My Personal Learning Environment

I have to say that it was strange to think about my own learning environment. I always thought that I learn from some university lessons and by watching dvds only but, the truth is this is only a small part of the world where I take all the information from.
Making up my mind I realized I have a pretty much expanded learning environment. Of course, I learn many things during university lessons but, in my opinion, I learn even more in my freetime. In fact, you can see that in my mindmap(please click on SPLE.mm to see it): There are a lot more "arms" in the freetime section as there are concerning the university environment due to the websites I often go to during my freetime such as Google, youtube ecc.
I've put two books under "learning/studying" which I really appreciate very much. One is about how to write commercial e-mails in English and the other one is about how to make commercial phone calls in English. In my opinion, it is very useful to be prepared in that field if you want to work with languages because sooner or later you will have to respond in English (to e-mails and phone calls). There are very good examples in those books and therefore, I hope I won't be freaking out when I will have to respond to a phone call at work one day...
I hope I managed well to upload and link my mindmap otherwise I'll try again and again or simply explain it to you in class.
See you all soon.
Caroline

Judging online sources

Hi my peers!



First of all, I apologize for posting my comment with delay but I really hadn't noticed we had to do this work within Friday. Usually, Sunday is my big English-blogging-homework-day and this time it should have been Friday already. I'm sorry about that!!!



The criteria I usually refer to are very close to the ones I found on the links. I remember when I wrote my thesis my professor told me to be careful when choosing material from the Internet.
So I followed the criteria given in the first link:

"Is there a reference list or bibliography of corroborative evidence?"
"Is there a date when the site was last updated - how long ago did this happen?"
"Does the site seem to be permanent or part of a permanent organisation?"

I always make sure the websites are still up to date and where they found the information. As far as my thesis is concerned, I chose information based on researches and proper bibliographies only. I went to Google to see who the author was - if it wasn't written on the website - and to check what else the author had published regarding translation theories ( That's what my thesis was about.). In that way I made sure to select authors that really were involved with the topic and that they were "name-brands" I couldn't know before.

I think it is very important to see WHO wrote the articles I might found interesting and who made up the website. I mean, just as we mentioned last week, everyone can write just about anything in the Internet and therefore, the most important thing is to check if the website is of a University or known organization and if it's still getting updated regularly.

Furthermore, I pay attention to the language style, that is if the text is in scientific language or colloquial language. I think you can tell a lot of a text's reliability by the way it is organized and written. A reliable source for a thesis would probably be written in a very formal style - maybe taken from a book for educational purpose rather than just to give information.

Ok, once more: I'm sorry for being so late. See you in class.

Caroline