markz space: Seven sites in seven days: 11-17 Dec 06

I thought I'd do a regular highlights of my bookmarking activities, because I do see a lot of sites on the web, and bookmark those that interest me in the spirit of my physical library — I'd rather have something on my bookshelf that I can turn to in a time of need than nothing at all. If you dip into this blog on occasion, you too might be interested in some of the sites I consider worthwhile; this is the start of a hopefully regular series highlighting selected posts. If you want to see all my posts I found a small SupGlu demo that shows my posts (the URL may change and if so will be updated here), or you can use delicious.

In a spirit of reckless abandon I've called this post "Seven sites in seven days" and I'll try to continue this kind of post every Sunday, but I do have doubts about some of my compulsive abilities... What the heck, here goes, it's called that now. Set up a sweepstake to see how long I can maintain this.

You'll find that posts entitled "Seven sites..." are not about sites per se, but rather sites, pages, posts, and/or anything with a URL that takes my fancy. So you might find a wide variety of topics here. This week things are mostly about learning and the web.

In no particular order, seven highlights from my last seven days of bookmarking:

Adam Garry and Parry Graham, Using Study Groups to Disseminate Technology Best Practices. A post from 2004, this provides a how to guide to using collaborative study groups and reflection to improve teacher practice (or any other area of endeavour)> Nice how to guide that has an emphasis on productive work practices, and a couple of example of previously effective study groups.

Nancy Blachman, Google Guide. A bunch of clear explanatory web pages on how Google works, with pages for novices and for experienced users.

Marc Prensky, Writings. PDFs of some of Presnsky's writing. Marc is the author of "Digital Game-Based Learning" and "Don't bother me now Mom - I'm learning". I've bookmarked this to go back to the two part article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (it's second part is Do They REALLY Think Differently?).

Philipp Lenssen Lessons Learned Self-Publishing With Lulu. Seb Schmoller of the fabulous Fortnightly Mailing turned me onto Lulu, which I think I've come across before, but without the shock of realisation. I had an extremely negative experience of publishing with Addison Wesley (although I liked the book that resulted from the experience) and Lulu promises to revolutionise the experience of publishing my next edited monograph. In the link here Phillip Lenssen gives a view of self-publishing with Lulu from the trenches.

Andrew Beacock republishes a handy bookmarklet to associate Technorati tags with posts in Oddiophile's Technorati Tags Bookmarklet. There are several ways to do this, Google around and find a few, or see what you can find in my Technorati bookmarks. Don't know what a Technorati tag is? Try this.

LifeHacker provides Alpha Geek: Video Editing 101, a simple guide to video editing on Windows platforms with Microsoft Movie Maker.

Pew Internet, Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0". I like the Pew Internet site for its evidence based reports on the internet and its development. Here they do the Web2.0 thing, but you may find the site an interesting browse.

Fred Stutzman, Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know. Not so important in my view for the five sites that Stutzman mentions, but rather for the three trends that he identifies towards the end of his post: