Do you wanna bookmark with me?

Hi guys,I know it's a bit late but I'm back again..
This week in the classroom our teacher-or I’d better say my Web wizard:-)!-opened a new window onto the infinite universe of the Internet. It all began with a brief discussion of the way we students look for and save the information we are interested in when surfing the web. Some of us said we usually write down the urls of the websites, others send links to their e-mail accounts, others yet bookmark the page on their browser!
Bookmarking? What does it mean?
In its usual meaning a bookmark is nothing more than a piece of paper or any other stuff people use to mark the page of the book they're reading so as not to lose their place and to come back later to it .
In the web language a bookmark is something rather similar, i.e. you can save a website in the bookmarks in your browser so that you can go back to it later. Thanks to the Internet people can now find lots of news and information, for example using search engines like Google, and by just clicking on the results everything they need is displayed in front of them! Sometimes it happens that more than one result is interesting and worth reading but for time reasons it is not possible to do read everything and so one is forced to throw the dice and choose the best result off the cuff. In my little experience with web searching, sometimes I felt really lost when I started reflecting on which could be the most meaningful and useful article amongst all those displayed. I often had a look at the first two paragraphs and then gave up if it didn't suit my expectations but...what if it would prove to be more interesting later on? I would never know it! Well, let's write down the url on a piece of paper and track it down later at home; this is what I did for all the webpages that I thought could be useful for me. Of course, being a big muddler, I almost always lost all the urls and consequently had to begin my search anew! If I had known about bookmarking it would have been much easier!
Social bookmarking takes Web bookmarking one step further. Social bookmarking is the easiest and fastest way to save the results of a web search, to store them in a safe place and to share s.o's favourites links with other people in the same community. This sounds delicious! And Delicious is the name of a community which allows its users to do that ...what a catchy luscious name! Another advantage in using social bookmarks is that it is possible to see how many people have bookmarked the same webpage before I did- so it can serve as an initial skimming for authoritativeness and usefulness, and it is completely free!!

Wow, the more I go on with this course the more I learn..
Thanks Sarah, you’re giving a lot of amazing tricks- I really enjoyed this new one!
At the moment I haven’t found very many websites that I’d like to keep track of,but I'm sure I'll find more soon.
The ancient Romans were right: verba volant and scripta manent..but the bookmarked even more:-)!

See you soon,bye!

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Fun and the City

Hi guys,

how are you going on with your e-learning? Feel that you have improved your skills? Tonight I was thinking about it and I realized that things can change in less than a second! I was surfing on the web while listening to music (how relaxing, I should enjoy this luxury more often!) and to my surprise I realized that I could understand almost all the words of the songs. I've never been able to do it before, partly because I didn't pay too much attention to the texts and partly because they contained unknown words or were pronounced with particular (=odd) accents (I think the most terrible is the british!). Anyway this time it was different and I guess it was because I had no pressure and I was doing something that I liked..in a word I was relaxed! It looks like there's an invisible thread between your linguistic (or any other) performance and the way you are feeling in that moment!
Besides that, have you ever dreamed to find something which is not only useful for you but also funny? Talking about how we can improve our english I suggested to try and watch more films in the original language and so yesterday I decided to start the experiment. I went through an old chest of drawer and I found an old dvd,the 4th season of Sex and the City..amazing! Since this is my fav serial, I can nearly say that I know by hearth every single word that had been uttered, but not in english of course! At the beginning it was a bit difficult to understand what they were saying, my ears weren't trained enough, but after a while things got easier and I enjoyed eventually the pleasure of a good film in its real "sound". Oh yes,'coz in this way you can hear the true voices of your beloved and, above all, learn a lot of funny slang words. By now I've enriched my vocabulary with words and expressions which may be not really useful in my academic life, but I'm sure they'll come in handy in my everyday life, soon or later;-)!

I'll write again tomorrow, now it's high time to go to bed..

See you in classroom,bye!

Anna :-)

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Falling into (blog)lines

Hi everybody,

I'm back again and I have some good news for all of you! I don't know about you, but I've always had some difficulty with the world of technology, it seemed to me that we were two entities totally incompatible and miles away from each other...until this new blog adventure began! As time goes by I'm getting more and more used with the web tools(gr8!), I'm even enjoying running my own blog (despite the little time I can devote to it!) and it is always nice to discover how some tools can make your life easier!

Feeds ,for instance, are an excellent device for being always updated on the topics we like most (worldnews, culture, our favourite blogs) without being forced to continually check them on the main webpage, since they are a real-time source of information, like a 24-hours peephole on the world. Well, what about feeds? They are simple to use and give lots of advantages! I think they will be very useful in my blog experience,since they allow me to have the control over loads of things in just a few seconds without wasting too much time looking up for urls and opening links. As you can see, I've already added the link to bloglines in the right side of my webpage..let's click on it, you'll see it's easier done than said!

That's all!

See you soon

Anna

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Good intentions

Talking about what we are going to do to improve our language skills I think that there are lots of ways of getting along. The simplest and the more obvious is to refresh our memory with a brief review of the general rules of English, maybe with the help of an advanced grammar including exercises and keys. This is not a trivial thing, since I guess that some of us have almost forgotten most of the rules we learned in the past (as to say, “repetita iuvant”) and that in any case we need to make headway in the knowledge of specific word orders, which is useful in the written and in the spoken production.
The second thing we could do is to start reading novels, magazines and newspapers almost exclusively in English, that again seems quite simple, but that for many reasons (laziness, lack of time) turns out to be much more complicated than it actually is.
And what about films? Are you still watching them with subtitles or, horror of horrors, dubbed into Italian? Don’t worry, you’re just like me, hopeless lazybones! You know, this is a typical way to spend a Friday-night-in with friends and some of them wouldn’t understand a damn word in the original language. Maybe the best solution is to watch the film by yourself before your friends come (if you have enough time) or after they’ve gone home (if you’ve not fallen asleep yet!).
Also the internet and the world of blogs can be a very useful tool to improve our skills, since they provide good opportunity for dealing with different kinds of expression within a language, in particular with the slang and the everyday life speech, which we have hardly ever been taught in our academic life. As far as the language is concerned, in their blog people feel free to write about what they like most and they’re much more concerned with conveying the information than caring about the way it's given. The result is that in the blogs we can find a lot of slang expressions, completely new sentence structures that we may not use in a formal register, but that are common in the e-language.
I know that many of the things I’ve listed above could sound too obvious to some of you, which means that you’ve put them into practice for a long time. I don’t know about you, but even a simple thing like revising a little bit of rules (I bought a new grammar last week) can turn out to be really frustrating (it seems to me that I've forgotten everything!) Anyway, I know it’s not new year’s eve and that it is maybe too late to come out with a last-minute pledge, but I make the promise that by the end of this semester I’ll have put all the advices into practice. Or I’ll try at least:-P!
See you soon, bye!
Anna

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Welcome to my world!

Hi everybody and welcome to my blog!
I’m still quite incredulous that I have a blog of my own, it happened all at once that I haven’t realized it yet! How could it happen? I’ve always hated blogs and social networks in general ‘coz I think that they’re a loss of time and that if you want to get in touch with someone you’d better go out and meet real people in real places, not in virtual ones like that! I’ve never had even a secret diary, except for two or three months in my late childhood, ‘coz I never had the time to both do things and write about them. Now fancy me running a blog:-/!
But it happened all the same! One day I woke up, went to the university and within two hours I had my brand new blog. That’s done, I’m screwed:-O! I don’t want to make a drama out of it, I’ve always loved challenges and I’m ready to take it up, but well, let’s make things clear. The first step is to set the subject. What am I going to talk about? People usually write about their personal experiences, give opinions and suggestions to other people on various matters or focus on topics they’re particularly interested in. About me, honestly I don’t know where to start from. I don’t want to turn it into a “me, myself and I” blog (people won’t be too pleased to read it!), and neither do I want to focus on one single matter (I don’t have any strong point!). This blog is supposed to be an academic device for improving our language skills, both written and spoken, so I’ll try to fall into line with its professional ethics, which means that I’ll post my messages (after careful analysis) at least two or three times a week and then correct any mistake I might make. Any help or suggestion will be welcome so don’t hesitate, drop in and leave your comments. My motto is “you learn from your mistakes”, and of course we’re all here to learn from each other.
I think that’s all for now.
Talk to you later.
Anna:-)

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