Personal knowledge mastery

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.

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

The topic for this lesson is fake news. Jarche instructs us that there are four primary types of fake news and he asks us to find an example of each type. I don't normally post overtly political content here on my blog, but when it comes to the topic of fake news, it seemed easier to focus on politics than teaching and learning.

The closest I could come off the top of my head in my normal topics was the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast, and the many podcasts I've done about grading and assessment. But I'm still going to stick with politics for now. Stop reading if you aren't prepared to read examples of the current US presidential administration lying.

Four Types of Fake News

1. Propaganda – Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause.” – Merriam WebsterExample – Snopes shares 12 times AI generated or doctored content was shared by Trump or the White House. These examples seem to fit under propaganda, since they attempt to influencing people's attitudes and beliefs. Though that also sounds like disinformation to me and I'm still not clear I know the difference.
2. Disinformation – “False information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” – Merriam WebsterExample – Trump states that there is no inflation in the US. There are some who say that Trump's specific type of lying falls under the category of bullshit, as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit. Either way, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel to find examples of disinformation from this administration.
3. Conspiracy theory – “Persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them… Based on a variety of thinking patterns that are known to be unreliable tools for tracking reality.” – The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, by Lewandowski + CookExample – Ok. So this isn't a genuine conspiracy, rather it was satirical from the start. But given how I feel after finding those examples of propaganda and disinformation, I needed a little break. The “birds aren't real” satirical conspiracy scratches a certain itch for me, as someone who enjoys learning about birds.
4. Clickbait – “Text or a thumbnail that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow (“click”) that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading… A defining characteristic of clickbait is misrepresentation in the enticement presented to the user to manipulate them to click onto a link.” – WikipediaExample – Bryan Tyler Cohen is rather notorious for using clickbait YouTube video titles on his main channel. I saw a video of him explaining that he knows they are frustrating to people, but that they really generate far more views, in his testing. He even created an alternate channel (Bryan Tyler Cohen News) with more toned down titles, which he suggests can be better to send to people who may be on a different side of the issues than him, politically.

My Muddiest Point

I'm having a hard time distinguishing between disinformation and propaganda. Jarche shared a quote from researcher Renée DiResta, who would prefer our focus be on the word propaganda, as it is more descriptive of the problem at hand.

El Pais: The problem is not misinformation

Q. Why do you prefer the word “propaganda” to “misinformation”?

A. 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. Anti-vaccine messages don’t appeal to facts, but to the identity of the recipient. They’re saying: “If you are a person on the right, you should not trust these vaccines.” It’s very much tied to political identity. Misinformation implies that if you were to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an absolute clown who knows absolutely nothing about vaccines or their relationship to autism, and that this has been researched to ad nauseam by scientists, if it were a problem of misinformation, you would assume that people would say, “Oh, here’s the accurate information, so I’m going to change my mind.” But that’s not the case. It’s a topic of identity, of beliefs, and that’s why propaganda is a more appropriate term.

But I'm still not entirely clear I can distinguish propaganda from disinformation at this time.

Handling Conspiracy Theories with Students

I have such a hard time navigating conspiracy theories with students who take business ethics with me. We have a whole section of the class where they learn how to use Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework to fact check the articles they read about business ethics related news stories throughout our semester together. I've found it is practically useless to ask them the question from Mike's mini course about if they or someone they're close to has ever believed in a conspiracy theory before.

There's so much of one's identity that gets wrapped up in what we believe. Generally, they don't view these beliefs as conspiracies if they or their loved ones believe in them.

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

The Medium: The “Smart” Phone

Shhhh… Don't tell anyone, but our 13 year-old son will likely be getting his first “smart” phone for Christmas this year. I don't think he has ever read my blog, so we should be good until December. As long as you cooperate with this secret surprise.

I remember reading a few years back that the average child in the United States gets a phone at the age of 11. That seemed really early to me then. By the time Christmas rolls around, he will be about a month away from turning 14, which seems awfully late.

Our son would agree.

He tells us that he and one other guy in school are the only kids without a phone at this point. This may sound like a stereotypical story of woe that young people tell their parents to let them have something. But when we discuss the subject, there's a common theme:

What he really wants is a camera, disguised as a phone.

A primary driver for his wanting the camera and messaging functionality is his upcoming middle school Washington DC trip in the Spring. When I tossed the idea around of getting him a camera, instead, he had no interest in that, though. Dave and I have talked a lot about it and figure this is a good time for him to get a phone and we've started our discussions about how we want to handle that, as parents.

Dave and I talk more about these tensions in the second half of the video we recorded of us unboxing and playing with Justin Shaffer's Alignment: A Course Design Deck.

We also link in the video's notes to the parent resources from The Social Institute, which are recommended by the academic leadership at our kids' school. Now, on to why I'm bringing up smart phones in this particular post.

McLuhan's Media Tetrad

Jarche introduces those of us participating in his Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop to McLuhan's Media Tetrad this week. I've seen the diagram on Jarche's blog, before, but never slowed myself down enough to spend time soaked in it, like I have today.

 

Here's my best, novice's understanding of the framework:

It starts with a new medium.

McLuhan posits through his Laws of Media that every new medium results in four effects. Jarche explains that under McLuhan's laws, each new medium:

Extends a human property,

Obsolesces the previous medium (& makes it a luxury good)

Retrieves a much older medium &

Reverses its properties when pushed to its limits

When we take time to understand what happens with new media, we can put in place steps to negate or minimize the negative effects. Ample examples exist of ways that social media extends humans' voices, while ultimately making healthy, human-to-human conversation obsolete. Then, our more tribal affiliations can kick in (Twitter, anyone?) and we reverse into “populism and demagoguery,” according to Jarche's example.

Jarche writes:

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.

My Example

As I mentioned earlier, I've selected the “smart” phone as the medium to analyze.

Here's my attempt at the tetrad:

Jarche suggested that we first explore what the technology enhances and then what it obsolesces. That felt easy and hard, simultaneously. Today's “smart” phones contain so many features that the definition of what this technology is can be blurred. Our son, for example, has understandably brought up that when adults raise concerns about phones, they can often be actually talking about social media (which he presently has zero interest in).

The “smart” phone:

• Extends: connection opportunities and access to information
• Obsolesces: “home” phone + other single-purpose devices

As Jarche predicted, these two elements of the tetrad were fairly easy to identify (though I could have chosen to go in a bunch of different directions). I can still recall what it felt like to go with my brother to a convenience store that was about two miles from our house and involved climbing down a super steep, dirt hill. The idea that I could have called my Mom to ask her to pick us up, so we could have avoided the steep hill on the way home would not have occurred to me at the time.

That's despite the fact that we watched Star Trek as a family and they had these transporter beams that would transmit the characters in the show from the starship and a planet's surface.

 

The idea of extending our home phone to one that could be carried around in my pocket (if women's pants had pockets, that is…) would have been a welcome idea to me. Then, there are all the other single-purpose devices that the “smart” phone can take the place of, such as:

• 📞 Landline phone
• 📷 Camera
• 🎧 MP3 player
• 🗺️ GPS
• ⏰ Alarm clock
• 📺 Video player
• 💾 Disk or hard drive
• 📝 Notepad
• 🧮 Calculator
• 💡 Flashlight
• 💳 Wallet
• 🧭 Compass
• ✉️ Mail service

I could have kept going with that list for a long time and just be getting started.

Productive Struggle

Cognitive psychologists talk about how helpful productive struggle can be in the learning process. As Jarche thought we might, I had trouble with what the smart phone might retrieve a much older medium, in terms of the way I had anchored the framework with the other two components (extends and obsolesces). I then moved my focus over to the reverses portion of the tetrad and thought how it was the polar opposite (disconnection) of what it promises to extend (connection).

For the retrieves part, I kept getting stuck between two, broad ideas: the pubic square or the commons.

I considered how the promise of today's phones as the device to connect us with others and with information winds up making loneliness more likely and seeding a potential decline in mental health. I also fixated on how the “extends, obsolesces, and reverses” descriptions I had come up with were more geared toward individuals, yet the promise of the common good is only possible when we come together in community.

I would like to learn more about the history of the public square, as well as regarding the commons in medieval and early modern Europe. I'm also intrigued to keep my learning going regarding “the commons” in digital contexts (Wikipedia, Wikis, Creative Commons, etc.). There are also a lot of places I continue to want to explore about the attention economy and surveillance capitalism.

Until next time, when I share my reflections from Jarche's Fake News lesson. That should be fun, ehh? Nothing going on there in the world, right? 🫠 

It was a bit of a relief to have well-traveled terrain as the today's topic in Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop: Aggregators and RSS.

While I still want to drop everything going on in my life right now and dive deep into the topic from two days ago (the Cynefin Framework), that just isn't realistic. This PKMastery workshop has been a wonderful blend of ideas that challenge me, coupled with topics that I always enjoy learning more about, but am not starting from scratch with…

RSS – Not-So-Popular

It seems RSS could really have used some help from Galinda in the musical, Wicked, in terms of getting popular. I wish aggregators and RSS were something that the vast majority of people knew about and had incorporated into their lifelong learning and sense-making. It's strange to me that RSS has been around such a long time, yet still isn't very common in organizations at all.

In case the terms (RSS and aggregators) are new to you, Common Craft's RSS in Plain English from 18 years ago still checks out:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I've got some good news for you, some bad news, and some real ugly news.

The good: There's a ton of information on the internet, which has the potential to be transformative for us, as sense-making human beings.

The bad: We can't keep up and the quantity of information just keeps on growing, yet not enough of us know ways to harness the possibilities.

The ugly: Some of us give up on thinking we'll never be able to have a way of seeking, sensing, and sharing, so we resolve to just search for things at the exact moment we realize we have a specific question about something (a gap in our knowledge that we are aware of in that moment).

What gets missed here in “the ugly” (among other things) are the questions we don't even realize we have… The unknown unknowns… Not to mention misinformation/disinformation, etc.

Getting to Know RSS

Here are some RSS-related articles that I've saved on my digital bookmarking tool of choice: Raindrop:

• Curate your own newspaper with RSS, by Molly White
•  How I Use my RSS Feed for Bluesky and Mastodon: Keep up with anyone, no social media account required, Justin Pot for LifeHacker
• Real Simple Syndication, by Harold Jarche
• The Indispensable Digital Research Tool I can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time, by Alan Levine

Next, let's take a look at how I've set things up to be a tap away from a world of possibilities for sense-making…

My RSS + Aggregation Tools

I use Inoreader as my RSS aggregator. That means that when I discover a source (news site, blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc.) that I discern will serve me up potentially useful information, I add it to Inoreader inside my existing folders (e.g. News, Technology, Business, Digital Pedagogy, Higher Ed, Thinkers). Each time one of those sources (called feeds in RSS nomenclature) posts something new, it automatically shows up as an unread item on Inoreader.

Thats where some people stop.

They download Inoreader's app(s) and read their feeds on their computers or smart phones and they're off to the races. Inoreader is both an RSS aggregator (keeping track of what feeds the user subscribes to, as well as which stories they have read/not read) and a reader (actually reading/watching/listening to the items in the feeds you've subscribed to).

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

 

 

This is where you insert a joke about “who has two thumbs and can set up RSS aggregators and tools? ME.” Except that in my case, it actually only takes one thumb, using my preferred RSS reader.

Unread = The Best RSS Reader I've Ever Experienced

Those who read on iPads would be hard pressed to find a better RSS reader than Unread, especially if you want to be able to skim and scroll through headlines (you can set up Unread to automatically mark the items as read, as you scroll through them, making the navigation even easier).

Inoreader does the work behind the scenes of keeping track of all my subscriptions and what is read/unread. The Unread app then presents me with a “window” into all that “stuff” Inoreader is keeping track of in the background. Unread “syncs” with Inoreader. I don't have much use of an RSS reader on my Mac, preferring to do most of my RSS consumption via my iPad, but I wanted to mention that even if you had a different app/service you preferred to use on your computer, Inoreader (and other RSS aggregators) are able to keep track across different RSS readers what you've read/unread.

Something Very Cool

Harold Jarche suggested that those of us who already have an aggregator / RSS workflow to share tips. I've kind of done that, already, above. But I will say that through his materials, I was delighted to discover that I can set up feeds for Mastodon #hashtags.

From Harold:

You can also subscribe to any Mastodon feed by adding .rss to the address, e.g. mastodon.social/@harold.rss

You can subscribe to #hashtags by appending .rss — e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/pkmastery.rss

The PKMastery workshop is the gift that just keeps on giving. I'm looking forward to giving that a try this weekend. So cool.

My first year or two after graduating from college, I kept wanting there to be some instruction book that would teach you how to do all the lessons you somehow had missed in life thus far that it seemed like people should know. Today, young people would refer to this body of knowledge and skills as “adulting,” I think. I'm still wishing I had the magical powers that I witness only on the internet of those people who are able to meal plan effectively and sustainably (as in do it week in and week out). I'll do it like once and then will be so exhausted by the process that I won't try again until three years later.

It still amuses me how this yet-to-be-discovered curriculum evades me. When you think you have something figured out, change emerges, and you're right back in a liminal space. Jarche writes:

The Cynefin framework can help us connect work and learning, especially for emergent and novel practices, for which we do not have good or best practices known in advance.

Speaking of instructions: Will I ever live to see the day when I don't need to look up the pronunciation of Cynefin each time I run across it, yet again? I've been in the field of learning my whole life, though started getting paid for it at the age of 14 and a half, when I first started working and was quickly asked to train other people how to scoop ice cream, decorate cakes, clean the store, and so on at the local Baskin Robbins. It wasn't that complicated. Sweeping the floors looked the same day-to-day, Even when someone requested a new cake design, it was essentially tracing on plastic wrap and didn't require new ways of thinking.

Instead of step-by-step actions, many of the challenges I navigate today at work are complex. I was once selected to be the scholar in residence for the University of Michigan Dearborn specifically because I wasn't an “expert” (nor did I claim to be one). The role was to explore artificial intelligence in higher education. The team who hired me said it was specifically my curiosity that was what made them think I would be an effective person to help them explore the various perspectives people hold without acting as if there was some easy way to step-by-step figure out exactly what needed to happen.

Jarche writes:

In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.

This “as we are going” learning is only possible with intentionality. It's otherwise all too easy to succumb to the tyranny of the urgent and neglect the humility required to continuously learn from what is emerging. We are invited to think of an example of each of the following, which I will attempt to do:

1. formal community – at my work, we have our Academic Leadership Council (ALC)
2. informal community – a group of friends have a text chat, where we share each others joys and sorrows, as well as recommend podcasts, articles, tv shows, books, and so on with each other
3. open knowledge network – I'm thinking about communities that arise from clever (intentional) hashtag use, such as ones related to the disability movement, or Black lives matter, etc.
4. formal knowledge hub – so many universities have resources to share with faculty related to teaching + learning, like the University of Virginia Teaching Hub