Del.icio.us Feedback

As I learned a few days ago, to have an account into Del.icio.us give me the possibility not only to store my bookmarks, but also to create a personal network with other users, in my case with my classmates. So, I went in and took a look to my peers' choices.

I found out that Francesca and I have the same interest in punctuation. Personally, I want to learn more about the right use of English punctuation because I usally tend to reproduce the Italian one while writing in English, and this is a bad habit! :)
She bookmarked the WikiHow page on punctuation; the content of the page is clearly organized and full of useful examples. There are a lot of tips and warnings to use some of the most tricky punctuation symbols correctly.
Feedback: clear, simple and very useful.

Among Valentina's choices, I found the bookmark on Internship Mistakes very fun. It's a website on the most common mistakes, bad behaviours and habits in the working field. Perhaps, it is not directly linked to our field of study, but it can come in useful while approaching any job field...thus, our next future!
Feedback: fun and job-oriented.

Take a look to them!

Bye
Giorgia

It's a snap(shot)!

I totally agree with Betta’s post on images: that of photo sources is a problematic issue. Finding a useful photo on the net is very easy, but discovering if it's possible to use it is not so immediate. More often than not photos on the net are covered by copyrights, so they cannot be copied and then pasted somewhere else, otherwise you’d break the law.
When you find an image that you want to use try to find out as much information as possible concerning the right to use it and always remember to put the link from which you took that image.

Another great tip that I’ve got from the teacher is to use Flickr, which is an image and video hosting website (online community for photo sharing) with plenty of photos. The good thing is that each photo is accompanied by some specific symbols explaining the way in which you are licensed to use that photo (i.e. if it is covered or not by copyright). These symbols are - technically speaking - the Creative Commons license: each symbol represents a type of license.

Well, as regards my blog I've put the link of each photo at the end of my posts, while if you click on the photos on my sidebar they take you directly where I found them.

Hope you'll find some useful news!

Bye
Giorgia

...some Del.icio.us links...

While I was surfing on the big waves of the net through both Technorati and Del.icio.us, I found some interesting websites and blogs that I'd like to tell you about. I decided to store them as bookmarks in my social bookmarking account.

I've pasted there the links and I've given a short description of them. Anyway, if anyone interested has an account on Del.icio.us can find my bookmarks using the search toolbar...just searching for the tag 'bloggingenglish_09'.

My bookmarks:

• Omniglot is a blog concerning a plenty of linguistic issues, such as translation, ESL, education and foreign languages learning. It is very interesting, its style is formal when talking about language games and fun stuff, and it becomes formal - but not too technical - when exposing specialized issues;
• Livemocha is an online international community, where people from all around the world sign in to take online language lessons and give feedback to the others. Anyone interested can choose among 20 different languages and take lessons at 4 different levels;
• BBC English page is a webpage inside the BBC website. This page is full of tips, links, games, crosswords, audio files and fun stuff for learning English while enjoying;
• GrammarGirl is a blog full of 'quick & dirty' tips and suggestions for better writing in English. It gives a lot of lessons through both written texts and podcasts. These lessons particularly focus on word choice, grammar and punctuation;
• Two Expats is a blog run by two young Italian guys living in London. Gioia and Matteo (their names) write about food, life style, music, friends and everything else about their lives in London. The blog has a catchy and funny style, it is obviously written in English with some Italian words here and there.

Hope you like them as I do!

Bye
Giorgia

To Bookmark or not to Bookmark…?

The more I go on learning new things about the web, the more I get scared :P
Well, we all know how huge is the net…scary!
We all know how huge is the blogosphere…twice as scary!
Now we can make them smaller…at our fingertips…SUPER-SCARY!

What about creating your own 'little' world wide web?

I’m talking about bookmarks, or better, Internet bookmarks.
They work just like real paper bookmarks we commonly use while reading books; therefore, we use them to find what we need easily.
When you frequently visit a website or blog you can save their URLs in order to be easily retrieved. You can do it on your pc or you can subscribe in a social bookmarking community, such as Del.icio.us and store your bookmarks in the personal page you’ve created. Being a social community you can share your bookmarks with the other people in the community. Also, you can create your network of users and see their bookmarks.
Social bookmarking communities are better than your pc, since you can visit your bookmarks from any computer, while if you save bookmarks only in your pc you can retrieve them just from it.
What's more, to make the search of bookmarks easier anyone usually put tags, that is to say, key words to label the URLs stored (i.e. if you type ‘language’ in the community toolbar, will appear all the shared bookmarks with the tag ‘language’).

I think it's a really good tool to keep track of our favourite websites, without searching for their URLs all the time, or without writing them down on a piece of paper that you may lose!

Well, I think it’s all…
Let's enjoy with this new tool!

Bye
Giorgia

(photo source)

Good Chances II

Hello all,

Hope you’re doing well!

Does anybody know the American serial Prison Break? Well, I started watching it in 2005, since the first time it was broadcast in Italy. Obviously, I watched the first two seasons in Italian, but a few weeks ago…(suspense like in a drama serial!)…straight from the U.S.A. …a friend of mine brought to me the complete third season and part of the fourth in the original language! I was so excited!
Unfortunately I’d had some troubles with the dvd player, so I watched the first episode only a few days ago.
I have to admit that I sometimes missed some words, especially those of the actors who spoke with strong (strange *--*) accents! However, after the initial panic I decided to watch it as I watch to any Italian movie or serial, that is to say, relaxed! (thank you, Sarah, for your advice!)
I missed some words…Ok, fine. I didn’t understand the meaning of some words…Ok, fine. Accents made the listening difficult…Ok, fine. However, in the end I tell you what they were talking about, I can tell you the plot of the episode because I was relaxed, and when I missed a word there was an image, or a sound, or a gesture that helped me to understand. I realized that listening (and understand!) doesn’t involve only ears!
BTW, watching movies and serials in English can be fun and useful at the same time…And you know that it’s difficult to join these things together :P

Talk to you soon!
Giorgia
(photo source)

FEEDing on New Technology

Shame on me…Unfortunately last Thursday I was absent from class ‘cos I was sick and I missed the important lesson on feeds and feed aggregators. By the way, although I’m unfamiliar with Internet technologies, I managed to follow the walkthroughs given by the teacher. I created my account in a feed aggregator (Bloglines) and started to subscribe to the feeds I was most interested in.
I think feed aggregators, and feeds as well, are amazing tools to keep track of the blogs or websites you like to visit. After the initial ‘technical’ effort, I realized that these tools give me a lot of interesting opportunities! I created my page on the aggregator, I subscribed to the feeds I was interested in and I made my playlists…ok, these things took time, but in the end it was worth it…Once I started to run my feeds’ page properly, it became very easy to find news, images, information, all kinds of things…and keep me updated on them!

Basically, a feed is a piece of information (in a particular format) used for providing subscribers with frequently updated content. Subscribing to a feed of any blog or website is like signing a subscription with magazines or newspapers…except for the fact that feeds are FREE!
Isn’t it amazing? I just go into my Bloglines’ page and I immediately see all the news about the feeds I subscribed to! This will totally cut down the time I usually need to search for information online, and will provide me only with the news I want…’cos I decide what to keep track of!

That’s all guys…
Let me know about your experience with feeds so far…

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)

Good Chances I

As I've told on a previous post, I committed myself to do as much as possible to improve my English in any possible way…so…guess? I’m attending a seminar of English Contemporary Literature in which we watch movies in original language – English obviously – without subtitles! It’s definitely a good chance to prove and improve my listening skills. What’s more, these movies were produced in some of the old European colonies (i.e. Australia, Africa, Jamaica, to name a few) and therefore they are full of slang terms, which are interesting to learn as part of everyday, informal language.

Ok…just a little step forward, but a step indeed!

Bye
Giorgia

Language Learning

I just want to say briefly for those who may not understand who I'm referring to when I write 'we' or 'us' (hoping that someone else - apart from my classmates - will read my blog! :) ) that this blog is part of an academic course of English language.
That said, as I told you on the previous post, this blog can be an extremely useful tool to improve English. Blogging and - primarly - reading others' blogs and get feedback or comments on yours are parts of what we called during class 'personal learning environment'.
As a matter of fact, reading others' words or get your pieces of writing corrected make you notice which are your weak points/frequent mistakes and how to get rid of them.
Thus these are the 'things' that I wanna get rid of (I'll get them back as soon as I learn how to use them properly!!!):

. present perfect
. 'also'

First of all, I have to remove the present perfect because the more I think about its use the more I mistake. I think that sometimes it's really difficult for an Italian native speaker to understand the subtle difference between present perfect and past simple, especially when the fact that you are describing happened not long ago.
Secondly, I have to get rid of the adverb 'also' because wherever I put it, it's always the wrong place :). I think that this mistake depends on the fact that I use 'also' as the italian equivalent 'anche', but syntactically they are very different.
I hope I'm not the only one dealing with these problems :(
Well...Let me know what do you think about this kind of issues, so we can discuss them together and help each other out!

Apart from these last (and new) notes, last week we fulfilled a personal ‘To Do List’ on the next language goals we would like to achieve. As far as I’m concerned, I never thought of designing my own language path before. However, to sit down, think and write my personal needs & projects made me feel more realistic on what I’ve learnt so far and what I still need to learn. As a matter of fact, I realized that I want to be more confident when I have both to communicate and interact in English. I want to organize my speeches and my pieces of writing better, more coherently. I want to enrich my vocabulary both formal and informal. And I want to get rid of my usual mistakes (see above). That said, I committed myself to spent at least 30/60 minutes a day practising my English in any possible way: reading books, newspapers or magazines, watching movies without subtitles, surfing the net, reading my classmates’ blogs and trying to interact during classes as much as possible.

Easier to say than do! :)

However, to point out this ‘To Do List’ was a good thing indeed!

Let’s start and see what happens as we go along!
Okay, that's all for now...

Bye
Giorgia

Me & Blogging

I never had a blog ‘till now, ‘cos I was always concerned about being boring as well as exposing myself too much. However, as I read on the net while doing a paper on the blogging phenomenon, almost EVERYBODY has either a blog or a page into a social network...so it’s high time for us to become active cybernauts :)
As I’ve just written, I found a lot of interesting info on ‘blogging’ during the wiki project on the 1st semester: blogosphere is HUGE and there are plenty of blogs, the ‘cyber-world’ is so big that have been invented websites working as search engines for searching blogs (e.g. Technorati or Icerocket).
Neverthless I’m sure that blogging and analysing others’ blogging – using the proper tools – will become more and more interesting, useful and easy as we go on.
Try to go in Google or Technorati and key in “how to blog...”, you’ll find a lot of tips and walkthroughs for managing properly a blog and its tools.
Beyond all these technical notions, I think (and I hope) that this new adventure will help me to improve my writing skills in English as well as my vocabulary both informal and formal. I think that this can be an effective experience through which achieve some of the above mentioned language goals I set at the beginning of this semester!

Read, write, observe, analyse, learn...It's up to me now!

Bye
Giorgia

Welcome

Hello all!

I’m Giorgia and this is my blog. This is my first time running a blog and I’m really excited! I hope we’ll enjoy sharing interests, improving our English and learning a lot of things together. Any comments, advices, suggestions are welcome!

We are all here to learn from each other :)

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)