Bonni: [00:00:00] On today’s episode Dave Stachowiak and I revisit the topic of personal knowledge management and discuss how our processes have evolved.

Production Credit: [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:19] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:46] Welcome to episode 67. I’m excited to be welcoming back Dave Stachowiak. That last name may sound familiar to you. It’s my last name I am Bonni Stachowiak and Dave spent on the show many times before. And welcome to you Dave.

Dave: [00:01:00] I’m glad to be back.

Bonni: [00:01:02] And we have some new listeners though so that’s why I’m mentioning who you are and that you’ve been here before.

Dave: [00:01:08] We have a lot of new listeners and the article that was featured in The Chronicle has certainly attracted a bunch of new folks listen to the show. So thanks if you’re listening for the first time or one of the first few times.

Bonni: [00:01:21] And if you are listening for ever and a day we’ll come back and if you have no idea what article are referring to I will put a link to that in the show notes it was James Lang who wrote an article about what he has benefited from by listening to the podcast and it was such an honor to have him write about it in such a gracious way. And I was really touched by it and honored again that he would express that so the notes will be at teachinginhighered.com/67.

Bonni: [00:01:48] Dave and I are gonna talk a lot about tools so this would be a great time to get those show notes. And at the end of the episode I’ll mention how to get them automatically in your email every week.

Bonni: [00:01:59] We’re not going to go back and completely address personal knowledge management but I am going to be linking to in the show notes to Harold Jarche and he is the guru on knowledge management that I always start out with and he defines personal knowledge management as a set of processes that are individually constructed to help us make sense of our world work more effectively and contribute to society.

Bonni: [00:02:26] And it’s a lot about having autonomy in your own professional development. And I know for both Dave and I we get really jazzed about it and I’m constantly tweaking my system wanting to make it even more valuable and we’re going to go through his paradigm which is seek, sense and share.

Bonni: [00:02:44] So we go out and find all the information. It comes at us or we go out and look for it and seek for it and then we want to make sense of it not just now but we have it makes sense in the future and want to be able to share an ad and contribute to that great body of knowledge.

Bonni: [00:02:59] So we’re going to be talking about the same paradigm that we did back in an episode more than a year ago actually a couple of episodes we went through in that and we also had a couple of librarians join us too on a third episode so we’ve we’ve covered this before. I will put a link in the show notes if you want to dive even more into this topic.

Dave: [00:03:18] And this is something that is I think a real challenge for a lot of us because we’ve got the good problem of having a lot of great information out there that comes to us on a regular basis through colleagues or students through or professional associations. And the challenge though is is that how do you make sense of all of that and captured in an effective way. And so hopefully we can walk through what we do in order to do that Bonni and how we get that then share that information with the world too.

Bonni: [00:03:46] When it comes to seek both you and I on the episodes that we did previously we both make use of Twitter quite a bit and talked about that it’s of value. One of the things that I have tweaked in the last couple of months is since we had the guest on Peter Newbury from UCSD and he really challenged me and challenged all of us to diversify who we follow on Twitter.

Bonni: [00:04:09] And one of the things that I’ve been doing is following more people who are engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement and that really did change my feed and has introduced some some good perspectives to me and some important things to have in front of me as I perform my own knowledge management. And I like that tweaking and I want to continue to do that even more and diversify that even more.

Bonni: [00:04:30] It’s hard to do without making it too broad though i limit mine silly as this is I limit mine to 208 people which happens to be my favorite number and I’ll tell that story some other time not.

Dave: [00:04:42] So funny. I did not know it is 208.

Bonni: [00:04:45] Well right now it’s 207. But I got that one.

Dave: [00:04:48] That one spot somewhere that someone could write in and say I would like that last spot of yours.

Bonni: [00:04:53] It’s tough because there’s so many great people out there on Twitter that are sharing such great information.

Dave: [00:04:58] Yeah. And I think that’s the key for me as I try to really limit it down so the way I think about what’s in coming is of course there are things I get like an e-mail from someone or a message and say oh here’s an article that you may be interested in. Often I will get those into my system so I do review them.

Dave: [00:05:12] But just as far as like general things that are coming my way if it’s something I for sure don’t want to miss I’ll subscribe to it with RSS and I’ll use an RSS reader to make sure that I capture those really important sources of information and for things that are maybe less important.

Dave: [00:05:28] Or it’s not critical that I see everything. Those are people or organizations I’ll follow on Twitter and I tend to follow more people on Twitter and I try to know if something’s not interested me on Twitter any world you know unfollow and then I’ll follow someone else. So that gives me a pretty broad sense of what’s out there in the world. A lot comes through those two sources.

Dave: [00:05:46] Feedly is the back end for both you and I as far as capturing those RSS feeds from various blogs and news sites and I like to read my news via Feedly on an app called Newsify. So you think of Feedly as the backend that’s tracking which posts have been read and unread and then Newsify as the one that just has the interface that I like the look of it. I particularly like the dark mode because I read a lot in bed before I go to sleep and they say that that light shining in our eyes is not so good for the melatonin. I think they shouldn’t really say anything like that so we have a lot of really smart people everywhere you go. That’s not at all what it is.

Bonni: [00:06:30] I just know it’s not good enough should do it.

Dave: [00:06:33] There are a lot of smart people who listen to the show. I’m sure someone will email in a good article which will then go into our system and we can share right.

Bonni: [00:06:39] That reminds me actually I’ve had a couple of ongoing dialogues with nursing professionals nursing instructors nursing professors and then have just had a really nice email come in. This past week from a nurse in Qatar and I was thinking oh I really should have people who teach in nursing programs come more on the show. That’s something I really should go out and seek. I thought you’re married to someone who’s taught for years in a nursing program although you are not a nurse yourself.

Dave: [00:07:07] I am not I have taught a few years the Education and Leadership parts and a graduate MSN program. So yeah.

Bonni: [00:07:13] Welcome our nursing professional.

Dave: [00:07:17] I’m glad to be here. Small world. That was funny when we’ve gotten a few of those. You’ve got to feel those e-mails and share them with me it was as fun to get connected with people all over the world and see what people are learning.

Bonni: [00:07:25] Next we have sense and since we last recorded I jumped ship and I now use the same bookmarking service that you use which is called Pinboard and you shared about Pinboard previously and I tend to not always trust you when you first start using a tool because you’ll switch to one and switch to another and then switch to another and I am very loyal with my tools.

Bonni: [00:07:48] And but I could I couldn’t say better things about it. You and I both pay a little bit of money each year to have everything that we save on Pinboard be archived. What that means is that if a site even went away completely or a page link got broken or something like that all of the information every single page that we have saved is archived and backed up on the pocket servers.

Dave: [00:08:12] You mean Pinboard.

Bonni: [00:08:13] I’m did I say how many Pinboard I do mean in Pinboard.

Dave: [00:08:18] Can we back up maybe just a little bit so people know what Pinboard is. So for those who are wondering what is that one of the things you want to do. I think these days is to have some sort of a repository for where you save your links of things you find online because most things we find these days do have a link to it.

Dave: [00:08:34] And so Pinboard is just a service that allows you to basically catalog and have a library of those and it also gives you the option if you want and a number of the services do this to share that library with others so I can for example go to Bonni’s Pinboard account it’s available publicly that you’ll probably put a link to the show notes and look at you know what she’s tagged around things like higher ad or education or parenting.

Dave: [00:08:55] And I find that that’s a nice way to share knowledge with other people. And you know if we’re having a conversation someone says like I got an e-mail today. What articles do you know on interviewing someone. Well I’ve the last year I’ve tagged a bunch of articles on that so I don’t know them off the top my head.

Dave: [00:09:09] But I can give the person that link to the just that specific tag of articles and they can pull up that on my account and like you said this particular service we pay like 10 bucks a year and it also catalogs all of those and saves them so if they disappear that they’re still there as well the full text of of all that information.

Dave: [00:09:25] So it’s just a good system. The key is to have a system. So whether use something like Pinboard or delicious is another popular one is to have some way to catalog what you’re finding online because you do want to save that stuff and like your e-mail account or try to bookmark every site that’s just that just becomes laborious.

Bonni: [00:09:42] It is great as you said because we can tag things an article can have more than one tag for a while. I was doing a lot of bookmarking of topics in fact for years I have been on instructional design. But then within that there’s universal design so I can have an article that’s both about instructional design and also about universal design. And I was corresponding with someone over e-mail and they had a particular interest in universal design and I’m just able to send them a single Web site link. And it’s every article I’ve ever saved with that tag plus all the ones that I might save between now and forever more.

Bonni: [00:10:21] That’s really powerful because it constantly can update you can actually even subscribe to an RSS link of somebodies Pinboard bookmarks. If I wanted to do that if I wanted to have just know what’s what have you saved lately about some particular leadership topic – that could even come into my Feedly / my Newsify.

Dave: [00:10:40] It’s a really powerful service I way under utilize it. But Pinboard is definitely something to check out. Pinboard.in and I think it is. It says social. What does it say social bookmarking for introverts or some like that is the tagline.

Bonni: [00:10:53] I don’t know if.

Dave: [00:10:53] There’s something about… I’m not sure why for introverts. But anyway that was just appealing to me. It’s fun.

Bonni: [00:10:59] As far as using a tool like Pinboard another popular one among educators is Diigo it has many of the same features as a pinboard does although he even saves annotations where if you were to highlight or put a sticky note or some kind of an annotation on a site those would actually be saved and then you can share those with others.

Bonni: [00:11:20] I just have never I’ve never taken that step to want to have that and that. Like I said I don’t like to switch too much but what I have done with refining my personal knowledge management system over time is to just everything goes and Pinboard everything goes in there and that tighter I can make my workflow to get things into there the better whatever service I use to read things.

Bonni: [00:11:46] If it doesn’t work with Pinboard I’m not going to use it. Newsify I am reading an article I go I click on one of the icons I say save Pinboard. I type in any tags that I want and it’s saved. The other thing about Pinboard is you can email to it. Dave mentioned email as being a terrible way of storing our bookmarks or articles we want to save. I can forward an email to Pinboard and have it saved that way a couple of other things around. I do want to say something about Pinboard.

Dave: [00:12:18] Oh yeah I was just going to say for those who are Apple fans and I know a lot of them in the community. If you use an iPad or or a iPhone there’s a great app called Pushpin which is fairly inexpensive it’s there for bucks it’s the best app on iOS for Pinboard and the great thing is you can be browsing things on your phone or tablet and you can use it as an extension.

Dave: [00:12:38] So if you’re on a web page you can just get the extension button save it right into Pinboard that syncs right up to the account it’s really cool you could tag undo all of that right from there. It’s very powerful.

Bonni: [00:12:47] Within PKM and one we’re talking about making sense of things we want to have a place for things we want to have a catalog we want to have a system that makes sense to us and that will have this knowledge just become richer over time.

Bonni: [00:13:02] And one of the things that I started doing is really getting in the habit of making lists inside of Evernote. I have an ongoing list of potential podcast guests. Every time someone sends me a suggestion for a podcast guest or a podcast topic or blog topic I’ve got lists for that and I can easily add that in.

Bonni: [00:13:23] And then I also have conferences every time I hear about a conference even if it’s one I miss because unfortunately I’m really good at finding out about conferences I want to go to after they I’m it on Twitter going. These are my people I want to be at that conference.

Bonni: [00:13:41] Well I’ll put it in the list of conferences because I actually have it now in my academic year preparations to go through the conferences list and then identify what are the dates for this coming year. Which ones might I want to apply for professional development funds for etc.

Dave: [00:13:56] Smart.

Bonni: [00:13:57] And then I’m doing the same thing with journals. When I see an article that’s been posted in a journal that looks like it’s really of interest to me and might I might want to write for that publication sometime. Then I will add that to that list and I also have that in my academic year review too.

Dave: [00:14:11] I use Evernote in a similar way I like to think I’ve ever noticed kind of like my virtual bulletin board like Fauzan and officemate and every computer like what would be things I would put on a bulletin board and so ever notice those kinds of things like lists of future guests of conferences of ideas of even things like things like I see something that I want to buy for our son.

Dave: [00:14:30] But it’s not like he has too many toys right now it’s like OK maybe that’s a good deal like on the Christmas list and I’ve got a list of like future gifts for kids of just ideas when inevitably three months from now I can’t think of anything. So it’s just stuff just kind of like my brain emplace goes in Evernote of things that don’t work other places or there aren’t good systems for like Pinboard.

Bonni: [00:14:49] I’m cracking up because one of the things I knew people said was hard about parenting is that they always want toys and you know how difficult that is when you’re in the store. I’ve not found that to be anywhere near as hard to deal with as just dealing with myself and all the things I want to buy. There are so many great toys and so many great apps too. Yes kids are tough. So lists good thing.

Bonni: [00:15:12] And then the last part of sense that I’ve really evolved in my Piqué and practice in this past year and then some have to get real about pocket. Now I accidentally said pocket earlier let me tell you what pocket is now. Pocket is a electronic pocket for saving articles that you want to read later on. And just like Pinboard it’s really easy to get things into pocket.

Bonni: [00:15:36] I’m inside of my RSS reader which in my case is newsify and or I’m on the browser I’m on my chrome browser and I see an article. Oh that looks great. Or a video I want to watch. It is a single click. And it automatically stores inside of pocket and is just waiting there for the next time I’m at a doctor’s appointment or the next time I’m somewhere early or having to wait for something.

Bonni: [00:16:01] And all of that wonderful reading material is available to me. It’s a wonderful service. It’s also a huge hole for me that kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I was never going in and it became one of those mental things where I thought oh I’m not going in there because this is going to be reminded of what a Kopans Webb’s mess that is of a tool. And what I decided to do I went in probably three weeks ago and I marked everything is red.

Dave: [00:16:32] You did the purge.

Bonni: [00:16:33] Well I mean I did actually skim every single headline but I just force myself. I was this quick skim and I didn’t allow I think I only allowed myself to save a talk from Audrey Waters a video that I really still want to go back and watch.

Bonni: [00:16:46] But really I really just zeroed it all out like that. Talk about zero in box we’ve talked about that on the show before I zeroed out my pocket getting real and I’m going to add that probably to my monthly review. Now if I haven’t read it in a month and needs to go needs to be a really useful tool to mean I’m finding that that’s really nice that can kind of have that as something I can go in and use more often.

Dave: [00:17:08] I use Instapaper for almost the same thing which is the other service that’s like pocket. And I also have the same struggle of always having a lot of things in there so it’s when I find something then it goes to Instapaper.

Dave: [00:17:18] And then eventually it goes to Pinboard after I’ve read it and Instapaper because Instapaper is the best place to read it on the iPad which is where we do most of my reading and I have a couple hundred articles on my queue right now. But it’s. There’s lots of good stuff there so I don’t know maybe I’ll go through and purge at some point here too, I’m work through there gradually.

Bonni: [00:17:37] When Dave and I do our sharing a lot of it takes place on our blogs and we also then we’ll tweet out to the blog post that we have and one of the ways we’ve automated that is through a tool called buffer and the website I will have on the show notes.

Bonni: [00:17:51] But it’s bufferapp.com what buffer app allows you to do is to whether it’s blog posts that you have written or blog post that other people have written that you want to share is to schedule those out and if they have some default scheduled post where you can just click a button you can even just write inside a twitter and click on buffer and it will post it into a queue to the times that they have found are best for tweeting. And it’s not just Twitter. It’s also linked in Facebook.

Dave: [00:18:26] There’s a whole bunch of others so but those are the big ones.

Bonni: [00:18:29] And when I post an episode people might have realised this I’ll have a bunch of graphics of quotes that people have said and then I’ll just send out probably six or seven different quotes from each episode with a link to the episode notes on Twitter.

Bonni: [00:18:43] But it’s not all on the same day but I’m not sitting there when it goes out it’s already been prescheduled I mentioned that you can have it. Queue them up according to their algorithms but you also can schedule them at a particularly designated time for you. I find that a lot of people that tweet in my community tend to do so really early in the morning were here on the West Coast in the United States and I find if I even do 6:00 AM I get a lot of people that start to have a conversation.

Dave: [00:19:09] Yeah and you can schedule all that that’s specific for you. Once you get that account set up so it’s a good thing to do though we are not posting all at once and I think maybe even taking a step back here too is helpful. Like why would you want to do that.

Dave: [00:19:21] So if you’re active online having a presence and establishing yourself as an expert in a particular area is really helpful. Generally speaking there are two reasons that people get followed on social media.

Dave: [00:19:34] Either you are resourceful people with information or you’re entertaining and if you can be both all the better. I’m not that entertaining at least I don’t think so. I try to be resourceful as far as finding articles for my community and things that I think will be really helpful to people around leadership and the kinds of things I talk about in my show.

Dave: [00:19:52] And so I. But you know I put those in my buffer cue those go out throughout the week and those come out of my reading on Instapaper and Pinboard and all that so so but that’s that’s part of the value that you add is part of the online community is sharing what other people have written and what resources you’re finding.

Dave: [00:20:11] And I’d encourage that to be most of what you shared you know what you are doing or what you’ve written should be a small portion of that sharing what other people have done and affirming others and retweeting or reposting or liking or whatever is a great way to build your community and to establish yourself also with some expertise and some knowledge in that area online.

Bonni: [00:20:33] One other tool that really makes a difference as you are sharing whether you’re sharing on your blog or on Twitter is to have some kind of a graphical element. And I know many of us in higher ed may not think of ourselves as artists. I believe we actually all are artists in our own way.

Bonni: [00:20:49] But if you’re not graphically inclined there’s a lot of sites out there that will make you appear graphically inclined one of them that I use quite a bit. It’s called Canva and it’s like canvas without the S canva.com and Canva has a lot of templates for things like a blog post a twitter header or a Twitter graphic all different already pre sized images and they have templates.

Bonni: [00:21:14] Some of the images on Canva are free and other ones they charge for. And it maybe you have a picture of the sunset and that picture of the sunset is going to cost you a dollar. But if you had your own picture of a sunset to upload you can upload photos for free. You can add text for free and it’s a really nice graphic creator I use it pretty much for all of my graphics now but I don’t like to pay the dollar per image. I have done it a few times as you well know because you see the charges through from them.

Bonni: [00:21:44] I don’t think I’ve spent any more than twenty dollars in the last couple of years on images from them but we have purchased bulk photos through a site called deposit photos and we like their photos a lot. They do a pretty good job for stock photos and then we can upload the whatever photo we want to use to Canva and not have to pay that dollar by Canva is great… I’d highly suggest it… and we know that tweets said include images are much more likely to be viewed and retweeted.

Dave: [00:22:12] And we do that of course to honor copyright law and all that. I have a great video by the way, Bonni, I’ll send you of copyright law. It’s a great one to share with students. By the way I’ve shown it many times in classes on just how how does copyright work. What do you need to know about the basics of that to make sure you’re in compliance with the law so I’ll definitely share that with you so folks can access that as well too.

Bonni: [00:22:36] And for people listening that didn’t hear the news already. Happy birthday. Now. The song…

Dave: [00:22:40] It’s in the public domain the public domain which I didn’t know it wasn’t prior to.

Bonni: [00:22:45] I was so surprised you didn’t get the news.

Dave: [00:22:47] I didn’t get the news. Yeah and I think that too to part of our larger purpose of this conversation here today to for the shows you know if you do this well you also depending on how savvier students are with online and social media I mean you can really be a resource to your students too and posting things during classes.

Dave: [00:23:07] And if you have an integration with Facebook or Twitter LinkedIn or something like that as part of the work you’re doing in classes this can be part of your strategy too is just as far as how you organize and schedule and structure things and so it’s another lens to think about this through not only your own established you’re establishing yourself and your own brand and credibility in the higher education space but also thinking about how you can do that for your students and really be valuable to them too.

Bonni: [00:23:32] Dave is there anything else you’d like to add about how you’ve evolved your personal knowledge management system in the last year and then some.

Dave: [00:23:40] I think the thing that I’m always thinking about is online is no different than in person just being kind and being gracious to people and being helpful so using people’s names thanking people giving people credit the kinds of things that many of us do naturally when we’re in person.

Dave: [00:24:00] Sometimes we forget about online. So just remembering not to forget about those common decent good human relations principles and if you do that same thing online then people are going to want engage with you and want to connect with you. So that would be my reminder for myself always. But also a reminder for everyone listening.

Bonni: [00:24:17] This is the time in the show when we give a recommendation. I realized I was given a bunch of exams yesterday and one of the things that I like to do is really positively received by students and I think makes a big difference for them when I give an exam. It is typically a 50 minute exam just based on the classes that I teach and the structure of them.

Bonni: [00:24:39] And when they’re halfway through that 25 minute mark comes I ask all the students to set their pens or their pencils down and to stand up with me and to put their arms above their head.

Bonni: [00:24:50] And we take a stretch break and I actually tell them it’s going to take three really deep breaths because some of you were getting ten says he said are bodies are tensing up and then I have them actually twist their trunks a little bit so that they can loosen up their back and that kind of thing.

Bonni: [00:25:05] And it’s something I haven’t talked about on the show before it seems so simple. But students really rave because they forget they are sitting there and a lot of them suffer from test anxiety or just anxiety in general. A number of students recently sharing about panic attacks and having to be hospitalized. It’s a little thing but we can help them just become more aware of their bodies and how they’re sitting and I think that’s a good thing and then for some of them that struggle with keeping time well on exams that kind of thing. They know that at this point they should be kind of shifting over into the second half of their exam.

Dave: [00:25:36] I’ve seen you do that during the presentation days in classes but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you administer an exam I didn’t know you did the. So it’s really cool. You know I was thinking about yesterday. Awesome awesome.

Dave: [00:25:45] My recommendation is a service called TimeTrade which I think we’ve mentioned on the show previously. I am in the midst of putting together a mastermind group for the folks who listen to my podcast. And so there’s a whole bunch of people who’ve applied and I’m interviewing people by video conference and it would be a just a mess logistically to try to schedule with all those people and to find times that work for me or work for you.

Dave: [00:26:12] And so Time Trade is a really good resource to use if you have people that are regularly scheduling appointments with you but you want to automate that. So specially those of you listening who interface with a lot of students and maybe need to book time for office hours or if you need to book time with other colleagues or professionals or you do a lot of calls.

Dave: [00:26:30] It’s a really good system for that. So what time try does is you set up an account. It links to your calendar wherever it is either outlook or iCloud or whatever common system use or exchange and it will you can set up availabilities so you have certain times that you’ve got blocked out where people can schedule and what it will do then is it will look at your calendar and it will show them only the available times not what’s on your calendar but only available times.

Dave: [00:26:55] And it’s all web based. So you just send them a link. They look at a time that’s good for them. They put in their information that automatically books it into your calendar sends them a confirmation or even sends them a reminder before the meeting. It’s a great service and it’s has saved me hours and hours of time in the last couple of weeks which is why I’m thinking about it so time trade Dotcom is a good resource for that. If you’re looking for a good way to automate those kinds of things.

Bonni: [00:27:18] Thanks once again to Dave for being on episode 67. I’m glad to be here. It’s so much fun. People that want to see the show notes they’re going to be at teachinginhighered.com/67 and a few reminders as we close our time out together.

Bonni: [00:27:34] First reminder if you have yet to subscribe to the weekly updates that’s where you don’t have to remember to go look at notes that come into your inbox each week along with an article on teaching or productivity. And if you subscribe you’ll receive the 19 ed tech essentials tools that will help you use technology to facilitate learning in your classroom. That’s at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni: [00:27:59] If you have feedback about the show. That’s at teachinginhighered.com/feedback. And it looks like Dave might have something to say. He doesn’t.

Dave: [00:28:11] I don’t. I wish I could say something profound here, you know.

Bonni: [00:28:13] I wish you could, too. We’ll look forward to hearing from all of you about what tools you’re using in your personal knowledge management system and have a great rest of your week.

Dave: [00:28:23] Thanks.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.