF and I was trying to find some technical French words concerning the textile industry: not an easy search! Luckily, using del.icio.us I found a glossary that really simplified my work. And I saved the URL of that webpage so if in the future I need to translate the same kind of text I won’t waste time on the Internet looking for something that can help me! In addition, I saved the URL of two online dictionaries. I think they can be useful for you too, especially if you need to find technical terms.

Having a look at the bookmarks saved by my blog peers, I noticed that we have almost the same interests. That’s way I think the network we created on del.icio.us will be really useful! For example, both Arianna and I are interested in current English usage: Arianna saved a website about English idiomatic expressions and I saved Slang O’ The Day, a website about slang words. Then all of the girls in my group saved at least one website that can help us to practice our listening skills. Arianna’s www.elllo.org offers a wide range of listening activities and I noted that the people who record the audio files are not necessarily American on British: there are many people from other countries. In this way we can learn to listen to people speaking English with an unusual accent. Chiara saved a website about listening activities, too. As far as this website is concerned, does anybody know how we can download the podcasts and save them on my computer? Martina highlighted a website dealing with the main grammar rules. I read the pages about sentence fragments and run-ons: have a look at them, you’ll find a definition and some useful examples.

Speak to you soon,

Ilaria.

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And finally I discovered the TITLE!!!

Reading the corrections concerning e-tivity 3, I noticed that I didn’t write a title for my posts!!! Eh eh I don’t know why, but I didn’t notice the space in which we can put the title of a new post!
And now I wonder how many things are waiting for me to discover them! :-)

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I do like Bloglines!!! I think feeds aggregators are a brilliant invention! They are a very useful way to make the most of my time, because in this way I can easily find everything I’m interesting in, without wasting time. I only need to open a single window, on which I can see what’s new on the web pages I usually visit. Last Thursday, I added the feeds of Blogging English, Arianna’s blog and Chiara’s blog. Then I had a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/ , I clicked on the orange button on the right side and I read the information about news feeds from the BBC. I subscribed to feeds concerning entertainment stories, the latest news from the world and from the UK. It was so easy! And now I can open Bloglines, see the title and read a short summary about the latest stories from BBC and choose to watch the video that interests me the most. I recommend the feeds from BBC to everyone, because I think we can use them to improve our listening and reading skills.

Ilaria.

Hi!!! I’m ready to write my first reflective blogging post! The topic is “my next language learning targets”. I think setting some targets is really useful because it allows me to focus on something in particular and work on it, instead of wasting time trying to do one million things at the same time! As I wrote last week, my targets for this 2nd semester are essentially three: I’d like to enlarge my vocabulary and improve my writing and communicative skills. I firmly believe that writing posts on my blog will help me to achieve my language targets. First of all, reading what my classmates write on their blogs I can learn new words; I’ve just read a new expression on Elena’s blog: smash hit, I’ve searched it on my dictionary and now I know its meaning! Then, writing on a blog I learn to be not only concise and accurate, but also spontaneous. And being accurate is certainly useful when you have to explain some complicated concepts in an academic essay, while spontaneity is a quality that is precious in a conversation with other people. I find it difficult to interact with other people because I can’t speak in a spontaneous way and I’ve always to reflect on the words I should use or not. In a post I don’t have to write complex sentences like in any other written text; I am required to be clear and straightforward as I should be in a spoken conversation.
As regards what I’ve done during this week, I’ve to say that I’ve been pretty busy with lessons, blogs and academic papers! And I’m trying to do my best, especially taking note of every new word I read or I hear while I’m in class, surfing the Net or simply listening to music! Do you know what an Oxford comma is? I didn’t know it before listening to a song by Vampire Weekend, whose title is Oxford comma: it aroused my curiosity and so I used Google to find the meaning. Anyway, the meaning of the title doesn’t help me to understand the sense of the song which is still quite obscure!!! :-)

That's all for now!

Ilaria.

Welcome to my brand new blog!

This is my first experience with blogging! I think creating a personal blog is really funny, but it is also difficult: there are millions of interesting blogs in the blogosphere and creating one that can catch people's attention is a very hard work! Anyway, I'll do my best because it's a great opportunity to improve my computer skills and to write in English combining accuracy with spontaneity. And I'm sure you will help me leaving many comments on my posts!!! ;-)