Personal knowledge mastery

 

As part of participating in Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, we were given lessons and activities three times a week for six weeks. I had been blogging perhaps once or twice a year for a while now, never feeling like I had found my voice with those posts. Doing that much sharing via the written form seemed daunting, yet I had a strong suspicion that the discipline would pay off. I was not wrong at all on that front.

Here are the various posts I wrote, along with an overview of the concepts explored in each one.

01 – Getting Curious About Network Mapping

Great insight lies in visualizing and analyzing the relationships that surround our work and learning. Networks are fundamental lenses for how we connect, influence, and grow.

Key themes:

• Network mapping and the difference between strong ties and weak ties (and how both kinds are essential to a thriving learning network).
• The habit of giving first and nurturing relationships as network fuel.

Quote:

“Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” — Mark S. Granovetter (1973)

Both strong and weak ties are vital to our learning.

02 – Let’s Get Curious

Allowing ourselves to wonder opens up our capacity to learn, connect, and co-create more deeply.

Key themes:

• Sparking curiosity means we tap into a power well beyond certainty (as illustrated so well through this beloved clip from Ted Lasso).
• The world of work is increasingly complex; the very skills that matter now include creativity, imagination, empathy and curiosity.

Quote:

“The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity.” — Harold Jarche

Stay curious, widen our lenses, and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing as the gateway to meaningful growth.

03 – Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

Grief, networks, and belonging are deeply intertwined in shaping the places where we learn, grow, and support one another.

Key themes:

• The isolation that grief can bring creates a powerful invitation to community when we’re willing to show up with vulnerably.
• Communities (using Mastodon) and how we sustain communities when the baskets we placed our eggs in (platforms, networks) change or disappear and what that means for our learning ecosystems (I didn't write about this in the post, but many say the answer is federated networks)

Quote:

“If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” — Bonni Stachowiak

Invest in communities that embrace complexity, invite connection across networks, and hold space for both loss and belonging.

04 – Engaging with Intentionality and Curiosity

As I reflected on intentionality this week, I realized that showing up with purpose—not just going through the motions—significantly shapes what I notice, how I respond, and who I become in the process.

Key themes:

• Intentionality helps clarify why something matters and helps resist the pull of the urgent and focus on the important.
• Analyzing who Harold Jarche follows on Mastodon offered an opportunity to reflect on my aims for the network.

Quote:

“Show up for the work.” — Bonni Stachowiak

Jarche also gave some examples of the practices on which PKM is built upon, such as narrating our work and sharing half-baked ideas.

05 – Scooping Up Adulting and the Benefits of Being Curious

Moving through life’s messy, liminal spaces requires curiosity, humility, and movement.

Key themes:

• The relevance of the Cynefin framework in helping us learn in the complex domain.
• The value of formal and informal communities and open knowledge and formal knowledge networks as our learning ecology.
• Curiosity as a pathway through liminality: staying attuned to what is becoming.

Quote:

“In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.” — Harold Jarche

This Learning in the Complex Domain post by Jarche is likely the most important one for me to revisit from all that I read throughout these six weeks, as I'm still struggling to understand the Cynefin framework.

06 – Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now?

It's still wild to me that RSS isn't as common as navigating websites.

Key themes:

• A well-curated set of feeds via an RSS aggregator turns passive reading into active sense-making.
• RSS remains undervalued in the age of algorithmic feeds, yet when we control our own feed-ecosystem we reclaim agency over where our attention goes.

Quote:

However, I'm picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via Unread on my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb. — Bonni Stachowiak

I was also glad to learn from Jarche about subscribing to Mastodon feeds and hashtags via RSS, though I haven't experimented with that much, yet, since the Tapestry app does a lot of that for me.

07 – Can You Keep a Secret?

Understanding the frameworks behind our media tools unlocks far deeper insights than simply reacting to what comes our way.

Key themes:

• Exploring Marshall McLuhan’s Media Tetrad helped me see every medium as doing four things: extending, retrieving, obsolescing, and reversing.
• Applying the tetrad to the smartphone made visible how it extends access and connection, obsolesces older single-purpose devices, retrieves communal spaces, and reverses into distraction and isolation when pushed too far.
• This kind of analysis invites me to pause, notice, and interrogate the media I use daily rather than assume they’re neutral or benign.

Quote:

“The reversals are already evident — corporate surveillance, online orthodoxy, life as reality TV, constant outrage to sell advertising. The tetrads give us a common framework to start addressing the effects of social media pushed to their limits. Once you see these effects, you cannot un-see them.” — Harold Jarche

Analyzing these media tools heps us choose how to engage with them, rather than passively being shaped by them.

08 – Fake News Brings Me to an Unusual Topic for this Blog

It is critical to engage in ways to increase the likelihood of us being able to identify fake news. .

Key themes:

• The articulation of four primary types of fake news — propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and clickbait — as outlined by Harold Jarche.
• How propaganda intentionally spreads ideas to influence or damage an opposing cause; disinformation deliberately plants falsehoods to obscure truth.
• The persistence of conspiracy theories despite lacking evidence, and how clickbait uses sensationalism to manipulate attention and action.

Quote:

Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. – Renée DiResta, as quoted in El País

Our identities get so wrapped up in what we believe, it can be so challenging to consider how we might be part of combating fake news in our various contexts.

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

It can be so generative to share thoughts before they’re polished and this openness fuels learning, creativity, and connection.

Key themes:

• Half-baked ideas make space for iteration: they invite others in, rather than presenting a finished product that shuts conversation down.
• Sharing early thinking helps me stay curious, flexible, and less attached to being “right.”
• When we release ideas in progress, we give our networks something to build on, remix, or nudge in new directions.

Quote:

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

Let ideas be emergent rather than complete so that learning can unfold collaboratively.

10 – The Experts in My Neighborhood

Jarche introduces us to various PKM roles for this topic.

Key themes:

• Our learning ecosystems benefits from curating a diverse set of experts to help navigate complexity.
• Through my PKMastery practices (bookmarking, sense-making, sharing), I can engage with expert ideas over time.
• The real value comes not from one “expert,” but from a network of thinkers whose disagreements and different perspectives stretch our own thinking.

Quote:

“Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.” — JA Westenberg

The value of PKM is in curating many voices, cultivating a “neighborhood” of experts to follow, listen, question, and to build a rich, networked sensemaking practice rather than rely on single voices alone.

11 – Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

Turning toward connection can be one of our strongest antidotes to imposter syndrome.

Key themes:

• Network weaving reframes “Do I belong here?” to “Who can I bring together?” — shifting the energy from proving my worth to creating belonging.
• Connecting people, ideas, and stories becomes my purpose: not to be the smartest person in the room, but to serve as a bridge, curator, and connector.
• Vulnerability matters: acknowledging I don’t have all the answers, but inviting others to learn out loud anyway.

Quote:

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. – Valdis Krebs

This reminder feels like fuel for the next leg of my PKMastery journey — leaning into weaving networks as practice not just for growth, but for belonging and shared strength.

12 – I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here

Growth often comes not from jumping to answers but from staying curious, experimenting, and traveling alongside fellow learners.

Key themes:

• Fellow seekers offer empathy, solidarity, and space to wrestle with ideas, often more supportively than experts alone.
• As described by Harold Jarche, combining curiosity with connection can help transform seekers into knowledge catalysts, nodes in our networks who learn, curate, and contribute meaningfully.
• Innovation and insight often emerge through playful experiments (half-baked ideas) from the beginner’s mind held by seekers.

Quote:

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. — Harold Jarche

Seeking is not a sign of weakness, but as a source of collective curiosity, connection, and growth.

13 – What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible

There is strength in making invisible processes and decisions visible.

Key themes:

• When we narrate our work, we open up pathways for real-time collaboration and shared learning rather than one-way transmission.
• Narration allows for experimentation: sharing work in progress de-commodifies knowledge.
• It shifts the emphasis from polished deliverables to ongoing learning — not just focusing on the final product, but how we got there, and what we learned along the way.

Quote:

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. — Harold Jarche

Narrating our work offers a window into our process of learning.

14 – No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking

As I reflected on systems thinking, I found myself returning to how challenging (and how necessary) it is to see beyond events and into the structures that shape them. Revisiting Senge’s The Fifth Discipline reminded me just how often we can slip into reacting instead of zooming out to notice patterns.

Key themes:

• How easy it is to fall into organizational “learning disabilities,” like assuming I am my position rather than part of a larger whole.
• Chris Argyris describes the phenomenon of “skilled incompetence,” where groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning.
• The invitation to practice systems thinking collectively, not just individually.

Quote:

You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. – Peter Senge

Sitting with this reminded me that lest we fall victim to skilled incompetence, we need to continually nurture the humility and curiosity to keep looking wider, deeper, and more generously at the forces shaping our organizations and our work.

15 – Asking as a Way of Knowing: PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander

The potential for adding value through PKM helps make our contributions much richer when paired with curiosity, generosity, and intentional sharing.

Key themes:

• PKM isn’t just about what I read or bookmark — it’s about how I transform that input through asking questions, sense-making, and offering what I learn into shared spaces.
• Public sharing (through podcasting, writing, conversation) complements private learning — the two together deepen meaning and foster connection.
• “Adding value” can look like holding space for others’ learning — asking curious questions, offering resources, and modeling openness rather than trying to prove expertise.

Quotes:

Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you. — Maria Popova

It was great getting to see this all in action, through a dinnertime conversation with Bryan Alexander.

16 – The Gap

Fear and self-doubt often keeps us from beginning and from recognizing how much value we hold even before we “arrive.”

Key themes:

• There’s often a gap between where we are now and where we want to be — but that gap doesn’t diminish the worth of what we’re already learning and creating.
• True learning requires embracing vulnerability: pursuing new practices.
• Public sharing matters: showing work in progress reminds me (and others) that learning is ongoing and that we don’t need to wait until we’re “expert enough” to contribute something meaningful.

Quote:

“The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.” — Tim Kastelle

Commit to practice, to sharing, and to staying open to becoming someone who learns out loud.

17 – Walking With PKM: Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice

Stepping away from busyness — even just to wander — creates the space for real insight and creative thinking.

Key themes:

• Walking becomes a practice of reflection: giving my brain space to wander and surface ideas.
• Learning isn’t always quantifiable.
• The value in a consistent PKM practice allows me to my own capacity to notice, wonder, and ultimately learn.

Quote:

Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness. — Harold Jarche

PKM is part discipline, part letting go of the busyness, and part listening to whatever emerges.

18 – The Last Step Toward the First Step

“Mastery” is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing.

Key themes:

• Value lies not in perfection, but in consistency: the small acts of sharing half-baked ideas and imperfect work.
• What I do contributes to a larger learning ecosystem: by sharing what I learn, I contribute to collective sense-making and encourage others to do the same.

Quote:

It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other. — Ronald Burt

The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

This final PKMastery workshop post is what I'm referring to as the last step toward the first step, meaning that while I'm through with the formal/structured activities and curated lessons from Harold Jarche, there's such tremendous potential for even deeper learning, with a renewed commitment toward PKM.

Jarche shares a report from many years ago about the most valued Future Work Skills. He writes of how: “The report identified six drivers of change.

1. Longevity, in terms of the age of the workforce and customers
2. Smart machines, to augment and extend human abilities (quite obvious since 2023)
3. A computational world, as computer networks connect
4. New media, that pervade every aspect of life
5. Superstructed organizations, that scale below or beyond what was previously possible
6. A globally connected world, with a multitude of local cultures and competition from all directions

Ten future [present] work skills were derived from these drivers and these were seen to be critical for success in the emerging network era workplace. In 2014 a relatively simple infographic was published to show the relationship between these drivers and skills. Of these 10 skills, four compose the essence of personal knowledge mastery:

1. sense-making
2. social intelligence
3. new media literacy
4. cognitive load management

Participants in the workshop are then invited to focus on which competency we would most like to develop in, as part of our overall PKM practice. I'm torn between sense-making and cognitive load management. While further understanding of systems thinking and sense-making practices would certainly help me in my ongoing learning, I recognize my lack of sufficient discipline for what a focus on cognitive load management might bring me.

Throughout this process of blogging my way through Harold Jarche's Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, I essentially wrote the equivalent of half of a book. When I tell myself that I don't have time for certain pursuits in my life, these past six weeks would seem to counter those self-limiting beliefs. While I'm not actually interested, necessarily, in writing a book for other people at this exact moment, my shift in focus to a more reflective and open writing style for all these posts has felt liberating. As Ronald Burt shares:

It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.

Having no idea who will ever read these words, but knowing that the writing practice this workshop has instilled in me has been tremendously helpful in my own sense-making. James Lang would say I'm getting lots of practice writing to an imaginary audience and that has felt good. By Jarche asking us to engage on Mastodon and to use the #PKMastery hashtag, I've been able to share my work with a niche audience, reconnecting with people I hadn't been in regular touch with for a long while, in addition to meeting a couple of new people along the way.

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

I love to walk. Sometimes I do it alone (almost always listening to either music or podcasts), though most often walks these days are facilitated by an invitation from one of our kids to go for an evening walk. I'm at the POD25 conference, so have been missing my night time walks. Right now, I'm holed up in my hotel room, doing some reflecting, writing, and a bit of grading.

Instead of feeling guilty, I'm overwhelmed with supportive messages about how healthy this is. First, let's start with walking. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking about this practice:

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society — and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

The pull to keep producing and soaking in every bit of ROI from my university paying for this trip is strong (not because of them, I should say, but because of my own sense of needing to “get the most out of limited budget dollars”). Yet, learning cannot be perfectly quantified in terms of financial metrics, despite corporations' and governments' strong desire to do so. Jarche reminds us of the importance of leaving room for time and context to enrich our learning.

We cannot tap into our innovative capacities without being open to radical departures from the predictable, planned path (an example of which might be the typical professional conference schedule). And yes, sometimes that means not engaging in every planned session at a conference, like the one I'm participating in this week.

Jarche writes:

Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness.

As we wrap up our time together, Jarche invites those of us participating in his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop to reflect on our experience these past six weeks. Here I go, in responding to his questions:

Q. What was the most useful concept I learned from this workshop?

A. It wasn't really a concept, rather a practice. I benefitted by committing to a regular writing practice throughout the workshop, which provided opportunities for rich reflection and deepened learning. The structure of the workshop allowed for that to take place (plus me being a person who is a bit of a completist and wanting to blog through all 18 of the opportunities for reflection and activity that Harold provided).

Q. What was the most surprising concept that has changed my thinking about PKM?

A. I had seen Jarche write about McLuhan's media tetrad in the past, but didn't slow myself down enough to absorb much of anything, at the time. However, given my commitment to practice PKM throughout this experience, I wrote about the concept for the first time, and even shared the framework as a part of a keynote I gave a month or so ago.

During the keynote, I couldn't remember the word “tetrad,” when the idea came up later in the talk (as in after the slide had long since disappeared). I had attempted to come up with a word association on the plane ride out to Michigan, but it had failed me, in that moment.

“Think of the old arcade game, Tetris, plus something being “rad” (like in the 80s)”, I told myself. I was definitely learning out loud and performing retrieval practice in real time, as I eventually cobbled together audience participation input and finally got myself there.

A few things I've learned about myself, cognitive science, and other human beings remind me of these principles. For starters, my embarrassment in not knowing, but still struggling through and reaching the side of knowing means I'm unlikely to forget the word in the future. Plus, people aren't looking for other humans to be perfect. It is through our vulnerability and relatability that we might most often have an opportunity to make an impact on others. At least I believe that may be the case for me… as I wasn't meant to be the expert, as my primary role in this world, I don't think. I would rather be known as someone who is curios, which I've heard enough times to start to believe that it is true.

Q. What will be the most challenging aspect of PKM for me?

A. I still need to learn more about the concepts and frameworks involving navigating complexity, including one I've come across in the past, but never got much further than confusion, previously: cynefin. Jim Luke (who I met a gazillion years ago at an OpenEd conference) has offered to share his wisdom about cynefin with Kate Bowles and I sometime in the next couple of months. He replied to me on Mastodon about cynefin:

I find it a very useful heuristic in thinking about community, higher ed, any activities that are organized and care-centered, etc.

This exchange wouldn't have occurred, had it not been for Harold structuring the PKM workshop around engaging on Mastodon, by the way. This is going to be a gift that keeps on giving, I believe. While my connections there are still small in number, they are strong with competence, care, and creativity.

I'm glad that I can now pronounce cynefin without first locating an audio clip of someone else saying it. I'm useless at phonetic spelling, so that stuff doesn't often help me in the slightest. I do still have to look up how to spell it each time. My brain feels slower with the learning when a word is pronounced differently than it is spelled. I still have to occasionally slow myself way down when spelling my own last name, so I won't let myself feel too bad about still not being able to spell cynefin without help.

Q. Where do I hope to be with my PKM practice one year from now?

A. I would like to be in a more regular practice of blogging a year from now. I tend to save up blog post ideas that are super laborious for me (at least the way I approach the task, in those cases). I like doing posts for Jane Hart's Top Tools 4 Learning votes (like my top ten votes from 2025). But given how extensively I write and link in those posts, they take many hours to complete. I also have enjoyed doing top podcast posts, drawing inspiration from Bryan Alexander's wonderful posts, like this one about the podcasts he was listening to in late 2024.

My post from late 2024 about what Overcast told me I had listened to the most that year was less time consuming to write, than ones I had done in the past. But I felt weird only going from the total minutes listened as my barometer, when I think that other podcasts are far more worthy of acknowledgement than some of the ones I wound up having listened to the most that year. This 2021 Podcast Favorites post took forever to write and curate, but is more emblematic of the ways I would most like to celebrate all the incredible podcasts that are out there (or at least were publishing, at the time I wrote it).

If I put some creative constraints on myself, in terms of the time I would allow myself to commit to any individual post, I suspect I would have a lot more success with this aspect of PKM. I so appreciate the way that Alan Levine, Maha Bali, and Kate Bowles write in more reflective, informal ways. I've been pushing myself throughout this workshop to just get the ideas I'm having in the moment out there, to tell stories that are snapshots of my sensemaking processes, and to be human and allow myself to show up in the messiness that is indicative of the learning process.

Gratitude

My deepest gratitude goes to Harold Jarche for such a well-designed, impactful learning experience through his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop. I had been telling myself that I would do it at some point for years, now, and finally realized that there wasn't really ever going to be a “good time” for there to be six weeks without something big happening (conferences, speaking gigs, etc.). So Harold has been able to travel with me on airplanes, sat with me in airports, and is currently in my hotel room in San Diego at the POD 2025 conference. This is only metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know, he is in Canada right now. Though I am not surveilling him and he does seem to travel a lot, at least as it compares to me.

I'm also feeling thanks for those people who allow themselves to learn out loud and take the risks of being openly curious and worrying less about being “right” or “perfect” all the time.