Personal knowledge mastery

This Saturday, I begin a doctoral class that I teach a couple of times each year. One of the topics we explore is personal knowledge management (PKM).

Over the eight weeks we'll learn together, the doctoral students will create and refine their own PKM processes. They will then be able to regularly seek out new knowledge, make sense of that knowledge, and then share their own perspectives on it in community.

As I prepare for the course to start, I realize that some of my own PKM system has changed, since I first started teaching the course back in 2014. This post provides a current description of my approach and tools and hopefully gives anyone reading this post some inspiration for getting started with your own PKM system.

Personal Knowledge Management Defined

Instead of being at the mercy of all the information that flies at us on a given day, we can take charge of the process, and discover ways to seek our credible and relevant information, transform it into knowledge (information that serves a purpose), and share it with others in our networked communities. Harold Jarche defines PKM as:

… a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively.”

This graphic illustrates the tools that work in concert to make my PKM system efficient and effective.

Seek

Kris Shaffer emphasizes the need to combat misinformation in Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies. Where we go looking for information will certainly impact whether what we find is trustworthy and also if it is connected with our individual learning pursuits.

I try to keep the tools I use for seeking to a bare minimum (primarily Twitter, Feedly, and my podcast client – Overcast). I also regularly consider whether the people and sources I follow are worthy of my attention. To avoid being a information hoarder, I design a system that feeds me regularly and keeps me in a continual state of learning.

Twitter (Microblogging service)

Twitter is the most timely of my seek tools. My list for getting started on twitter for education doctoral students provides a small list of possibilities. Generally speaking, I advise following more individuals than you do organizations (there are exceptions to that guidance). Twitter is about relationship, for me. Peter Newbury also gave my Teaching in Higher Ed podcast listeners such good advice when he advocated that we follow people who are like us, and follow people who are not like us on Twitter.

Feedly (RSS reader)

Feedly connects me with articles, blogs, and other information from all sorts of areas of interest. Whether Seth Godin is filling my mind with wisdom, or I'm finding out about the latest geeky Apple news from Daring Fireball, I can be assured that valuable information is at the ready, each time I visit.

There's an option to mark-all-as-read on Feedly, too, which I can't recommend highly enough. Being able to press the reset buttons on our PKM systems is a vital option to keep in mind. We'll never be able to “keep up” with everything that is going on in our various social networks, but we can “tap in” when we're ready to engage.

Overcast (Podcast app)

Probably the easiest component for me to get behind in with my PKM system is with podcasting. There are so many phenomenal podcasts out there and not enough hours in the day to enjoy each of them. Malcolm Gladwell is doing some innovative storytelling with his Revisionist History podcast. Mike Wesch gives a tremendous look into college students' lives in the first episode of his Life101 podcast. This American Life tells stories about what happens when school kids from two very different contexts come together.

Sense

When people are first introduced to PKM, they usually get super energized and excited by the seek part. It's like getting to eat at a magnificent information buffet, with so many options to choose from… It's the sense part that is harder to digest.

Information in isolation does us no good. We must, instead, make sense of what we are taking in…

Social Bookmarking

We can use social bookmarking tools to keep our information categorized (through tagging) and make it easier to draw from it in the future.

I use a bookmarking service called Pinboard.in. As I view my tags, I can see which ones have the most bookmarks within them, because they show up as larger in my tag cloud. My three most popular tags are:

• EDD703 (relevant information for the class I've been referring to in this post)
• EdTech (lots of duplicates from EDD703 and EdTech, since they both address similar topics)
• HigherEd (the industry I work in)

Share

This is the part of the process that often makes people the most nervous. There's a feeling of inadequacy that arises. What we share doesn't have to be an original creation. In fact, it is often through networked learning that we are able to discover places we might not have ventured on our own…

Curation

One way we can provide value to our networks is through curation. Curators are becoming increasingly popular in our knowledge-hungry society. This video talks about the benefits of curation and presents some popular curators from different disciplines.

We can also recognize the value of “working out loud.” As we document our failures, we're not the only ones who get to learn from those mistakes.

Original Content

I share original content weekly through releasing a podcast episode, a blog post, and tweeting out links to content I've created, as well as curated.

Scheduled Sharing

I use a service called Buffer that lets me tweet on whatever schedule best serves my network's needs, instead of whenever I happen to be in front of a computer.

Getting Started

While this post articulates my PKM system in its entirety, I suggest you don't try to follow it like it was a recipe. Instead, just dive in and start setting up a system to help you seek, sense, and share.

Find 4-5 people to follow on Twitter and start checking in on what they have to say daily. Set up a bookmarking service (EDD 703 students will be using Diigo, so we can share our bookmarks, together). And start retweeting some of the great things you read about on Twitter, with a few words of why you found what they had to say so important.

For more information on setting up a PKM, check out my Introduction to Personal Knowledge Management module.

 

Linked In used to provide a way for us to visualize our network connections in a graphical format. After talking with Bonnie Stewart, recently, about networked pedagogy, I keep wondering how my map has changed since I first wrote this reflection on my network visualization more than five years ago.

Certainly, more of my connections initiate from social media now. I have found more of what Seth Godin calls a tribe through virtual connections, than I ever do in my local community.

When I want to lament about race relations in the United States, I'm just as likely to reach out to my Egyptian friend, Maha Bali, than I am to people I see face-to-face. I find far more challenging and creative teaching ideas through the blogs I subscribe to, than I do in hallway conversations.

I was honored to be interviewed by Lina Gomez for a forthcoming episode of Utopistica a couple of weeks ago. She asked me one question that was incredibly difficult to answer. She wanted to know which Teaching in Higher Ed interview has impacted me the most, in terms of it being challenging and encouraging. I wanted to go with the safe answer and say that I just couldn't narrow it down.

Instead, I shared that it was probably the episode with Ken Bain, since I'm still thinking about how to capture the essence of my courses through a compelling question. His precise challenge to us was to think of the following as we design (and redesign) each of our courses:

Ask engaging questions that spark people’s curiosity and fascination that people find intriguing… – Ken Bain

Also, I made a complete idiot out of myself on the episode, when I read, verbatim, the autocorrected version of The Minerva Prize as “The Manure Prize.”

I decided to create an actual Manure Award that we award annually, to professors who share their failures with the community. The first Manure Award was presented to Maha Bali on episode #100 of the podcast. Others shared their failure stories that encourage us to continue to take risks in our teaching and never settle for safe.

There are so many other episodes that continue to “speak” to me daily in my work. If I would have thought it was appropriate during the Utopistica interview, I probably would have tried to squeeze at least ten episodes into the conversation, that continue to shape me and challenge me today.

Ten Episodes that Shape My Teaching Daily

1. Episode 19: Cheating Lessons, with James Lang
2. Episode 30: Teaching Naked, with Jose Bowen
3. Episode 23: Teaching with Twitter with Jesse Stommel (and more so from what he says about kindness on the episode than even the other magnificent things he had to say about Twitter)
4. Episode 71: Flipping Out with Derek Bruff (he competely changed my thinking about the best approach for the flipped classroom / blended learning)
5. Episode 72: How to Use Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Learning with Robert Bjork (the most observable differences in my teaching from before learning about retrieval practice to after come from this conversation with Robert Bjork, when I was first introduced to the approach)
6. Episode 92: Small Teaching, with James Lang (currently, the most listened to episode)
7. Episode 87: What the Best Digital Teachers Do, with Sean Michael Morris
8. Episode 118: Teacher Becomes Student Through LIFE101, with Mike Wesch (even though it is a recent one, I already know this conversation is going to continue to shape my teaching for years to come)
9. Episode 112: Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, with Kevin Gannon
10. Episode 107: Engaging Learners, with Gardner Campbell

The list, above, is not in any particular order. Let's just say I had about 10-15 other tabs open in my browser for consideration. I tried to keep this list as episodes that have observably changed my teaching, versus ones that I think are full of tremendous ideas that I haven't been able to act on just yet.

I am so thankful for all the people who have accepted the invitation to be on the podcast. It is humbling to get to talk to such phenomenal teachers each week.

How about you? What episode(s) has most shaped your teaching?