Let's PODCAST !


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Let's PODCAST !
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "a podcast is a multimedia file distributed over the Internet using syndacation feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The term, as originally coined by Ben Hammersley in an article in The Guardian February 12, 2004, was meant as a portmanteau of 'broadcasting' and 'iPod'".

The word podcast is a play on the word broadcast combined with the word iPod (one of the most popular MP3 players). However, you don't necessarily need an iPod to listen to or create podcasts. In fact, there are many other MP3 players that you can use for better listening to podcasts. You can listen to them on anything that plays MP3s. Because once the podcast is downloaded, it's just an MP3. You can also listen to them by clicking a link online or even get them delivered automatically to play on your PC or Mac every time there is a new show.

Sports, comedy, movies, food, politics, music, books, speeches, walking tours, whatever - you name the topic, for example in Google, del.icio.us or odeo, and you'll find podcasts about it. But never forget to be critical because you have incredible choices. When you enter the world of podcasting, you're stepping into a realm where anyone and everyone can have a voice and broadcast their opinions and imagination to the world.

There are thousands of podcasts covering a myriad of subjects, including many of the programmes, from the BBC which are available as podcasts, too. If you've ever wanted to learn a new language or find a different way to learn vocabulary or grammar, podcasts allow listening to take place anywhere at any time. Take a look at BBC Learning English to see some of what's out there. You will discover a huge material for improving your English. Students can download podcasted programs view wherever they go among the different sections (News English, Watch and Listen, Grammar & Vocabulary, Quizzes, Business English, etc.) and whenever they like. New episodes of a podcast are automatically downloaded when students "subscribe". When you subscribe to a podcast you'll get the newest episodes delivered right to you as soon as they're available.

Another perfect example of using the Web to improve your English is Englishfeed. You can easily download reading comprehension quizzes, focuses on English grammar, i.e. adverbs of frequency, reported speech, conditionals, future forms, time expressions, etc. and also several podcast on English pronunciation and on how stress works in words. It develops English learning and teaching materials for English learners as a L2 in a variety of formats.

Even the Italian University of Messina has a blog which provides English material that can be podcasted. You can learn, for example, some interesting English on how to survive different situations. i.e. a first date, an Halloween party, a journey in the UK, etc.

Podcasting allows education to become more portable than ever before; it cannot replace the classroom but it provides teachers one more way to meet their students. For example, podcasting allows lectures or other course content to be made available to students if they miss class. Beyond missed lectures, podcasting can also provide access to experts through interviews.

What's more, students can create their own podcasts as a record of activities, a way to collect notes or a reflection on what they have learnt as we've been doing for our first podcast. I have to thank Sarah if podcasting makes a difference in my efforts to learn English. To be honest, at the very beginning I was actually a bit sceptical about podcasting: how could such a tech-genius as I am have ever recorded her voice onto a computer and published it online making that speaking accessible to anyone at any time?...

Well, I'm sure now there is a huge return for the learners.
Podcasts offer an authentic audience for students' spoken work and offer them a different way to learn, either listening to material proposed to them or creating their own lessons and resources for the class.

Have fun podcasting ;-)

Alice


Photo taken from: Flickr

A voyage in the discovery of the genre of web sites

The use of the Internet has been continuing its rapid growth and almost every day new websites are created. However, there aren’t strict studies about its genre as a particular “form of art” according to specific criteria. What I’m trying to examine is this set of conventions that forms the genre of websites. I’ve looked at two particular websites which my course-fellows have saved in del.icio.us and I’ve tried to identify their purposes and their language features.

Both English Club, a site to help you learn English or teach English as a second language, and Online Newspapers, a page where you can retrieve information from all over the world, are accessed trough hypertext or hyperlinks embedded in other files. Their starting point or opening pages, i.e. their homepages, functions as tables of contents or indexes with links to other sections of the site. They’re addressed to everyone and at the same time to no one. An intelligent human being filters through the mass of information packaged daily for our consumption and picks out the interesting, the important, the overlooked, and the unexpected.

In some way English Club is aimed at a kind of discourse community made up people that are learning English as a L2 (you understand the abbreviations, i.e. ESL or TEFL, only if you’re already familiar with them) while Online Newspapers attracts all kinds of viewers. It cannot create a community who shares their interests because it just provides a service: it gives access to a selection of the 50 most popular newspapers where one can retrieve pieces of information.

Both sites have a linguistic semiology instead of a visual one. According to Swales (1990) they’re ‘text-only version’, which nowadays are quite rare to find on the Net because they’ve been substituted by pages with a high graphical content. Only in English Club there is a couple of pictures, however they’re not effective at all.

Because we don’t have graphics, language is all we have to look at. Simple noun-phrases are found at the top of each main list; for example in the English Club homepage we find concrete noun-phrases used metaphorically, ‘ESL Learning Center’, ‘ ESL Clubhouse’, ‘ESL Teachers Lounge’, etc. while in Online Newspaper you can find just a list of proper country names where you have to click if you want to go forward. There are no complete sentences because websites use keywords as portals and they have to be self-evident.

The English Club reception area provides a site map which helps surfers to understand the complex organisation of the hypertext-linking mechanism. The presence of the site map highlights once again that the site is not a relatively new one because in recent websites these maps tend to be replaced by other useful search facilities.

The language used in both sites is similar: it is plain and easy to understand even for a non-native speaker of English. Because of their ‘text-only version’ one can define them as institutional sites - as Swales (1990) pointed out in his distinction between institutional and personal pages. They are written in an easily decoded form without any possible types of personal expressions.

It is certainly true that even these two sites make us aware of the linguistic heterogeneity of the Web: specific types of pages require different analytical frameworks.

Alice

Social bookmarking

Have you ever seriously thought about an easy way to collect, share and interact with online information from anywhere? Well, go to del.icio.us and explore. It will make you sure you can visit your favourite web pages from any computer, anytime without having to remember the page URLs or rely on the computer programs.

It has become a means for users to share similar interests to locate new websites that they might not have otherwise heard of, or to store their bookmarks in such a way that they are not tied to one specific computer.

Social bookmarking is a very useful service that lets you save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users links and tags. You can be open and share your thinks with others. It helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interestig sites and publish your bookmarks.

My first experience with social bookmarking has been very interesting: it has opened the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person's other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag.

This has been the way in which my course friends and I have been working in developing a unique structure of keywords to define resources about learning English as a L2 using blogs.

-Lara has suggested an English blog where you can find very useful information about English culture, its grammar, its literature, etc. but also many links to FilmBlog and Podcast.

-Isabella has found a funny Dr. Grammar who will answer to your grammar questions. This webpage may provide help in learning English as a L2.

-Daniela has recorded a very complete website where you get in touch with English Club which is full of lessons for students and jobs for teachers includung interactive pages such as forums, games, quizzes, chat, help, etc.

-Francesca has provided a list of business letters and forms which may help in doing a good job. What one has to do is just select the type of document he/she needs.

-Daniele has discovered a very interesting page where you can recover newspaper websites. you can retrieve information from all over the world just searching per country.

-Valentina has indicated a great blog full of good stuff for people who cannot get started writing in English seen as the international language of business.

Have fun looking at them ;-)

Alice

Surfing into the blog

I consider myself a basically new blogger having started this experience just a couple of weeks ago. I see this blog as my own first serious attempt to get into cyberspace and a good chance to get to know a world of interesting tech-ideas that might be useful at any time.

Thanks to Sarah, our guide on our journey through the blogoshpere in English, we first learnt how to access to a blog, which is our course blog, and after that how to properly use it. In doing the first e-tivity I recognize once again how difficult writing down something is and not only because it wasn’t in Italian, our mother tongue, but because not all students enjoy writing.

Blogging gives us the chance of expressing our “voice” and to develop our interests without any particular constraints. We have just to keep in mind the blogging etiquette, only a couple of basic rules that one must consider as a blogger: don’t forget to sign comments, identify yourself properly, leaving a contact where other readers can reach you, always quote sources, respect copyright laws, never leave spam comments, don’t be rude, etc…

Useful links where you can find some interesting stuff about blog behaviour:

the bloggers disclaimer
cafe mama
a learner's impression on blogs

In the 2^nd week of our course we actually surfed into the World Wide Web looking for blogs: everyone got lost in there. We discovered online journals whose topics included the owner’s daily life or views on education, politics, environment, cinema, animals, cartoons or what ever subject was important to bloggers. However, blog means something more: it goes beyond a simple homepage or an online diary because whenever a blog is posted it can be commented on by others. You leave your comment and get feedback from others, thus creating a sort of forum. They’re also full of links which help bloggers in their searches on a particular subject; they create a sort of inter-blog conversation.

After two weeks of blogging how can I sum up the blogosphere’s genre?

Well, the tone used is quite informal and the language's plain and easy to understand. A blog post as well as a comment are made of short sentences. Redundancy must be avoided. However, we have to keep in mind that the kind of language may change together with the kind of user who leaves his/her bit on the blog. Different topics may also influence the way of writing.

What blogging does for students who are learning English?

I think it encourages students’ initiative to write, it gives them the chance to get in touch with a colloquial English that is impossible to find in a course or study book. I’m sure it will enrich our vocabulary and we will express ourselves in a better English.

Now I see blogging as a great challenge in learning English, as an open dialogue over important themes which will help us in making richer our knowledge.

I wish you all great fun !

Alice

Welcome message from Alice

Hi everyone! I’m Alice and this is my first experience with the so called blogosphere. I’m not actually very fond of technology so you all have to be patient of my silly tech-mistakes.

I’m doing my specialistica in foreign languages (English and German trying to learn Dutch too!) at the University of Padova while I’ve done my triennale at the University of Verona. Two summers in a row I worked in a Campsite on Lake Garda where I got in touch with a lot people coming from all over the world. I’m very interested in how languages are used by native speakers, in how dialects survive within the local communities and in how non-native speakers succeed in learning foreign languages.

In my spare time I like doing sports: I play volleyball twice or three times a week, I cycle nearby and I’ve only recently begun to be crazy about mountain bike. I love going to the cinema while I don’t watch so much TV, I just enjoy myself in watching the TV program Che tempo che fa.

I’m really looking forward to better understand how blogs work and in which ways they may help human beings in their lives and relationships. So it comes now the time to… BLOG!

I hope we’ll have a great time together ;-)

Alice

Photo taken from my album