ALICE's FEEDBACK

After reading all my collegues’ last contributions to Edutech I feel to say that everyone has really improve the articles they’d decided to work on. However, I’ve tried to underline “both positive and contrastive criticism” as Sarah asked us.

• I appreciated Lara’s contributions both to “Educational Usage in Language Learning” in “Podcasting” and in “Social Bookmarking” pages. In both articles one can find out that her personal experience interacts with information, manipulates it and what comes out is an original re-writing based on both personal knowledge and her study. I especially enjoyed the examples she gave to better understand how useful podcasting can be in the process of learning English as a second language. I guess one who wants to know more about podcasting is also eager to learn how it effectively works on the web and giving examples of them doesn’t miss this chance. Once again in the article “Social Bookmarking” she has shown what she had learned by using that knowledge. She has turned her subjective, internal and personal learning into an objective one. Perhaps she has given too less weight to quotations which I’m sure were not many but because they’re a few one has to able to get in touch with them to better understand what social bookmarking means.

• Together with Lara Valentina has contributed to the “Podcasting” article. While Lara has concentrated her attention more on podcasting for educational purposes Valentina has added more information about the history of podcasting and its revolutionary and significant part in bringing about results in everyday life. However, Valentina has always stared at the importance of podcasting to improve teaching and learning a language too. The contents of the article are well organized into paragraphs, perhaps what lacks in each paragraph is an emphasis on keywords using bold which may help the reader following the information. They have an exhaustive reference section but in my opinion some more links in the text are required so one can easily retrieve the source if she or he wants to know more about what it’s said. Let’s make an example: in the paragraph “Why is podcasting important?” step number 4 one has mentioned “some researches in instructional media” and maybe it would be very useful to have immediately a link back to these researches to emphasize the point and give the importance these researches have.

• Isabella and Daniela have contributed to the “Website” page. Their cooperation has produced a very well organized article divided into useful paragraphs and divisions; bold words help users to make selective reading much more easier and internal links to other pages in the wiki contribute to achieve one of the most important wiki’s purposes. Quotations are present but the common denominator in their observations goes back to their personal learning experiences in the actual doing of exploiting Web and technology to improve their English learning. I only think Isabella would have to avoid saying “according to my personal experience”: personal learning occurs when each student becomes responsible for the construction of his/her own webfolio, particularly in wiki-ing it’s not necessary to render it so explicit. The bibliography is well made and I found the links very effective in use. The content seems to me easily understood even thought I guess the first paragraph should be enrich with more information of what a website really is or pretends to be and maybe with some quotations coming from researches on the matter. But that’s WIKI – a collaborative writing which is never outright!

• I think Francesca has chosen one of the most difficult article to contribute to: first of all because of the subject, “Programmed Instruction” and then because someone else is contributing at the same page but it seems to me they’re not really working in cooperation. In fact, two “References and Links” sections are present at the same time and each of them refers back to the contribution of the two people. Wiki-ing also means facing this kind of situation. Francesca’s piece of work is objectively the best organized. Paragraphs, divisions, internal links, bold keywords and quotations are present and effective at the same time. Her writing is concise and plain, any ambiguity is avoided. Like what I have been done working at the article “e-tutoring”, she has also created a couple of new pages which didn’t exist before but she thinks they can become good articles to write about.

• In my opinion Daniele has chosen another difficult article to contribute to mainly because of its matter: “Behaviourism”. I guess it’s a topic which requires a lot of quotations from scholars and their researches and they’re really present in the several paragraphs. I think what lacks is a substantial bibliography where one can retrieve all the other information she/he is looking for. However, the layout of the article is very good and the content straightforward.

VERY GOOD JOB GUYS !!!

Alice