Jane Harris's List: PKM

• Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively.
• But what we loosely call knowledge, using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture, is often just an approximation. As knowledge management expert Dave Snowden says, we are not very good at articulating our knowledge; “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”
• the cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we share can help us have better conversations and increase our understanding of things that cannot easily be codified. Our individual sense-making can be shared, and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. This is not a linear process, as in from information we get knowledge, which over time becomes wisdom. Gaining knowledge is much messier than that.
• Becoming knowledgeable

  • So now, people who want to can become apprentices as well as practice in the environment where there are participants at various levels of expertise.
• is laborious, hence the reason why masters through the ages could only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology
• Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to continuously share it.
• Knowledge shared in flows over time can help us create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock
• Seeking includes observation through effective filters and diverse sources of information. Sense-making starts with questioning our observations and includes experimenting, or probing. Sharing through our networks helps to develop better feedback loops.

  • This is it in a nutshell.
• In addition to seeking, sensing and sharing, we need to become adept at filtering information as well as discerning when and with whom to share. Like any skill, these require practice and feedback. Much of this feedback can be provided in communities of practice,

  • I see this as part of seeking and perhaps sensing?
• Narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding.
• Free Your Bookmarks:

  • You will bookmark for yourself anyway...the social benefits (sharing) become clearer later.)
• Aggregate: Driving as many information sources as possible through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Feedly,
• Connect:
• Twitter
• The search function can help find people who post about a specific topics. To start, one should follow no less than 20 and no more than 30 interesting people. Once set up, beginners should dip into their stream once or twice a day and read through any posts of interest. Over time, as they follow links, they may add or delete feeds. Within a week or two, anyone should be able to sense some patterns and then modify their streams to provide more signal and less noise.
• It is best to start with simple tools and frameworks.
• As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind“.

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