SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social Bookmarking is the last thing I was pleased to discover on the Web. Actually, I'd already heard about it but, to be honest, I had never cared about finding out what social bookmarking was. Thanks to our last lesson in the lab, I became acquainted with Del.icio.us, a free online software for Social Bookmarking, and I started to appreciate its usefullness. Social Bookmarking is a tool that enables you to subscribe your favourite websites online, to store them online and to share them with other people. Two advantages of Social Bookmarking are quite manifest. The first one is that with Social Bookmarking you are provided with a list of your favourites online and so you can consult it from any computer without losing information. The other one is implicit in the adjective "social": as your favourites can be seen by anybody and you can share information about interesting websites with other people, you can also take advantage of what the other people had already looked for on the internet and follow their suggestions. As far as I'm concerned, I think that Social Bookmarking is some kind of reciprocal exchange of information between people where if you are interesting in looking for something on the Web, you can also have a look at what the other people suggest about the same topic. Moreover, Social Bookmarking plays the role of filtering the huge amount of information that you can find on the Web dealing with a specific topic. Thanks to the notes given by the people who previously visited the website, you can have a general idea of the website you're interested in and then decide to log on or simply to quit and try another one.

As far as my personal research is concerned, I must admit that I found Social Bookmarking very useful. If you look for something with Social Bookmarking, you're already provided with a list of selected websites on the topic and so you don't have to spend a lot of time screening and switching from a website to the other in order to finally find out the one that really matches with you personal interests.

Talking about our e-tivity, I took quite a lot of time visiting the suggested websites and I believe that the majority of them are really really interesting for our language learning purposes. I chose my tags thinking about my weaknesses in English and some aspects of the language that I would like to improve. Therefore, I subscribed an online Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs because I think that the more you learn them, the less you're confident with them. Then, I listed a Dictionary of Idioms and Idiomatic expressions too because idioms are among the funniest and most captivating aspects of a language and there are always a lot of things to learn about them. The third website, the Phrases Finder, is linked with the previous two because it still talks about idioms and phrases but it also gives you the explanation of their origin. I think it's quite an interesting and stimulating thing, isn't it? The last two websites are less specific: the first one is a collection of online exercises to test our language abilities while the other websites provides a series of listening activities to keep up with our listening skills.

I really enjoyed reading the websites' choice of the other members in my group. I noticed that we focused more or less on the same aspects of language learning, maybe because they are the most difficult ones. For instance, Sivia and I chose the same websites on idioms or idiomatic expressions and listening activities while Zara selected the Phrase Finder website that I mentioned before. Just one word for Giada's choice; she subscribed a websites dealing with how to use English punctuation properly: it was quite detailed and exhaustive, I really appreciated it. In the end, Letizia found out a website called English Club about how to learn English and teach English and I analysed the section dealing with "How to teach English" deeply since I'm managing with my first experience as a teacher of English.

I hope you'll appreciate my post and I'm looking forward to reading your opinion about Social Bookmarking...

Bye!

Elena