W(iki) Marco!

Hello everybody!

This time I am going to speak a little about wikis.

Wiki is a social software in which people can find information simply by clicking on the site and searching in it. This Information can be changed by authors or can be edited and modified by people after the subscription to the site: it is in this way designed as to be a community.

So therefore, about the type of audience of the site, I can say that it is theoretically open to anybody, in the sense that any net surfer looking for information can enter and have it immediately in most areas of a wiki. On the other hand, there are often some restricted wikis as well: since (as I am going to say in the next paragraph!) people can create their own communities through the creation of new wikis, one can give their community the characteristic of a free, public wiki, or might also give it the characteristics of a private link of communication between a restricted number people creating it as a chat or a list of web mail, thus creating a private wiki.

Surely, the most well known wiki is Wikipedia but actually it is much more. One can find a lot of different wikis that may have the form of communities dealing with many different sorts of interest (including, for example, a Swedish community about Nintendo!) or you can create your own wiki thanks to some "tailor made" options you can find in the resume about wiki farms. , which is a server or a collection of servers that hosts wiki. Therefore one can say that the wikisphere is like a little universe of its own rather than just one site with different contents.

Even if wiki is opened to all surfers like a forum or a site of a public institution and even if in many parts of a wiki seems to me structured like a blog, in my opinion the language used in it is much more formal than the language often used in blogs but it can be very similar to the language used in the second type of sites I mentioned. Since a wiki is often opened to anybody the language used in it can vary depending on the style and characteristics of the person who writes in it, assumed that one has to follow rules of good sense. Some of these rules are also summarized on a page of the site that Sarah advised us to read: the site calls them "wikiquettes".

Moreover, a wiki is characterised by the fact that there are many links that are present in texts and at the bottom of the pages, so one can find an explanation for everything, sometimes even to the very word present in the text that he/she may not know. It is worth saying that, because of its structure, a wiki also has a search engine that provides links to others pages in the same site (or others one as well!)

Goodbye everybody,
Marco

Podcast: the voice you can bring with you

Hello everybody!

This time the good, old Marco is going to speak about three different podcasts he found on-line.

The first podcast I found was an halloween song from the site of the princetown review: this site is full of podcasts that are useful to learn new vocabulary words. In this case, since Halloween has just passed, I chose a song about it because the words of the song are clearly sung and, above all, I was curious to listen to it!

The second file I chose is about the meaning of the word tinker, because this is a good example of how we can improve our English vocabulary also with words coming from real situations in real life: tinker in fact means spending time in doing small jobs or making small changes to things, usually trying to repair them.
The site in which I found this podcast is also very interesting because it offers a lot of similar podcasts about other words, so that if one may have any doubt on any word, this is the right place to search these things in!

After these two links, I looked for the third one in a site called English feed, that provides podcasts about grammar porblems: in this case I chose the first podcast about conditionals, but others podcasts were about futures and present perfect and continuous. In my opinion, podcasts one can listen in this site are more useful to review one's grammar, because these audio files are like a lecture held by a professor in class.

I'd like to add also a few words on English feed site: I quickly explored some parts of this site and I found also podcasts about entire dialogues based not on grammar problems but on typical situation one may face in the real world, as for example a business dialogue: in this way this site could be also useful to learn new vocabulary rather than study grammar problems only.

And finally, after a long struggle with my Pc and any sort of link, I was able to put my audio file on line!!!
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Different styles in web sites

Hello everybody, meinen Damen und Herren!

This time I am going to speak about the different styles with which web sites are built up. In particular, after having clicked on some of the links posted on del.icio.us by my university colleagues, I find now interesting to speak about how two particular sites of these are built up.

The first site that caught my attention was Urban dictionary , that then I ideally opposed to
English learning one because of their (quite) opposite way to welcome the surfer and put on-line information: in my opinion, the best way to explain the difference is to describe the second link to understand the first one.

English learning seems like the introductory page of an important organization and has a formal way to welcome surfers: it presents an exhaustive introduction paragraph at the top of the page and then the same page is organized as a sort of reception desk, with some Hypertextual links presented by images at the centre of the page and a lot of links introduced by explanatory words and divided in arguments by some main titles at the left and right side of the page, organized as to form to columns.
If we ideally divide the page in two parts, its second half is characterized by an explanation of what Efl is on the left side, and some photos on the right side. At the bottom of the page, we find sponsored links and information about the web page. This type of organizationis very formal and designed to be as user-friendly and exhaustive as possible to the surfer who is looking for information about English Club.
Links are introduced by a single nominalized word or by a short sentence and the language is quite formal standard English.

On the other hand, the home page of Urban dictionary seem to me to be organized in a very different way as respect to the first site I read: it is very (too much?) simple and welcomes surfers with some redirections to different parts of the site on the top followed by a single explanatory sentence about the content of the site. At the left side of the page there is then one of the definitions that are to be found in the dictionary and in the middle of the page a picture that refers to this definition. At the bottom of the page, other links introduced by small pictures.

So, in my opinion, the site of the Urban dictionary is much less informative than the home page of English club and in this way seem to be addressed more to expert users who know Urban dictionary yet than to surfers that come in this site for the first time.

That's all I have to say (or at least, all that comes in my mind) this time!

Have a nice day!
Marco

Marco and social bookmarking

Hello everybody!

This time I am going to speak about what social bookmarking is about.

During the last lesson of our English course at university, we went on a site called delicious. This is a space in which one can post their favorites links about any argument they want and read about the links posted by other people. In this way one may find also links that are worth reading about the argument they are looking for: this is also the reason why one usually finds interesting links of good quality.

My university colleagues and I put some links as well and we searched for links of other people in order to better understand how this type of community (I think I can call it this way...) works. This way of sharing links and interests with other people is useful and easy to do.

I searched about the links my colleagues posted: since we had to put links of common interest, I found that "our" links mostly dealt with dictionaries, university, translation: these are the things we all have in common, so there was not too much room for imagination. Anyway, in my opinion this is a very useful way to share and find out interesting information and moreover I had fun looking up among statistics how many people saved the same links as I did and who were they (at least through their nicknames!)

That's all, folks!
Marco

introduction to Marco

Hello, welcome to the first blog Marco has created in his life!

I think I should now practice a little more in order to understand how to develop and to organize my blog, because I usually don't use PCs.

After this little introduction, i can present myself: I am Marco, I am 23 years old and I come from Padua, a very old and beautiful italian city near Venice. I am attending the fifth year of Languages at the University of Padua (and I hope to graduate very very soon!!).

I am writing this brand new blog while attending to an English course that is a little different from usual: we have always studied how to translate a text, how to use grammar correctly in our written texts (I feel as if i have always been studying like a student of primary school: the sky is blue, the book is on the desk) but this year they are teaching us how to speak live English in the real world ( at least at the end of our studies!!) through the creation of a blog.

But, as I said before, Im not an expert in using things like PCs or blogs, so I am trying, at the moment...

Through this new experience, I think I will be able to improve my English level (I actually think that my writing style is nothing special) but above all that I will be able to understand how English language should be and how it is actually used by Enlgish people when speaking more spontaneously and colloquially, that is to say when writing for example on their blogs, since in these first two weeks at university I understood that there are blogs for every taste and about everything, and that every single writer has their own style!

Well, this is all I have to say for the moment, apart from the fact that I apologize for any mistake in texts you will find in my blog...

Bye
Marco