Personal knowledge mastery

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

Thus begins week two of Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop. This week's schedule already feels overly crowded, when my brain may best begin to be described as “fuzzy”… Hardly an opportunity for much sense-making. Still, I noted something as I considered some of the ways that Jarche says are the practices that PKM is built upon. He gives the following examples:

– narrating our work
– adding value before sharing information
– helping make our networks smarter and more resilient
– network weaving and closing triangles
– seeking diverse perspectives
– sharing half-baked ideas

I instantly thought of the tension between wanting to “add value before sharing information” and “sharing half-baked ideas”. I've almost always found incredible things happening in those times when I feel most vulnerable in sharing the unfinished work, while simultaneously wanting the exchange to be worth someone's time/attention.

My favorite LinkedIn thread of all time (as least as of October 13, 2025) started with me saying that I had needed to get these custom card decks printed before creating the game structure that they would be played on. As in I needed to create a game after having ordered the cards that the game would be made up of… It was then in my sense-making (and writing on LinkedIn) that I realized I wasn't even sure that I knew what a game was. And then, the beauty of the waterfall of goodness that commenced was amazing.

Harold suggested we look at who he follows on Mastodon, as we reflect on what our purpose and aims might be there. I noticed:

1. More than a handful of computer programers. While not a programmer, myself, I do enjoy learning from geeky people.
2. Primarily individuals and not as many organizations or group entities
3. Many use what appear to be their “real” names
4. A few have “request to follow” and I'm wondering what the etiquette is with that.
5. Found a number of people I recognized from elsewhere, but hadn't yet “found” on Mastodon
6. Lots of varieties in profile picture approaches. Some regular photos; others more sketch-drawings; others not people at all)
7. I try not to be about the numbers, but it depresses me to have gone from 8k on Twitter to 259 on Mastodon. Yes, I know it is quality, not quantity. Still… I won't try to pretend it doesn't bum me out a bit.
8. Lots of personality comes out on these profiles… sense of humor… believe in something that matters to them… good trouble…
9. Lots of environmental people/professions, which reminds me of a post Harold wrote about wanting differing opinions, but not “both-sides-isms”… I just looked to see if I could find this post in my bookmarks and have come up empty. It's a bummer, too, because he wanted to hear from people who generally agreed with the 97% of the world's scientists who agree that climate change is occurring and is an issue, but to hear from people who think differently about what to then do about it.
10. Wait. Robin DeRosa is actively posting on Mastodon. My goodness, have I missed her on social media.

 

 

This week, I got to welcome Clarissa (Rissa) Sorensen-Unrue back to Teaching in Higher Ed. She's been on a few times in the past, exploring critical pedagogy; intersectionality, power, and pedagogy; and about the wonderful learning made possible through the MYFest community. This time, Rissa was joined by her sister, Christy Albright. They both shared about their unique (and some shared) experiences with grief and how it has shaped and formed them.

Why write about grief, when discussing communities, as part of this week's Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop, led by Harold Jarche?

Grief can be such a lonely experience. Yet there are opportunities to feel less alone through the power of community. I've witnessed the ways that networks have helped people with disabilities navigating difficulties with access or inclusion, grieving parents who have lost a child, and connecting those who are looking to advocate for chance in higher education. Harold Jarche quotes Ronald Burt, author of Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal, in this week's reading:

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.

Getting Started with Mastodon

Jarche then invites us to set up and share our Mastodon profile, which we will be using throughout the workshop. I already had one set up on Mastodon.Social (a larger instance of Mastodon): bonni208, as usual, so this was relatively easy for me. Originally, Dave had set us up on a unique Mastodon instance. Ultimately, we decided that it wasn't worth the expense for us to do so and now we're both on a larger instance.

If my description of instances are getting confusing, Jarche suggests: Dear Friend: Let's Talk About Mastodon.

I'm still mourning the loss of community I used to experience on Twitter. First, I went radio silent and ultimately decided to delete my entire account. When discussing communities, that's one of the things we're warned against. If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there's no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was able to move some the people I followed over to other platforms, but it isn't at all the same as it once was.

Many people find themselves on newsletter and social media platforms that are misaligned with their values. Then, there's all the work with how to navigate that cognitive dissonance. This is messy business. I would advocate holding yourself to high standards as you're making decisions about where to farm and nurture your communities, but to be gentle with others who are in the process of making their own decisions about where to engage.

I know Harold and plenty of others aren't a fan of Bluesky, for reasons of replicating the issues many of us faced when investing so much on Twitter back in the day. However, that's been the closest experience I've had to some aspects of community I used to get to enjoy. I like that they have starter kits (thank you for all the bird starter kits, people of the internet) and that my feed has a mix of hard-to-read-yet-important stories, satire and humorous posts, and then there are the birds. Many, many birds.

Note: As I gather a few more links for this piece from my Raindrop.io bookmarks, I see that there is a way to: Roll Your Own Mastodon Starter Kits, thanks to Alan Levine's ongoing contributions to my learning over many years now.

Fact Checking Bird-Related Claims

Speaking of birds, when I was talking with Rissa and Christy, I mentioned something about not having fact checked an Instagram post, but enjoying the idea of when we listen to bird song, that the experience can be associated with positive health benefits. Before finishing the show notes for that episode, I figured I had better do my due diligence and assess the veracity of that claim. Using Mike Caulfield's Deep Background: Fact Checks and Context GPT,

In the first round of fact checking, the GPT stated that a fact checker might say that this statement is “mostly true.”

Strong evidence shows short-term relaxation and mood benefits from hearing birdsong, including reduced anxiety/paranoia versus urban noise. Broader or lasting “health benefits” (physiological and clinical) are plausible but less well established for birdsong specifically and should be qualified.

Another Round

When I followed Caulfield's advice and typed: “another round” in the text box, more nuance emerged. Note the parentheses in the following text, which indicates what is new in this follow up query:

What’s new here is marked (NEW).

What changed / what we learned this round

• We found a credible conflicting lab study (Hedblom 2019) reporting no significant physiological stress-recovery benefit from bird-song masking in a traffic-noise context—suggesting that some of the stronger “health” claims (physiology) don’t always replicate when visuals and context are controlled. 
• Two different angles refine the claim: (1) not all birds are equal—e.g., crow calls lower restorativeness scores relative to other species; (2) the mix with urban noise matters—bird/stream sounds may reduce annoyance only when traffic noise isn’t perceptually dominant. These both caution against blanket statements and point to designable soundscapes (what species? what mix?). 
• Net effect: support for short-term mood/annoyance relief remains strong (Urban Mind; Stobbe; Buxton), but broad physiological or long-term clinical benefits from listening to birdsong alone remain unproven or context-dependent, and species/mixture effects are meaningful. 

Pattern to note

• Higher-quality, controlled lab studies split: some show physiological recovery with general nature sounds (often water + birds), while others show null effects for birdsong specifically—especially when traffic noise is present or visuals drive recovery. Reviews also warn about conflating “birdsong” with “being in nature.” This pattern suggests the moderate claim is well supported, while the strong claim needs tighter, preregistered trials parsing species, diversity, and noise context.

Context Report

Finally, I followed Caulfield's guidance to type “context report” for a summary and can share the following results.

Core Context

• The claim is often presented as “listening to birdsong relaxes people and produces other health benefits,” which can imply broad, causal, even physiological effects; reviews caution that many studies are short, context-dependent, or conflate “birdsong” with being in nature generally. 

• In real-time diary research using the Urban Mind app, moments when participants reported seeing or hearing birds were associated with higher mental wellbeing, with benefits persisting to the next check-in; this is strong evidence of association but not proof of causation. 

• A randomized online experiment (~6 minutes of audio) found that birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia relative to traffic noise; depression decreased only with a higher-diversity birdsong track, and there were no cognitive gains—supporting short-term mood benefits rather than sweeping health effects. 

• Evidence syntheses indicate natural sounds overall improve affect and reduce stress/annoyance, with birdsong showing particularly strong links to stress/annoyance relief; these findings speak to psychological states more than durable clinical outcomes. 

• Not all studies find physiological benefits from birdsong: in a controlled lab study, masking traffic with birdsong did not improve physiological stress recovery versus traffic or silence, suggesting context and modalities matter. 

• Species and soundscape context shape effects: crow calls score low on perceived restorativeness, and the ability of birdsong to temper annoyance depends on how dominant traffic noise is in the mix—underscoring that “birdsong” is not a single, uniform stimulus.

I felt that note about crow calls hard. Real hard. 😅

Back to the Birds

Finally, I could hardly do all this writing and thinking about birds without brining up my colleague Ludmila Praslova's book: The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work. The community Ludmila has fostered on LinkedIn to help organizations “transform toxic cultures into thriving ones-reducing moral injusry, unlocking neurodivergent brilliance, and turning inclusion into innovation and belonging into business success,” is a great example of the power of networks.

Until next time…

…and here's a long list of sources, which I thought seemed appropriate, given what we're fact checking in this post.

Bibliography

• Alvarsson, J. J., Wiens, S., & Nilsson, M. E. (2010). Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(3), 1036–1046. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph7031036
• Annerstedt, M., Jönsson, P., Wallergård, M., Johansson, G., Karlson, B., Grahn, P., Hansen, Å. M., & Währborg, P. (2013). Inducing physiological stress recovery with sounds of nature in a virtual reality forest—Results from a pilot study. Physiology & Behavior, 118, 240–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2013.05.023
• Buxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(14), e2013097118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013097118
• Hammoud, R., Tognin, S., Burgess, L., Bergou, N., Smythe, M., Gibbons, J., Davidson, N., Afifi, A., Bakolis, I., & Mechelli, A. (2022). Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife. Scientific Reports, 12, 17589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20207-6
• Hedblom, M., Gunnarsson, B., Schaefer, M., Knez, I., Thorsson, P., & Lundström, J. N. (2019). Sounds of nature in the city: No evidence of bird song improving stress recovery. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(8), 1390. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16081390
• Methorst, J., Rehdanz, K., Mueller, T., Hansjürgens, B., Bonn, A., & Böhning-Gaese, K. (2021). The importance of species diversity for human well-being in Europe. Ecological Economics, 181, 106917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106917
• National Geographic. (2025, May 14). Listening to birds sing really does soothe your brain. Here’s how. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/birds-sing-brain-mental-health
• Praslova, L. N. (2024). The canary code: A guide to neurodiversity, dignity, and intersectional belonging at work (1st ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/-/9781523005864/
• Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Sound and soundscape in restorative natural environments: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 570563. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563
• Stobbe, E., Sundermann, J. M., Ascone, L., & Kühn, S. (2022). Birdsongs alleviate anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants. Scientific Reports, 12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20841-0
• Zhao, W., Li, H., Zhu, X., & Ge, T. (2020). Effect of birdsong soundscape on perceived restorativeness in an urban park. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(16), 5659. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17165659

I've been curious about curiosity for a long while now. That foundation made it that much more rewarding for me to see it as the current topic for Harold Jarche's PKMastery workshop. There's a vulnerability that comes from allowing ourselves to be curious. Yet what that yearning allows for is unparalleled and well worth the costs.

Lifelong Learning

When we are curious, our learning never ends. Getting to work at a university, being invited to speak at many other institutions for higher learning, and having kids who are both in middle school, affords me a never-ending buffet of learning. Sometimes, it can get overwhelming and I need to resort to bookmarking things that seem interesting, but that I may not have time to look to deeply at in the moment. Tagging those bookmarks allow me to uncover resources in the future, when they will be most relevant to something I'm curious about then.

I like tracking my reading in a service called StoryGraph. Setting a minimum goal for books read in a year helps overcome my natural tendency toward my attention going to RSS headline and short-form reading. Most years, I'm struggling to reach the goal, come December. However, my focus on listening to more audio books has allowed me to already have surpassed my 2025 goal.

Healthy Human Relationships

When we focus on being curious about what others thing and having empathy for them, the possibility for having healthy human relationships emerges. It's easy to focus on “winning” as the sole pursuit of our interactions with others. However, when our focus is on being right, instead of initially on curiosity, we limit the potential for solutions that are geared toward the common good. Covey writes:

Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated. When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.

I smiled, as soon as I saw that Jarche had included this beloved clip from Ted Lasso in his writing about curiosity. At this point in the show, Rupert, is “winning” at humiliating his ex-wife (the blonde woman whose expression you can see throughout many of the camera angles during the clip). She doesn't want to see Ted Lasso also be humiliated by Rupert and is concerned that is exactly what's about to happen.

However, curiosity wins the day, as does kindness. Lasso says at one point:

Don't mistake my kindness for weakness.

Curiosity is a powerful aim and one that is infectious. When we resolve to continually fuel our openness and getting better, together, we unleash a powerful problem-solving potential.

Cultivating Curiosity

Jarche writes about curiosity and resolve. He describes the need for a “constant dance between bigger groups of ideas and smaller groups of people working together,” and how necessary both cooperation and collaboration are to effective problem solving and creativity.

In this week's reading, Jarche reminds us of how needed a human set of skills are today:

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

He also stresses the unbounded potential for creativity that we posses, when we focus on curiosity:

While the industrial economy was based on finite resources, a creative economy is not. There is no limit to human creativity. We have to make a new social contract — not based on jobs — but rather enabling a learner’s mindset for life.

Until next time… And until then: Let's all stay curious.