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.
danmcdowell.net 