Exploring Social Bookmarking

Hello everybody!

This week we have explored the fantastic world of del.icio.us and become familiar with terms such as social bookmarking, tags and sharing sites.

I must admit that I like it better than Technorati because, if you choose specific and precise tags, you can find exactly what you are looking for, without wasting your time and energy on the web.

Furthermore, I think it is a selective instrument to expand on the topics you are interested in and an efficient way for discovering web sites that, for some reasons, are suggested by different people.
As a consequence, you join to a bigger community and you enjoy sharing your favourite sites with all its members. At the same time, when you are examining the sites selected by the community, you must have a critical eye.

You haven’t to take them as gospel truth or think their content is complete; you must consider them as a starting point for developing your knowledge that means you can also distance yourself from them.

Now, I would like to comment the web sites selected by my classmates, trying to highlight the importance they could have in our English learning at university and after university.

Lara

Among the sites she suggested, I chose http:// http://www.bbc.co.uk/ because it contains a complete learning program including reading, writing and listening exercises. In addition, it allows readers to check their pronunciation and gives them the opportunity to learn English in an amusing way.
As a matter of fact, they can have a good time by answering quizzes, listening pop songs or playing with words. This site can be an incentive for students who have studied English for years.
I think it can be seen as a precious resource for extending our knowledge of a specific field such as sport, science and much more.

Isabella

http://www.esl-lab.com/
I believe that this is the ideal site for students who wish to polish up their linguistic level.
I appreciated above all the division in different sections according to the difficulty of every listening and the wide range of situations presented: calls, rentals, reservations, travels, etc.
You can learn some usual expressions for each situation, put them into practice and enrich your vocabulary.
I would like also to indicate two important links with this web site: Everyday Language and Discussion, Accent Training to Help You Speak Naturally. I think they could be very useful to test our pronunciation and to speak English much more fluently.

Alice

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/
I really enjoyed your choice. The fact that there is a debate on a bloggers’Code of Ethics points out that the blogosphere is becoming more and more wide and, for this reason, it needs to be regulated or regularized.
In my opinion, it is precisely this that distinguishes blogs from journalism: the lack of a Code of Ethics. Blogs must be free. Journalism must respect some specific rules concerning impartiality, truth of the matter, formal language.
I think that many rules listed in the Code are quite naïve. During these weeks of course I have learned that all blogs should be submitted to a particular restriction which is called “etiquette”.
Don’t you think it is enough for the poor bloggers?

Daniela

http://view.byu.edu/
I chose this site because I consider it to be one of the easiest and quickest ways of finding words and grammar rules. I highly appreciated the possibility of making a comparison between registers in order to notice the frequency of each verb or term. I believe that if you are writing about a specific topic or you want to use a language understandable to a wide public, this is an efficient tool for checking your vocabulary. I think it will be very interesting for our course. As a matter of fact, I’m going to use it so as to avoid some mistakes and to write in a much more accurate manner. I also enjoyed the three minute guided tour. It gave me an overview of the wide range of possibilities this site offers.

Valentina

http://writingenglish.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/when-you-can%E2%80%99t-get-started-writing/

I love this web site. I’m perfectly convinced that the beginning of a piece of writing is always difficult because it can compromise your whole paper. When you start writing, you must consider many elements: your aim, the person to whom your paper is addressed, the style and the impressions you want to convey. The beginning of a paper is the first channel you can use to get in touch with someone who if she/he does not like it, can interrupt his/her reading.
According to this site, everybody can write in a correct way, the important is to relax and try to do your best. Step n. 10, in particular, caught my attention. Sometimes you spend too time on a paper, so your brain is too tired to keep on working; but if you stop for some minutes and clear your mind, then you’ll express yourself in words more naturally.

Daniele

http://www.word2word.com/coursead.html
Free language on line courses
This site has a lot in common with the sites chosen by the whole group.
I think that it can be useful for people who have not enough time to attend an English course but also for those (like us) who need to test their linguistic level, to look some words up in the online dictionary, etc.
However, the main difference between this site and the other sites we selected concerns translation activities. I believe that a forum for translators is a brilliant idea: they can confer with each other before translating a word and checking the recurrence of some terms in a specific field by means of this tool.
I really appreciated the links concerning Internet Language Software and Language Chat Sites. The first one presents a practical instrument which could help us when we are writing our blogs, while the second one is very interesting for people who want to chat in a safer and more efficient way.

To conclude I would like to sum up the experience of this week with a sentence taken from this last site suggested by Daniele: “(Word2Word is pleased to provide) these links in the hope of all people developing a better understanding of others through the use of language”.

What do you think about?

Communication is once more the aim of an activity exploiting the web: social bookmarking.



See you soon!

Francesca