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What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 9, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Personal Knowledge Mastery: Narrating our work Two kids stand on their heads, upside down in a cushioned swivel chair

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

Jarche informs us that when we narrate our work, we don't experience knowledge transfer, but what we do get is greater understanding. Our individual, self-directed learning is difficult to codify, he explains, and is more focused on relationships and expertise. When we narrate our work, focusing on decisions and processes, we make that work more visible to others. This means we can experiment and share knowledge, learning together in real time. The results of this thinking together results in enterprise curation, where we can more easily codify knowledge and experience the results of our earlier efforts.

network era knowledge flow individual mastery informs knowledge management Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) requires tools and time to seek, sense, and share knowledge

The value of social bookmarks are hard to see, at first. However, over time, especially when combined with the use of feed aggregators and readers, we eventually get to witness the power of PKM as a discipline. I've been using Raindrop.io bookmarks for years, now, and enjoy having shareable bookmarks (which I can surface, when a situation encourages that practice), yet most of my collections are private. One that is now public is my growing collection of AI articles, in both an RSS feed and just a browsable page.

I do find myself cringing a bit as I save items there, knowing that I certainly don't endorse each link I save and the topic of AI is so controversial and polarizing. I've got everything up there from the world as we know it is crumbling to its core to fun hacks to use AI to build you a rocket ship to the moon (or load your dishwasher) or some such thing.

Jarche states that our emphasis when we narrate our work should be on making our thinking accessible, but to avoid disrupting people with what we choose to share. He writes:

The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice.

One practice Jarche mentions under his tips and links section is to keep a journal. While I've not been good at this practice since my teenage years long ago, I did find many of these 6 Ways Keeping a Journal Can Help Your Career compelling. In Episode 425 of Teaching in Higher Ed, I share Viji Sathy's and Kelly Hogan's suggestion to keep a “Starfish” folder. There are variations of the beloved story of the starfish, including this Tale of the Starfish page from the Starfish Foundation with a powerful video describing the power in making a difference for a single starfish, even if we can't rescue them all.

I have kept up with digital encouragement folders for years now, both on my email accounts, as well as in my file directories (across my personal and professional domains). While not a journal, exactly, these stories and words can bring me encouragement during difficult times.

I've been paying for the Day One Journal App for years now, though entirely languish in my practice of journaling. I would switch over to Obsidian, which has the benefit of future proofing any notes I take using Obsidian, since they are just text files sitting wherever I want them to be (as in if the app went away, the text files are still there and readable).

However, Day One brings together all the TV and movies that I've watched, all my social media posts and images, and all the videos I've favorited on YouTube. I use Sequel to track what I want to watch, which then optionally integrates with the free Trakt service, which allows for an IFTTT rule to add an entry to Day One each time I mark something as watched in Sequel. In case you're wondering about how I accomplish this, I found these two automations on IFTTT and never had to change a thing.

  • IFTTT applet – If watched a new episode, then Create Journal Entry
  • IFTTT applet – If watched a new movie, then Create Journal Entry

Perhaps someday I'll go down a rabbit trail of trying to figure out a longer-term, non-subscription based model for collecting all those memories across all those different services and not locking myself into DayOne. For now, I'm enjoying revisiting this glimpse of these two upside down kind of people from 2017….

Two kids stand on their heads, upside down in a cushioned swivel chair

…and then having this song from Jack Johnson start playing on the soundtrack of my mind for what I'm sure will last at least a few hours.

Filed Under: Personal knowledge mastery

I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 9, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Personal Knowledge Mastery - Seekers and Catalysts

Gecko sits on a branch

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

Sometimes we think we need experts, sure. But we shouldn't dismiss the power of finding fellow seekers. There are times when an expert might help us, but also times they leave us behind or otherwise are unable to contribute to our growth. They may not have sufficient beginner's mind or childlike curiosity. We may need the empathy and lack of judgement that can be possible with someone who is still wrestling through these same ideas, themselves.

I've often tried to coach students in showing them the ways that they can help their professors, when they often think their only possible role is as one being the receiver of help. Similarly, when we are in a seeking role, we aren't able to see the ways we can add value to the learning process for ourselves and others. We can wrestle with trying to give the appearance of competence versus staying in the seeker's mindset and focusing on curiosity and wonder. This hesitance at potentially looking foolish to others in our incompetence can not only hold us back from learning, but also cause us to feel alone. It is vital to connect with other seekers and experience the benefits of those roles within our networks.

Jarche writes:

Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines.

I sure hope Harold is right about cross-disciplinary innovation expanding, as we need that more than ever. In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein instructs:

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead… start planning experiments.

The Value of Experiments

What are experiments? Epstein describes them by introducing physicist Andre Geim and his “Friday night experiments” (FNEs). It was through these endeavors that Geim won not a fancy Nobel Prize, but an Ig Nobel (which Geim shares with collaborator M V Berry via their Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons piece, available through the Internet Wayback Machine). The Ig Nobel is bestowed on those who at first seem like they're doing something ridiculous. From Wikipedia:

The Ig Nobel Prize (/ˌɪɡ noʊˈbɛl/) is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word “ignoble”.

A serious researcher, Geim is (as of 2025) the only person to both win a Nobel and an Ig Nobel prize. Those who are in line to potentially win an Ig Nobel are first informed, such that they can determine if the satirical nature of the designation might be detrimental to their research careers. For his FNEs, Geim was experimenting with levitating frogs with magnets and was awarded the satirical prize for that less “serious” work. Through another FNE, Geim wound up developing “gecko tape,” which was based on the properties of geckos' feet. These less serious experiments contributed to his more “serious” research, which ultimately led to his prestigious receipt of a Nobel Prize.

A lump of graphite, a graphene transistor, and a tape dispenser.

This 2010 image of a lump of graphite, a graphene transistor, and a tape dispenser, items that were given to the Nobel Museum by researchers Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov to reflect their Nobel research. Before their discoveries, it was believed to be impossible to create material that could conduct electricity in such thin layers as graphene is now able to, which has opened up even more possibilities in both material science and electronics.

In his first-person narrative from his 2010 Nobel Prize, he describes how his Russian literature tutor critiqued his writing for trying too hard to parrot experts vs trusting his own intuition. Geim writes:

My tutor said that what I was writing was good but it was clear from my essays that I tried to recall and repeat the thoughts of famous writers and literature critics, not trusting my own judgement, afraid that my own thoughts were not interesting, important or correct enough. Her advice was to try and explain my own opinions and ideas and to use those authoritative phrases only occasionally, to support and strengthen my writing. This simple advice was crucial for me – it changed the way I wrote. Years later I noticed that I was better at explaining my thoughts in writing than my fellow students.

I once was able to interview a recipient of the Ig Nobel for Teaching in Higher Ed: Episode 591 – Rethinking Student Attendance Policies for Deeper Engagement and Learning with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer. Danny is the one of these two collaborators with this great honor. Take a look at the incredible title of the piece that won him the Ig Nobel: Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, by Daniel M. Oppenheimer Imagine how bummed I was that despite me being so excited to ask him more about it, my nerves got the best of me and I entirely forgot to ever mention it during our conversation for the podcast.

Researching Versus Searching

Epstein describes in Range the ways in which the novice mindset gets weaved together with the expert mindset in such transformative ways. He reveals how us being willing to be vulnerable in our not knowing and early experimentation through an art historian's description of how Geim is emblematic of this willingness to stay in the not knowing longer. Epstein tells how:

Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,” Lewis wrote.

My friend, Naomi, and I always joke with each other about our “rabbit trail” emails back and forth to each other. I often wish there were a better expression that more precisely evokes the delight that can come from a diversion. Two years before he won the Nobel, Geim was asked to explain his research process. He described how instead of always going deep, he likes to stay in the shallow and move around. He described:

I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.

Seeking as Doing

Jarche illustrates how when trust is low that doers, connectors, and catalysts can address the limitations of credibility that exist in the roles of professors, stewards, and experts. He asserts: We Need Less Professing and More Doing. He describes how someone like Zeynep Tukekci can be not a medical professional herself, but so gifted at weaving “knowledge from many disciplines into a coherent narrative.”

Jarche stressing the doing part made me think of Mike Caulfield, who says that novice fact checkers need not to solely focus on critical thinking, but he would rather we all get far better at teaching critical doing skills. I've been having a blast following Mike's own critical doing skills as he documents his experiments with in what ways AI may be able to help with critical thinking/doing. He is in the process of learning out loud, as he identifies the less helpful approaches for trying to use AI for fact checking and where he sees promise for achieving better results than most people would be able to come up with, themselves.

In a lot of ways, I'm seeing Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop as my own set of small experiments. In Dave's recent Coaching for Leaders Episode 747, he interviews Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Le Cunff explains how:

The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind.

Sounds a lot like PKM to me… Until next time. For now, it is dinnertime around here and we ordered Cheesecake Factory. It's good to be back home. In the meantime, here's for our individual and collective ability to see clearly now, as we practice PKM together.

Filed Under: Personal knowledge mastery

Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 8, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Personal Knowledge Mastery: Connectors

Three women stand in the front of a room in a large lecture hall.

I've been traveling this week, so got a bit behind on my reflections on Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) workshop. The other thing that is a bit frustrating, is that I haven't been disciplined about my typical sensemaking habits and practices and seem to have lost the notes I took on a video he shared about something new to me: network weaving. At some point, maybe my reflections will resurface (my digital inboxes are overflowing, at the moment, and search seems no use to me if I can't even find the haystack that the needle may be hiding in with those notes). That's all just to say, I'm all over the place right now.

Network Weaving

I stubbornly don't want to rewatch the video at this exact moment. I'm sitting in an airport, next to an outlet with all my devices happily charging until it is time to get on my first of two flights for the day. To say that I am a person with battery anxiety is an understatement. Here's what I remember about watching Networks: Weaving People, Ideas and Projects, though, mixed with the connections I found with other ideas I've encountered in the past.

June Holley describes network weaving as connecting people, ideas, and projects. Hearing her describe the generosity and intentionality involved in network weaving had me reflecting on Coaching for Leaders Episode 279 with Tom Henschel: How to Grow Your Professional Network. Prior to listening to that conversation between Dave and Tom, I had thought about networking more as something I was never very good at, but tolerated, since I knew it was necessary in most professions.

Tom described different types of networking and it was then that I realized I actually loved it and did it all the time; just that I hadn't thought of what I enjoy doing falling under the category of networking. I enjoy meeting someone new and then identifying who else I know that is into the same stuff that they're into. I think what Tom was describing is a lot like June Holley's description of network weaving. Jarche shares this short Network Weaving 101 article from Valdis Krebs, which describes how this process is all about “closing triangles.” Krebs writes:

A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z.

This makes so much sense to me, instantly. Some of the other content that Jarche has shared has been challenging for me to take in (which I appreciate, as he's stretching me and helping me grow). But this one, I feel like I get on a more instinctive level. Like I've been doing something for much of my life, without having a word for it, yet experiencing such joy each time it happens.

Imposter Syndrome

I'm also realizing that one of the ways I try to calm my nerves when preparing to do a keynote or workshop may very well be embodied by the idea of network weaving. The lizard part of my brain starts to tell myself that I have nothing to offer (this gets exasperated by being in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city, after sitting too long on airplanes all day). One of the best listener emails I ever received came from Itamar Kastner in Scotland. He said that he knows I'm a fan of music and thought I might enjoy Grace Petrie, and English Folk singer-song writer “in the protest singer tradition of Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie,” he explained over email. Yes, indeed, Itamar was spot on in recommending Grace Petrie's Nobody Knows That I'm a Fraud:

To thwart the less sophisticated parts of my brain that make me wonder what I'm doing in a hotel room, preparing for the next day's adventures, I work to shift my focus away from how I am feeling and what I might like people to experience in the session with me. I even try to shrink it down more than a bunch of nameless faces and think about a single person and where they may be struggling and potentially feeling alone or like a failure in some way. What sorts of imposter syndrome symptoms might otherwise be relieved through my vulnerability in not having everything figured out, yet learning out loud, anyway? How might that posture provide fertile ground for others to do the same?

The second half of how I can calm my nerves is to remember that my job isn't to talk about what I do in my own teaching, necessarily. Rather, I get to share these incredible stories and point people back to the source of inspiration that I've found through the podcast across all these years. This feels very much like what I now understand to be a form of collective network weaving (as in connecting many people to new ideas, people, and projects. The last eleven and a half years, I've been fortunate to get to talk to people from all over the world who love teaching and learning (just like me). The stories within those conversations are limitless sources of hope, practice, and feelings of solidarity.

Jackie Shay offers the final piece of the puzzle for unraveling those feelings of insecurity that can be present for so many of us, by the way. I realize that last sentence mixed at least two metaphors at once, but give me a break. I'm sitting in an airport, remember? 😂 On Episode 571: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Through Joyful Curiosity, Jackie asks:

Why can't we recognize that these different types of intelligences have just as much value as intellectual intelligence?

I'm not supposed to ever be even close to the smartest person in the room. Not even close. But curiosity and connection? Those are two pursuits I've enjoyed my whole life and are forms of intelligence to be valued and cultivated in ourselves and others. As we prepare to share our sensemaking process with others, how about we stop trying to out-perform the imaginary room of intelligent people we'll be talking at and start working on creating conversations that spark imagination?

Jackie Shay is tremendously good at getting people curious and engaged. I remember so vividly talking to Jackie about my memories of camping with my family in Joshua Tree as a little girl and getting swept away in all the specifics that flooded into my mind. Then, I felt like I should pull back and joked about revealing a bigger focus on capitalism than I had hoped for a conversation about nature/science. My brother and I used to have a whole economy we had built out of the various elements in the desert back then, like the quartz crystals and different types of plants.

Jackie laughed with me, but also let me know that sorting and categorizing things (as we had done with the different elements there in the desert) was actually a big part of science. We were doing science, even though I didn't have a word for that at the time (and clearly didn't in my embarrassment feeling like no one wanted to hear about my childhood memories until she pointed out to me that we had been doing science, without realizing it). I recalled Alexis Pierce Caudell recommending Categories We Live By: How We Classify Everyone and Everything, by Gregory L. Murphy on Episode 527. While I wish I had finished reading it by now, but it sits in the virtual pile of books I've started but have yet to complete. It's not a science book, though, well… except maybe the varieties related to library science and information technology. I obviously need to read the book before I should be commenting on what it is and isn't. Sigh.

Two young kids about the age of six and eight stand in front of hills in the background and stone structures in the foreground. The stones make up the shape of walls and other structures.

I don't think at all that this picture of my brother and I was actually taken in Joshua Tree. I'm going to have to see if I can find one in the photo albums I haven't quite gotten to scanning yet. But it reminds me of our imaginative life that we had when our family would take trips together.

Closing Triangles

As Valdis Krebs described, network weaving is all about closing triangles. At the keynote I gave for the ETOM conference today, I didn't exactly close a triangle. However, I got to spend some time with a couple of past Teaching in Higher Ed podcast guests. Christina Moore discussed Inclusive Practices Through Digital Accessibility on Episode 293 and Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning on Episode 456. VaNessa Thompson helped us discover How to Engage on Social Media on Episode 416.

Three women stand at the front of a large lecture hall in front of a colorful presentation slide

VaNessa and Christina already know each other and I know them. Still, this memory we now share tightens the bond between us and now creates a triangular relationship between the three of us. Again, not necessarily closing triangles here. But certainly doing something new with going from one-on-one relationships and now having this shared triangle to remember and potentially strengthen in the future.


PS. My talk was aligned with the conference theme (innovation). I had some fun with alliteration and divided the talk into: 1) innovation 2) imagination and 3) imitation (which was kinda like curation, but I just couldn't break the alliteration streak I was on there). In my reading for the topic of connectors, I just saw a quick reference in Beth Kanter's piece that Jarche shared about how helpful network weaving can be when we're “stumbling through the fog of innovation.” I like that phrase “fog of innovation” and only wish I had come across it before today's keynote. 🤦‍♀️🫠

Filed Under: Personal knowledge mastery

The Experts in My Neighborhood

By Bonni Stachowiak | October 30, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Personal Knowledge Mastery: Experts. 

Electric typewriter with a hand pointing at it.

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

The topic of how expertise is no longer valued today is often discussed. I realize that I am walking through well-trodden pathways, as I bring it up in these reflections on experts today. In The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, Tom Nichols writes:

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.

In today's post, I want to think less about the societal and educational concerns I have about the death of expertise and more about how I might continue to attempt to inculcate habits that can keep me from dying that same death, myself. Part of that practice involves finding and curating many experts to help shape my thinking, over time.

PKM Roles from Harold Jarche

For this topic, Jarche invites us to use a map of personal knowledge mastery (PKM) roles to determine where we currently reside and where we would like to go, in terms of our PKM practice. He offers this graphic as part of his Finding Perpetual Beta book:

On the Y axis, we can sort ourselves into doing high or low amounts of sharing. As I wrote previously, my likelihood of sharing is in direct relation to the topic I'm exploring. However, as Jarche recommended social bookmarking as one way of sharing, perhaps I was selling myself short when I categorized myself as not likely to share anything overly controversial. I have over 35 thousand digital bookmarks on Raindrop.io and add around 10-20 daily. However, I'm more likely to be categorized as highly visible sharing in terms of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and the topics I write about on the Teaching in Higher Ed blog.

On the X axis, our activities are plotted on a continuum more toward high or low sense-making. A prior workshop participant of Jarche's wrote:

We must make SENSE of everything we find, and that includes prioritising–recognising what is useful now, what will be useful later, and what may not be useful.

Given my propensity for saving gazillions of bookmarks and carefully tagging them for future use, combined with my streak of weekly podcast episodes airing since June of 2014, when it comes to teaching and learning, I'm doing a lot of sense-making on the regular.

These are the (NEW) Experts in My Neighborhood

Taking inspiration from Sesame Street's People in Your Neighborhood and from Jarche's activity related to experts, I offer the following notes on experts. When I searched for people within teaching and learning on Mastodon, I found that I was already following a lot of them. I decided to then look at who people I already follow are following:

  • Ethan Zuckerman – UMass Amherst, Global Voices, Berkman Klein Center. Formerly MIT Media Lab, Geekcorps, Tripod.com
  • Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. – Professor, researcher, writer, teacher. I care about content moderation, digital labor, the state of the world. I like animals and synthesizers and games. On the internet since 1993. Mac user since they came out. I like old computers and OSes. I love cooking. Siouxsie is my queen.
    • I was intrigued by her having written a content moderation book called Behind the Screen. I know enough about content moderation to know that I know pretty much nothing about content moderation.
    • She hasn't posted in a long while, so I'm not sure how much I'll regularly have ongoing opportunities to see what she's currently exploring or otherwise working on

Other Things I Noticed

As I was exploring who people I follow are connected with on Mastodon, I noticed that you can have multiple pinned posts, unlike other social media I've used. Many people have an introduction post pinned to the top of their posts, yet also have other things they want to have front and center. One big advantage to Bluesky to me has been the prevalence of starter packs. The main Mastodon account mentioned an upcoming feature involving “packs” around twenty days ago, but said that they're not sure what they'll call the feature.

Sometimes, scrolling through social media can be depressing. I decided that the next time I'm getting down on Mastodon, I should just check out what's happening on the compostodon hashtag. It may be the most hopeful hashtag ever.

The Biggest Delight From the Experience

Another person who was new to me as an expert on Mastodon was JA Westenberg. According to JA Westenberg's bio, Joan is a tech writer, angel investor, CMO, Founder. A succinct goal is also included on the about page of JoanWestenberg.com:

My goal: to think in public.

As I was winding down my time doing some sensemaking related to experts, I came across a video from Westenberg that was eerily similar to what Jarche has been stressing about us making PKM a practice. I can't retrace my steps for how I came across Joan's video on Mastodon, but a video thumbnail quickly caught my eye. Why You Should Write Every Day (Even if You're Not a Writer) captured my imagination immediately, as I started watching. In addition to the video, there's a written article of the same title posted, as well.

As I continue to pursue learning through the PKM workshop, I'm blogging more frequently than I may ever have (at least in the last decade for sure). Reading through Joan's reactions to the excuses we make when we don't commit to writing resonate hard. We think we don't have time. How about realizing we're not writing War and Peace, Joan teases, gently. Too many of us get the stinking thinking that we don't have anything good to say or that this comes naturally to people who are more talented and articulate than we are. Joan writes:

Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.

Before I conclude this post, I want to be sure to stress the importance I'm gleaning of not thinking of individual experts as the way to practice PKM. Rather, it is through engaging with a community of experts that we will experience the deepest learning. A.J. Jacobs stresses that we should heed his advice:

Thou shalt pay heed to experts (plural) but be skeptical of any one expert (singular)

By cultivating many experts whose potential disagreements may help us cultivate a more nuanced perspective on complex topics. When we seek to learn in the complex domain, the importance of intentionality, intellectual humility, and curiosity becomes even more crucial. Having access to a network of experts helps us navigate complexity more effectively.

Filed Under: Personal knowledge mastery

From Half-Baked to Well-Done: Building a Sensemaking Practice

By Bonni Stachowiak | October 28, 2025 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Personal Knowledge Mastery: Half Baked Ideas Hand drawn image of a light bulb surrounded by colorful buildings, water, sky, etc.

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

Making Sense through Sensemaking

Sensemaking is an essential part of one's personal knowledge mastery, so vital that it ought to be a regular practice for any human, particularly those who desire to be taken seriously and be able to add value in workplaces, communities, and societies. Sensemaking centers on a desire to solve problems and gets fueled by curiosity.

Jarche shares that there's a whole spectrum of potential sensemaking approaches, everything from filtering information (making a list), or contributing to new information (writing a thesis). Sensemaking requires practice and vulnerability. We aren't always going to get things right the first time we come to a conclusion.

Half-Baked Ideas

In introducing the idea of “half-baked ideas,” Jarche writes:

If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view.

As I reflect on my own ability to come up with half-baked ideas, it all depends on how controversial whatever idea I might be having at the time is as to whether I'm inclined to share it in a social space. I find myself thinking about what hashtags or even words might attract people looking for an internet fight, or wanting to troll a stranger.

If a half-baked idea I might share is related to teaching and learning, I am less concerned about who may desire to publicly disagree with something, but it it is about politics, I just don't see the value in “thinking aloud,” in relation to what internet riff raff may decide to come at me, metaphorically speaking. Part of that is that I'm not an expert, while another aspect of this resistance is that I would rather do this kind of sensemaking offline. This is at least in terms of me trying out ideas about various policies, political candidates, and issues of the day.

Committing to Practice

I just launched a sensemaking practice involving books about teaching and learning. Usually, I read upwards of 95% of the authors' books that I interview for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. However, I would like to both find other ways to surface my own learning from all that reading, along with cultivating a set of skills to get better at video.

The series is called Between the Lines: Books that Shape Teaching and Learning and I anticipate eventually getting up to producing an average of one video per week. I won't hold myself to quite as high of expectations as I do for the podcast, since for that, I've been going strong, airing a podcast every single week since June 2014 and I don't want to have that kind of self-imposed pressure for this experimentation, skill-building, and sensemaking practice.

The first video is about how small shifts in our teaching make college more equitable and explores three key ideas from David Gooblar’s book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable. I hope you'll consider watching it and giving me some encouragement to keep going or suggestions for how to make them more effective.

Filed Under: Personal knowledge mastery

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