A road map for the future...

Hi all!
How are you? Summer is coming, and I'm really happy about that! Unfortunately I'm working in an ice-cream shop, so during the weekends, instead of going to the beach, I prepare huge sundaes for hundreds of terrible children! :-D

I think this will be my last post about this English course and I'm really sad because I guess this is the VERY last English course of my university career! So this time I would like to talk about my Personal Learning Environment.
A PLE is literally our 'learning environment', our learning universe in which we find both formal learning (university courses, institutional education...) and informal learning. It is the collection of tools we use when we learn both guided by someone else or by ourselves. The name itself says that a PLE is PERSONAL, so there's no right or wrong but just the way you see it and just the tools you use.

This is the first time I sit down and reflect carefully on my PLE. I've always considered informal education a fundamental part of my learning experience, but developing my mindmap I was struck by the number of aspects I can relate to the informal environment of my education.

In order to collect all the tools of my educational environment I started with a brainstorming: I created a list of things I do or use when learning English without trying to organize it. That was a second step. I divided the tools into 6 categories: People, Web, Texts, Spaces, Audio and Looking for Information and divided them - except for Looking for Information- again into Formal and Informal.
At the beginning I divided the different aspects between formal and informal and then into minor categories, but then I realized that the most important aspect was the means and not the 'environment', being it formal or informal.

I have to say that it was not that easy. It took me a while to focus on the different tools of my learning experience and to organize them in a comprehensible way, but I didn't imagine it could be so useful. Now I know that ending my formal education doesn't mean ending my learning experience. There are a lot of tools I can use and I have to make the most of them to become a good informal learner! :-D

Well, I think that's all...
This time I cannot say 'see you next week' :-( but I hope I will manage to use this blog even once the course is finished because I really like it!

Good luck and keep on learning! :-D

Elisa

PS: I created my mindmap with FreeMind, another useful tool provided by the Internet. I guess it can be useful for a lot of purposes, so if you want to use it you can download it: it's free! :-D