While I love the broad brush that AP World History paints of the last 10,000 years, it is beginning to be extremely limiting. In my college prep class, I spend about six weeks talking about the origins of democratic thought, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the wars for independence in Latin America. Even that amount of time isn't enough.

In AP World History, I am facing covering all of those topics, plus the rise of nationalism, the unification of Italy and Germany, and several smaller themes related to revolutionary ideas - all in a week. Obviously it can't be done. I will touch upon the Enlightenment, do a short simulation on the writing of the Declaration of Independence, and then do a comparison on the Legacy of the French and American Revolutions. My students will have to learn the rest from the textbook. Good luck.

I have been trying to use del.icio.us. Really I have. But for some reason I just couldn't do it. I also experimented with Jots. I do like the idea of social bookmarking. It just becomes took much. I am already overwhelmed with information that I acquire from my 74 Bloglines feeds. Plus there is the look and feel of del.icio.us. The simplicity is great, and while I do like simplicity, I like some amount of style.

Then I found Scuttle (I first found it through Google, but a couple days later Tim Lauer wrote about it). It is an open source social bookmarking tool that can be installed on your own personal server. It allows you to customize the css file to control the look and feel - which is already a bit more stylish then del.icio.us.

I am already moving towards Scuttle as the bookmarks solution to my knowledge management issue (discussed in my previous post). I believe that in order for the KM project not become overwhelmed with web resources, those items need to be placed in a separate section (especially if I move towards a blog-type solution). Scuttle would allow a small group approach to social bookmarking - allowing only those who are part of the group to contribute to the world history knowledge base, but keeping it public so anyone can access and search it. Scuttle, like del.icio.us also allows you to link to all of the items with a specific tag. That link could be included in the actual knowledge management system which will contain the lesson plans, strategies, PowerPoints, etc.

My first experimentation is to use Scuttle to manage the links for the San Diego EconEd Foundation web site I manage. I have collected resource and lesson plan links related to economics education for years and placed them in traditional html based pages. The maintenance of these resources is very time consuming and searching them is next to impossible. This new tool will hopefully provide a more usable resource for economics teachers AND make managing the links more efficient on my end. I just now need to work with the board members to develop a schema of tags that will address the needs of this specific community.

The process of collecting my knowledge (which I discussed in the previous post) naturally led me to my own teaching practices. One of the core ideas of knowledge management is to capture more then mere documents within a database. It involves recording the information that makes documents and factual information more relevant and useful – really, to record the human experience with the knowledge.

Teachers must collect vast amounts of knowledge, including lesson plans, useful strategies, reflections, and the content itself. Having taught world history for eight years, I have collected shelves of books, file cabinets of readings and handouts, and gigabytes of digital media (ranging from pdfs to PowerPoints to video clips). While I like to think I have a general handle on all of these resources, the reality is that I forget what I have. Once I finish a unit of study, a year passes before I visit those items again. While I attempt to take notes on how specific lessons went and what I need to do differently, I many times find them only after I have implemented the lesson a year or two later.

Most teachers develop some sort of system that allows them to organize their materials. I have used manila folders, massive binders, and a file hierarchy on my hard drive. However, I argue that curriculum, especially within the social studies, should be in some sort of flux. There are always new resources available, different perspectives to be found, new strategies to try, new technologies to be used to help transfer this information to students, and new needs to be met with the changing times. How can we keep track of all of this information? How do we not forget what we already do? How can we share our lessons, ideas, and links with colleagues without committing to hours of face-to-face meetings? Why are new teachers expected to create curriculum that already exists?

Within the business world, knowledge management is not a new idea. Technological advances have streamlined the process and broadened the ability for companies to share more and share it further. Why does it seem that education, most notability K-12 education, always seems to be just out of the loop or years behind?

In the next few months, I am going to be exploring these questions. On a personal level, I hope to bring my vast collection of resources (books, articles, links, lessons, lesson strategies) together in a manner that when I want to see my lessons on Totalitarianism in Europe, they will all be easily accessible. On a school level, I want to create a collaborative world history knowledge base with my colleagues. We already share lessons, but we do not have a lot of time to sit down and discuss how we individually implement the lessons. On a larger educational level, I want to explore methods and tools that might help other teachers tackle their mountain of information and hopefully, create very specific collaborative communities.

Any ideas?

As I finished up my masters program last semester, we had to explore the idea and eventually build a personal knowledge management system that reflected the information we had acquired during our stay in the program. We spent a considerable amount of time examining the XML features of Word and marking up documents. After some thought I realized that this particular system did not work for me. Having spent a decent amount of time using, researching, and talking about blogs in the last year, I felt comfortable about using a blogging tool for my Educational Technology Personal Knowledge Management System. While Blogger has suited my needs for this blog, I needed a tool that had more features and a greater ability to organize posts with categories and key words. I finally decided upon Movable Type. While not open source, you can install a personal version of the software for free on your server and set up and customize multiple blogs.

This was a great culminating project that allowed me to reflect upon the different classes I had taken and what I took from them. While I still need to fill in some of the abstracts and add a few more resources, I look at this as a foundation for my current knowledge and a way to easily refresh myself if the need arises. This collection will not doubt grow with time as I continue researching and expanding my background on ideas that interest me and are relevant to my job (whatever that may be in the future).

Of course, I could not just leave it here. Throughout my time in the program I went out of my way (sometimes doing much more work then required) to make my projects and research relevant to my day job. In the final weeks of the semester, I couldn't resist but to theorize how I might use this same idea in the classroom.

I have been working on this new look for a while now. It still needs some fine tuning, but I wanted it to look like the rest of my site. Any thoughts?

The clock is ticking. Right before break our union finally gave up trying to work out a better deal with the district. We are now moving into the fact-finding phase of the negotiations. This process involves both sides providing all of the evidence that supports our position. A three-person panel will then make a non-binding decision. That decision can be accepted or rejected by both the district and the union. If the district rejects the decision, it can impose its last best offer. Then we will have to decide if we want to strike. If the panel finds for the district, we will probably have to accept the offer - probably eliminating the power of the union to negotiate for years to come.

It is my feeling (and others that I have talked to), that the decision will either be for us or be so unclear that both sides will claim victory. In the end I think we will strike. This reality has increased my stress, anger, and indifference. It is hard for me to do long-term planning for next semester when there is a good chance some of the lessons will not be implemented. Additionally, the district decided to pass on health care costs to the teachers, so I am paying an extra $165.00 on top of the $400.00 I already pay.

A couple months ago I wrote a letter to the superintendent and president of the board after they visited my classroom. After seeing my December pay stub with the extra money deducted, I decided to write them again. Here is that letter, followed by the superintendent's response.

December 16 e-mail

Dr. Ryan

Just so you know, you have successfully ruined my holiday season. I was counting on every penny in my December paycheck to make it through Christmas. That extra $163.00 that has been deducted this month so my family can go to the doctor, will force us to purchase fewer gifts for my 2 and 4 year old and makes the short trip to Big Bear we had planned impossible.

I wrote a letter to you weeks ago that you didn't respond to, but this is not about the union leadership. You are attacking all of us. YOU personally make me want to leave this district and have gotten me to consider leaving teaching all together. I don't know who you think you are leading, but the people who are actually doing the work of this district (THE TEACHERS), think your agenda is purely political and not about educating the students.

In a season that should be filled with holiday cheer, I will wonder how to make less money go further when prices have increased.

I challenge you to be fair to those who work for you.

I challenge you to respect the teachers who had dedicated their lives to students.

I challenge you to make a difference, not expand the differences between us.

As you enjoy your holiday season with your family, know in your heart that YOU are responsible for making others' season more stressful and more difficult.

Merry Christmas from a teacher who will spend at least 20 hours of his vacation grading, lesson planning, and working in his classroom - doing the real work of education.

I received this response from the superintendent's secretary last Friday:

Dear Mr. McDowell:

I appreciate your email dated December 16, 2005. I feel badly about increases in teacher health and welfare benefit cost. Other district unions have a contract in place and haven’t experienced that increase. I believe that the responsibility belongs with GEA leadership. GEA leadership continues to deny teachers the opportunity to vote on the ratification of a new contract. To continue to pay for teacher health and welfare increases would constitute an unfair labor practice under the collective bargaining laws of the State of California.

Hopefully, an independent fact-finding panel from the State of California will be able to help us resolve our differences. It seems GEA leadership will continue to deny teachers their right to decide their own future by not allowing teachers to vote. This is most unfortunate.

I wish you a wonderful new year. Let's hope for labor peace and for the reestablishment of Grossmont teacher rights to exercise their democratic prerogative to vote and to determine their own future.

The problem with this letter is that it is misleading. First, the teachers (not the union leadership) have expressed disgust with the current offer (which is actually worse then previous offers). We haven't voted because there is no reason to vote on an offer that is an insult to our profession. This is just part of the district's plan to try paint the union as an elitist group that doesn't actually represent the teachers. What the district doesn't seem to get is that the union is not a few individuals, but all of the teachers.

Frustrating.

After a two week break, I'm... Well, I'm not quite sure. It was certainly nice to be home with my wife and kids, especially after such a long year of graduate school and teaching. However, I took home a stack of papers to be graded, lesson planning, and had a variety of other work related mini-projects I wanted to to start. And I did next to none of it. I have found over the years that winter break is far from relaxing. The holiday season is so tense and so filled with family obligations that I never feel rested. That's not to say it is bad (I have to be diplomatic of course), but it is certainly not calming.

Spring break is a whole different story. Not that I am counting the days.

I've always loved New Year's Eve. It is a time to look at what happened in the past year and what could happen in the year to come. While I am far from optimistic, I like to consider the possibilities and potential.

Some things I will be looking at this year...

• On a personal level, my five year-old will be going off to the kindergarten and the youngest will be off to pre-school in the fall.
  
• My wife and I will also be celebrating our ten-year anniversary.
  
• At NECC in San Diego this July I will be presenting my Holocaust Wiki Project (after running it again in the Spring). Starting later this month I will start working on an article (that will hopefully be published) with Bernie Dodge at SDSU to complement the presentation.
  
• I will explore the possibility of writing another article with another of my SDSU Ed Tech professors, Farhad Saba, on knowledge management for the K12 teachers. This was a topic I basically ignored until the last couple weeks of my program and then found that I am intensely interested in it. Expect posts on this as I explore it further.
  
• In the Fall, I will get to teach my AP World History class again! Not that this year is going poorly (just the opposite), but it will be nice to have a foundation to build upon.
  
• Last, and certainly least, my district is on a crash course with a strike. It will be a trying spring as we face tough decisions and consequences that will last for years.
  

Happy New Year.