Personal Knowledge Management
[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]
Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests and motivation (not directed by external forces)
Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)
Management = how to get things done
What is PKM?
PKM is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.
The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them.
PKM can be looked at as three types of activities [note: I’ve reduced this from seven activities in my previous articles on PKM as I believe that a simpler process is easier to teach and to begin with].
Aggregate |
Filter |
Connect |
Observations & Notes Information Knowledge Sources of Info & Knowledge |
Annotate, Tag,
List, File, Classify, Clarify, Expand, Question |
People – People
|
Why PKM?
Human knowledge currently doubles about every year and personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).
PKM is of little value unless the results are shared by connecting to others and contributing to meaningful conversations. Informal, social learning is the primary way that knowledge is created in the workplace. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we build on the knowledge of others. As knowledge workers or citizens, PKM is our part of the social learning contract. Without effective PKM at the individual level, social learning has less value.
A Model
There is more than one PKM process but here is a basic structure that works for me and makes sense to many others I show it to. This post is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Take what you need, as there are no best practices for complex and personal learning processes.
PKM in the context of work:
Individuals have their unique methods of sense-making and by sharing cooperatively or working collaboratively they contribute to the social learning mosaic that creates organizational knowledge.
Aggregate – looking for good sources of information (people) – noting or tagging pieces of information while working collaboratively.
Filter – saving information for later – considering how it may be useful in various contexts – finding the right information, at the right time, in the right format, from the information repositories of our subject matter networks.
Connect – ongoing conversations while learning and working including connecting ideas and people.
Enhanced Serendipity – PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning. and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”
Getting to work
One of the difficult aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what we view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice. It depends on the depth and breath of our sources (aggregation), as well as the effectiveness of our filters.
When we find something of interest or value, we need to do something with it. Either file it, save it, add to it, send it on or discard it. Discarding or missing something is becoming less of a problem online because we have powerful search tools and if we participate in cooperative networks, more than one person will notice items of significance.
All of this aggregation and filtering isn’t of much use if we can’t find things later. Putting our knowledge online, in databases that enable tagging, filtering and searching makes it much easier to retrieve it when we need it. For example, I use this blog as a knowledge repository. It is searchable and I’ve added tags and categories. With over 1,500 posts and +4,000 comments, I have a an excellent tool for managing what I’ve learned. Add to this almost 2,000 online social bookmarks and weekly summaries of what I learn on Twitter and I’ve created an outboard brain.
The most important aspect of PKM is making our knowledge not only explicit but public. This is part of connecting. Going public means looking both inward and outward. However, let me add one caveat. Sometimes, just publishing online for our own learning and perhaps later retrieval, is enough. It doesn’t matter if nobody links to it. If we get too focused on what others think, we won’t become good critical thinkers.