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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