[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 339 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Dave Stachowiak and I discuss personal knowledge management reprised.

[00:00:14] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:22] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Welcome to episode number 339. I am welcoming back to the show Dave Stachowiak. Dave is my best friend, my husband, my partner in life, and the father to our children. What else are you Dave? Podcaster extraordinaire.

[00:01:10] Dave Stachowiak: I’m also able to play the role of Harold Jarche in many places in life so here I am today, playing the role of Harold Jarche.

[00:01:17] Bonni: Yes, as a little preview. Spoiler alert, Dave is going to be quoting Harold Jarche quite a bit. Harold Jarche is the most well-known expert I know of in personal knowledge mastery and has inspired both of us so much in terms of our pursuit of lifelong learning.

[00:01:34] Dave: Is it called personal knowledge mastery or personal knowledge management?

[00:01:37] Bonni: He does. In fact, I noticed that in my prior episodes I referred to it both ways. Personal knowledge management is the broader term. He likes to really think about it in terms of mastery. Just that pursuit of one’s personal vision and how we’re never quite there yet. I think of Peter Senge describing that as this rubber band that’s pulling us forward and being able to use our strengths and show up in our work and in our life.

[00:02:05] Dave: I wanted to make sure I got the language right since I’m playing his job today.

[00:02:09] Bonni: [laughs] Yes, since you’ll be quoting him quite a bit.

[00:02:11] Dave: I’ve already learned something new. This is good.

[00:02:13] Bonni: Dave I’ve been thinking a lot about students who are graduating in December of 2020 and all that that means given the pandemic, given so many personal crises that students I am aware of are facing and I know there’s so many more that I haven’t had a chance to hear their stories yet. I think one of the ways that we sometimes in higher education, in general, don’t really serve students, as well as they, think we could is in the area of personal knowledge mastery.

[00:02:42] Dave: Yes, there’s so many things I think of if I could wave my magic wand and have students coming out of their university experience doing differently and knowing differently about the world and this is something that I’ve never thought much about until a few years ago when we first got introduced to Harold Jarche’s work. I think today especially, it’s so important because the systems are so much more complicated and so much more rich. There’s so many sources for news and information which is great but it also brings new challenges that I don’t think was as much the case when we came out of school eons ago. To kick us off, Harold Jarche quotes Ernest Hemingway in one of his works and says, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

That’s a good starting point for this because this is a process of continual learning. If we look at his definition of what is personal knowledge mastery, he says that it’s a set of processes individually constructed to help each of us make sense of our world and to work more effectively. PKM, as he calls it keeps us afloat in a sea of information guided by professional communities imbued by social networks.

[00:03:55] Bonni: He divides up this set of processes that you described Dave as seek, we’re going out and finding the information from trusted sources. Sense, we’re making sense of it, what Peter Senge would call sense-making. Then we are sharing that which we have taken in and made sense of and it reminds me a lot of a beautiful Mary Oliver poem, Instructions for Living A Life. “Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.” Paying attention to me Dave reminds me of that process of seeking. We’re going to be paying attention to those trusted sources that will most map to the things that we yearn to know about or in my case sometimes even, Dave, you don’t even know that I yearn to know about but just that they introduced me to in such unique ways. Be astonished.

That process of making sense of things and wrestling with ideas and changing our mind about things and then telling about it, that process of sharing what it is that we’re discovering and what it is that we’re learning. Dave, we’re going to go through each of the processes that Jarche describes. We’re going to go through seek, we’re going to go through sense, we’re going to go through share. We’re going to talk about what Jarche defines each one of these processes as and then we’re going to share some of the tools that we use. Sound good to you Dave?

[00:05:20] Dave: Sounds good. Okay, so starting with seeking, Jarche says, “Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to pull information but also have it pushed to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.” I’m glad he phrases it that way too, Bonni. I do think of both of those when I think of seeking information, both subscribing myself to things out there in the world and we’ll talk more about what we mean by subscribing or following something, but then also I really put a lot of effort in staying connected with individuals.

People that I trust whose helped me surface things that I think are of value out in the world and that comes to me more of in the push model and we’ll talk more about that too I’m sure.

[00:06:07] Bonni: A person very close to me recently discovered that their spouse has started to watch a couple of news sources that are known for being propagators of misinformation and disinformation. That is Newsmax and the OAN Network. What I wanted to share with that individual and with anyone who wants a little bit of help around, “How do we navigate this stuff?” would be Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework and that’s his way to say that we can all do our part. The S by the way stands for stop. Before you’re going to share something, let’s stop and think it through.

I’m not going to go through all of his four letters of the framework but they’re all very accessible. I’ll tell you just really quick, Dave, the other day I was trying to find out where this diagram came from because I had saved it super late. I know it’s hard to believe but I was reading late at night and didn’t save the source and I was able because of Mike Caulfield and others to be able to do a reverse image search. I knew what that was and I knew the kinds of results that it could provide me. That’s just one example of many that you’ll learn if you go through the SIFT framework, but to me, it’s all about making sure that we’re going to trusted sources and we really have to be more careful thinkers about that and cautious and do our due diligence more than ever before.

We’re going to throw out a couple of terms here. We’re going to throw out starting now the acronym RSS, which stands for real simple syndication and most websites today even most podcasts today are built around this framework of a real simple way to syndicate. A real simple way to send out feeds that can be picked up by other things such as an RSS aggregator. Dave, would you talk about what an RSS aggregator is and what it does for us?

[00:08:09] Dave: The simplest way to think of it is just a service that really provides the technology that pulls in the feeds that you’ve subscribed to and then allows you to do something with that. Many of them you can read right on the aggregator or you may use an app to use that, but it’s the backend that allows that to happen. The most famous one was Google Reader which is no more. It got sunsetted by Google several years ago. In its place, a number of other services have now emerged and at the time when Google Reader disappeared, a lot of people thought, “Well, maybe that’s the end of RSS and people consuming information that way.”

I’m glad that the opposite has happened. Not only has it not been the end but a lot of these other services have stepped in and done a better job than Google Reader did as far as being able to provide a service that you can then use for a lot of different apps.

[00:09:01] Bonni: You may read your news today on a service like Apple News or Google News and while I certainly enjoy that process, I happen to use Apple News and I like that process. I probably like it a little bit too much. Dave, it sometimes can be like candy. I find that’s my first go to. Just like, “What are you going to spill out for me today?” but recognize that when you use services like that, you don’t have as much of an ability to fine-tune things. I can go into Apple News and say, “I don’t ever want to see stories from this particular news source again and it will listen to you, but it’s feeding you with its own algorithms.

You’re not specifically saying, “I’d like this one. This one, this one, this one, and not this one. The RSS aggregators that are out there today really allow you to fine-tune and not just about news but about all different kinds of things. Anything that might be on a feed you could have. Even someone who who was just posting regular stories or personal blogs or pictures of their dog, or whatever it is. If it’s got a feed attached to it, you can have that pulled into your aggregator, and every time a new item gets posted, you’ll have that readily available to you. The other thing that aggregators do beyond what Dave shared is it keeps track of what stories you’ve read or that you’ve marked as red by the way, and which stories are yet to be read, which ones are new.

[00:10:30] Dave: Yes, I’m glad you made that distinction because it’s nice to hop on to an Apple News, or I know some people use Facebook for reading news. I wouldn’t recommend that necessarily, but there are algorithms that are making decisions about what comes up on your screen. The nice thing about using an aggregator service is that you’re making those decisions. You’re deciding which sources you are pulling from what you see, what you don’t see, and you have a lot more control over that.

Particularly, and I think of folks who are part of this listening community, Bonni, and who are, I think probably way more mindful of what’s coming into their thinking than other folks, the average person out there in the world. This helps us to filter in advance before we even see it. What kinds of things come across our reader screen and what kinds of things we’re considering for our own learning and knowledge.

[00:11:20] Bonni: The aggregator service that I use is called Inoreader. I was first introduced to it by someone who I initially met on Twitter, and would consider to be a friend and someone that I learned a lot from. Her name is Laura Gibbs. I don’t want to overwhelm you, because remember at their most basic RSS feed just allows me to subscribe to different kinds of feeds, but it even can become its own feed itself. Inoreader can both take in feeds, but it also can send out feed. Let’s say for example, Dave, that you were interested in knowing what I was sharing with one of my classes say that you were just interested in what kinds of articles that I was sending their way. You could subscribe to one of my feeds and all happens right there inside of Inoreader.

What I like about it is you can get started pretty easy. You could have up on your browser. The little buttons that are up on top, those are called extensions. You could extort and extension for Inoreader. If you saw a website that you want it to be able to subscribe to, you can just click on the button, and if you’d like to add it to a particular folder or just have it out there in a whole list of feeds that you wanted to subscribe to. I really like Inoreader because it’s easy to get started with, but it’s really your imagination is the limit with all the things that you could do with it.

[00:12:43] Dave: I use a service called FeedBurner that I’ve used for two or three years. If I was starting over again today, Bonni, I probably would use Inoreader just because it has more features. Inoreader is the Cadillac of this space, as far as the service that probably has the most options and ability to filter. FeedBurner doesn’t have quite as many, but it turns out I wouldn’t use most of the advanced features on Inoreader anyway, so I’ve just stayed using that. Both of these are paid services, there’s a few other paid services and there’s also free versions as well too. We both choose to pay for this each year, and I don’t know what you know Inoreader is right now Bonni, but I think they’re between 30 or 40 or $50 a year, approximately.

That allows us to use a lot of the features and one feature that I use extensively that I love, and it’s worth me paying for it just for this is, I believe Inoreader has this too, is they provide you an email address that you can forward messages to automatically. I have it set up on my email system that when I get a newsletter from someone that I do want to read, but I don’t want it to clutter up my inbox. I have some mail roles set up in my inbox, so there are certain newsletters that get forwarded to the email address in my RSS aggregator. When I never see those in my inbox, they automatically get forwarded.

Then when I sit down in the evening to read on my RSS app, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Those are just there and they’ve shown up, so that email bypasses my inbox and just goes right over to my reading folder and makes it super easy to not get distracted by those things during the working day.

[00:14:20] Bonni: I just wanted to mention that Inoreader can do that as well, Dave. It is one of those game changers completely, because I realized I never want to be sitting at my computer reading a newsletter. The ones that I really, really like, I want to be just in a mode where I can be a little bit more reflective in my reading and somehow I just rather be sitting on a couch or lying in bed rather than doing that when I’m more just focused on getting through the email versus really being able to absorb what it is that I’m reading. I love that feature both Inoreader, as well as FeedBurner. We’ve looked at our RSS remember that stands for real simple syndication, just an easy way to subscribe to things. We’ve looked at RSS aggregator.

Dave was mentioning that on these aggregators, you can do your reading. However, there are specialized apps where the programmers have gone in and just really, really dove down deep to how to have the richest most satisfying reading experience. For me, that gets delivered, and for Dave to, I discovered he’s still on the same one that I am, that is through Unread. Unread is our RSS reader of choice. We are on the Apple ecosystem. Dave, I think this is something that is specific to the iOS Apple devices, but there are tons and tons of readers that you’ll be able to find on Android and other operating systems. What a reader, what I really love the most about Unread is that I can have all of my Inoreader subscriptions come over there. It’s really easy. I can control the entire app with my right thumb.

Picture me holding an iPad with my left hand and my right hand. I literally can just scroll through the feed with my right thumb, and then when I find something I want to read, I can just tap on it with that same thumbs, it’s very powerful thumb, Dave. Then I can just swipe to get out of it. You can navigate the entire app reading stories, coming back out of them, looking at the headlines, drilling down, looking at a specific story coming back out. Then if I want to save that article, that’s something we’ll talk about in just a moment, but that also can be done really quick. Then this is one of the most satisfying things in the world, Dave, is to get the bottom of one of my categories. If I scroll all the way up, it’ll ask me, do you want to mark all of these as read? It’s such a delightful way to read through targeted information. That’s really interesting to me.

[00:17:01] Dave: It’s also a really nice app from a typography standpoint, and it doesn’t have filters out, mostly the ads. It just keeps it really simple so you can really focus on your reading. You’re not likely to get distracted doing other things. I really love it from that standpoint and probably read hours on it every single week.

[00:17:19] Bonni: Yes, and has got a great night mode and all kinds of themes that you can apply as well. When we talk about seeking, we talk about looking for those trusted sources. For me, they’ve a really big area of trusted sources is over on the social network, Twitter, and I love that. Not only do I have people that I follow, but I also have created lists over there, because when Peter Newbury was on teaching in higher ed long ago, he really did change my experience of social media.

He said on Twitter, and places like it, “We need to follow people that are like us and follow people that are not like us.” Just two of the areas that I really wanted to challenge myself in recent years is to get to know more about indigenous communities. I have a list that I have curated from the help of other people on Twitter, who shared such things, and really helps me understand a little bit more about those communities.

Literally now, not a day will go by where I won’t be educated. Our daughter, the other day, Dave, was asking you about books. She wanted to read books about Native Americans. I already knew, or didn’t tell you to go just from the experts that I’ve been able to connect with there. The other community that I’ve really been seeking to learn a lot from is people who have disabilities. The disability community that is up on Twitter is very strong. Boy, I just whether it’s areas of policy politics, just quality of life, there’s so much that I’ve been able to learn from just those individuals that I followed.

To me, having that list of individuals. The other thing is it was weird the other day, I don’t know why this happened, but like something around 20 people followed my disability lists that I had set up there. It must’ve been– You never know why these things happen, but I was like, “Did somebody share this? Then all of a sudden there’s just a lot,” but once you find a really good list, I’m going to mention one other list which might be relevant to listeners. Peter Newbury, the same person that I was talking about that’s taught me so much about getting the most out of a social network like Twitter.

He has a list that he’s collected as long as I’ve known him of the centers for teaching and learning that he becomes aware of. Just to be able to follow that whole list and see the kinds of things that they’re sharing.

[00:19:43] Dave: Most of these aggregator services too, you can follow this or you can follow individuals. For Twitter, for example, if there’s someone you really follow that you want to see everything that they post, but you don’t want to necessarily be up on Twitter all day long. You can also subscribe to individuals in these aggregator services, so that at the end of the day or the end of the week, whenever you do your reading, you You can read through what they’ve sent out online. It’s a really helpful way to really surface the things that are valuable from the people you want to see from, but also not to get bogged down in the normal social media landscape. That’s easy if you have pop onto Twitter and just start scrolling.

[00:20:16] Speaker 2: We’ve looked at RSS, aggregators, and readers. We have looked at what is often called the stream. Something like Twitter and social media, but of course, Dave and I couldn’t go on to start talking about sense before we shared about other media. Specifically, for us, podcasts are such a big part of that both of us use an app. It’s called a podcast catcher is the generic term for it, but how do you get access to those podcasts that you’ve subscribed to? We like to use one called Overcast. I like Overcast a lot because it lets me speed up the rate at which I listen and also has something called smart speed, or smart pauses or smart something. They take out the silence that may not be necessary for comprehension. I did also just want to mention real quick, I’ve actually been getting a little bit more out of YouTube by subscribing to different channels.

I have been enjoying exploring more about using the service called Notion. I’ve subscribed to different people who share content about Notion on YouTube. I also like to listen to music on YouTube as well. Just being able to subscribe to different musicians’ channels is really fun too. Lastly, I really enjoy watching a form of swing dancing called Lindy Hop and just to be able to see not– not as much during the pandemic, there are not as much swing dancing competitions going on, as you could imagine, but looking forward to those returning and getting to see such amazing dancers is really a cool thing,

[00:21:44] Dave: This is the part where I become Harold again. Let’s dive into the second part, sensing the second stuff rather. Jarche says, “Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting it into practice what we have learned often it requires experimentation as we learn best by doing.”

[00:22:04] Bonni: There are downsides to thinking that we’re really going to be able to manage ongoing learning. If you picture your brain, like just this map of information. If we just think of it as like every time we see something that we like, we just press the like button and press the like button without a whole lot more to be able to go back to, it’s going to be really hard on an ongoing basis to develop that network as much as is possible if we think a little bit more about the sense-making process, whenever I teach about personal knowledge mastery, one of the biggest struggles people have, Dave, is that they really resist this idea that you should be saving and curating things along the way because they picture it that well, you could just go anytime you wanted, you could even just pull out your phone and just search for a topic and find everything that you need.

Why would you ever need to have a place and a system for curating? I know that that’s an area of resistance that I try really hard to explain the benefits, but I guess one quick story I’ll share. Dave is a little bit more on the personal level, but I’ve shared before in the podcast of us going through infertility for so many years with our kids. If you were just to go search for a topic like that and fertility on the internet, let me just say she would not find the highest quality stuff popping right up to the top, through the master of the gods of the algorithms as you will. Over all of those years, I would save bookmarks.

For example, I specifically remember that there was a very powerful article about the myths around infertility. Dave, you’ll probably remember the first thing that most people, if they would hear that part of our story would assume that it was my medical problem, not yours, and would assume that it was because I allowed myself to be too stressed out and that there was something wrong with me. Well, if you look at the resolve organizations, and I’ll actually put a link to this in the show notes if you look at their page about miss that’s the first thing right up at the top, it’s always the woman’s “fault and right up there as well,” is that it’s always because someone’s doing something wrong and allowing themselves to be getting stressed out.

I don’t want to go on too much of a tangent here, Dave, but I really treasure the fact that I have curated all of these bookmarks around infertility, such that now if someone were to ask me for some help, some advice, some resources I’ve got that list right there that’s probably Dave, what over 10 years, total easily.

[00:24:47] Dave: Yes, easily.

[00:24:48] Bonni: Yes, it could even be more than that because of course my heart is still near and dear to people who are trying to develop their family. I’ll always save things if I come across some really good stories or that kind of thing. That’s just one example, Dave, I don’t know if you have any examples that you think of when someone tries to say, “Well, Dave, I could just find everything I need just by doing a search on Google. I don’t need this sense-making process.”

[00:25:14] Dave: Well, I think the challenge there is, many of us have learned through our academic training that, yes, Google is useful to tool, Wikipedia is a useful tool, but just because something comes up, number one in the search results doesn’t mean that it is the most credible, reliable well-researched source, right? In fact, most of the time, it’s not, it is the person who has placed the ad or it is the person who has perhaps created something that has become viral and not always viral for the good reasons, right? Rather than doing the cognitive workload, each time of trying to sift through what’s useful, if you’ve already figured out what’s useful before and have spent time creating a system and a database of resources, and especially things you refer to often like in our academic disciplines that saves you the time to then go and find things that are very useful to you.

You already trust your own system. You know you’ve spent the time going through the SIFT process, for example, or whatever you’ve done to make sure that you’re relying on things that can be useful. One example of that, Bonni is, I use a service and writing and we’ll get to in a bit called Raindrop that I’ve aggregated all of the links that I found online over the last six, seven years. I shared that link publicly with the folks who listen to my podcast. When folks go looking for something like, for example, a topic delegation, which is useful for leaders, they know that those are articles that I’ve already read, I’ve looked at. I have decided that– the article was useful enough that I was willing to make it available to anyone out there.

Rather than doing a search online for delegation, which had come up with hundreds of thousands of hits probably, there’s probably 20 or 30 up there– that would be useful to people. That doesn’t mean that they’re the best articles. It doesn’t mean that there may not be something there that I would disagree with or wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but I’ve done at least one pass to say, Hey, this is something that I came on my radar screen, I’ve looked at it and I think it would be useful to folks. It saves that time and that cognitive load to then be better used for once you found the resources, thinking about what you can do with it there,

[00:27:22] Bonni: As Dave mentioned, we both very recently have switched over to start using raindrop.io, and Dave and I don’t switch tools very often. You were talking about earlier feed bin, Dave, and that if you were starting from scratch, you might be on in a Inoreader. To me, you don’t want to be switching systems all the time. Just find one and really learn the heck out of it and use the heck out of it. I’ll tell you what though, I finally, when we did switch over to Raindrop, I think you’ve been on it a couple, two, three months more than me, but my gosh Raindrop is amazing. It can show up on your web browser on your computer like you might expect. It also can show up on your phone, on your tablet. It allows you to save things to collections, which are essentially folders.

You also can add tags and you also can search across all of your collections and all of your tags. However you decide to sort things, they’re going to be easy to bring up. For me, I like to have a tag of what classes the particular item might refer to. I like to know the kind of thing I’m saving. Am I saving a video? Am I saving something that is audio content? I like to be able to have some ideas. Is that something that’s funny? Is it something that makes me curious, I’m really fascinated by curiosity and talk and write, and think a lot about that as well.

I know both of us would really recommend that if you don’t already have a digital bookmarks system, raindrop.io is really, really a powerful thing worth exploring, but if that doesn’t turn out to be your tool of choice, get yourself a digital bookmarks choice. Dave, we’re onto our last and final of the processes that Harold Jarche includes in his personal knowledge mastery framework.

[00:29:09] Dave: That is called sharing. He says, “Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks, as well as collaborating with our colleagues.”

[00:29:18] Bonni: This is one of those things that seems so simple on the surface, but I find every time that I teach about it, I talk about it, I think about it, there’s a lot here because it seems pretty easy to just share about something, but when you’re sharing, you’re in some ways having to be vulnerable in ways that you might not first think about. John Stepper is a thinker in this area. He refers to this process as working out loud, that we’re going to be sharing about stuff that maybe we haven’t made up our minds about yet. We’re going to share about aspects of our work that we know could be better and maybe it’s an area of our own failure or our own challenges that we’re struggling with. I’ve started referring to this as teaching out loud that. In fact, I asked recently, some colleagues to share in a little informal discussion community that we had. They said, “Oh, I just not sure I have anything to be able to offer here.” I thought, “Oh, gosh, I really wish I could encourage more people to just take that, feeling of vulnerability and just the power that it can be.” I also recognize I’m in a place of privilege in terms of I now have tenure at my institution for some time now and don’t have to think as much about the ways in which I expose my own weaknesses and the things that I’ve struggled with as well.

Sharing it’s such a powerful thing. Oh, my gosh, I just think about all the stuff that I learned on a daily basis, because there is such this network of a community that really is working in solidarity to try to do what it is that we do better. Sharing could take place in a really small way. Sharing could take place of just telling someone about the– We were mentioning the podcast app that Dave and I use called Overcast. You can share a little clip out from a podcast. You can share an entire link to a podcast and send it over to someone.

Sharing could take place in a really small way. You can also share, of course, on social networks. We’ve mentioned Twitter a number of times. You could start a blog, if you haven’t already. You could revive your blog if it’s been a while. You even could share, I was mentioning Raindrop, you could share a tag. Maybe you teach the same class that others do and other institutions and you just want to share out the tag of bookmarks that you’ve collected around a particular class or a particular topic. One service that we didn’t talk about yet, Dave, is Readwise. Why don’t I have you just share what Readwise is, and then I’ll talk about it in relation to sharing.

[00:31:56] Dave: Readwise is a new service that has become really useful to both of us. The best way to think of it is, it’s a service that helps you to save and help your highlights in your reading become more useful. You can connect it to a number of different services and platforms. Probably the most well-known one would be Amazon. Bonni and I both use Amazon for most of our reading and we’re both in the habit of highlighting things on Kindle, or the Kindle app that we find useful and then going back and reflecting on those.

What Readwise does is it takes all of those highlights and brings them into the service. It does its own little personality mastery itself. Then it gives things back to you at some intervals. For example, I have my account set up to sync with my Amazon account. I’ve been reading on Amazon for years. There’s pluses and minuses to that but one of the pluses is a large ecosystem. I have two 200 or 300 books that I have highlights saved for. Every day Readwise sends me an email in the morning and it says, “Here are five highlights from five different books.”

Every day, it gives me those different highlights and it pulls five different ones from five different books at random every single day, and it puts them into my email. What I’ve been doing is posting them on LinkedIn, because a lot of folks in my professional network are on LinkedIn and use that as their connection point. I’ve been posting those regularly. I also have been using those to reflect on things that I’ve learned from past books. I’ve been using it to generate ideas about future writing that I would do and to do a little bit more note-taking on my own, which I may say more about a bit.

The nice thing about Readwise is if you highlight things on PDF, for example, you can upload those into Readwise. If you have highlights from services like Instapaper, you can use that. They also have a cool system where you can, what’s the best way to describe it? If you’ve read a book before, but you didn’t highlight it. Say for example, a book that I read years ago, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it on paperback because Kindle didn’t exist when I first read it. You can put on Readwise. You can say, “I’ve read this book,” and it will then populate in your database, the most popular highlights that people have, and then we’ll feed those to you regularly.

There’s all kinds of fun things you can do with it. I found it to be really helpful to surface things I have already highlighted myself or in some case other people have highlighted if it’s one of the supplemental books, and remind me of what I’ve learned and read and it’s just a really nice way to supplement that learning and to make it useful and practical and not get forgotten about it just because I read a book seven years ago.

[00:34:41] Bonni: When I first started using Readwise, I started thinking that it was almost so simple that why would this be a service I would want to or to feel the need to pay for. I’ve quite changed my mind about it. We’ve talked many times in this podcast about retrieval practice. Dave actually mentioned that earlier in the show as well. It has become, for me a form of retrieval practice.

Now, it’s not exactly like what you might be thinking when I’m saying that. It’s not quizzing me or anything, but just the very fact of bringing up a quote from a book, I’m going back and said, “What was the name of the book, and then the author? Then what was the main point and then how does this thing fit in? Then has it fit in with the other thing that I’m thinking about?”

Just recently, a quote came up from Daniel Kinnaman, The Thinking Fast and Slow book. Dave, just the fact that I could say that without any notes in front of me without any pauses, is really to the point of the power of retrieval practice because I would not have been able to do that if that quote hadn’t recently surfaced and I had all that memory of how powerful that book was to me and just been able to revisit it in that small but powerful way. Before we get to the recommendation segment, Dave, it is time for us to thank today’s sponsor, and can you guess who today’s sponsor is?

[00:36:00] Dave: I happen to know it is TextExpander, because that’s what it says here on the page in front of me.

[00:36:03] Bonni: It’s TextExpander.

[00:36:05] Dave: Speaking of fun services one of my favorite.

[00:36:07] Bonni: Well, in terms of one of the first things that we install on any new computer because it saves us so much time. With TextExpander, you’re able to quickly and easily set up what they call snippets. They have very cute names, but they do really powerful things. When I type in the letter Z followed by V U, P, H, O, N, E as in my phone number for work, instantly, I press the spacebar and there is my work phone number. That can show up in an email. That can show up in a web form because I don’t ever remember my work phone number. I’ve even got one for the show notes. It’ll pop up but it’ll say who’s the guest, hat’s the episode number, when’s the episode going to air?”

I can have these easy fillable forms fillable fields, I guess you would say, and instantly, I’ve got the show notes with all of the information that’s going to need to be contained in it and it’s just so easy to use. It is also one of those services you can really grow with as well. If you head on over to textexpander.com/podcast, you can get 20% off your first year. TextExpander is available on the Mac, on Windows, on Chrome, and on the iPhone and iPad. It’s just a wonderful way to save a bunch of time. In fact, they send us emails, Dave. Do you get those emails to the play how much time it saved you on a given month?

[00:37:29] Dave: Yes, I do.

[00:37:29] Bonni: It really does add up. It really does add up. Do you want to share a couple of more of your favorite snippets before we close this and head on over to the recommendations segment?

[00:37:38] Dave: There’s so many things I use TextExpander for it’s hard to even capture. One of them is for years, I worked with a client where we had to do a bunch of paperwork for, employees who were going through a particular program. Every couple of months, someone would fill out the paperwork incorrectly and we would have to send them a long, detailed set of instructions on exactly what they would need to do to solve that problem.

The instructions were always exactly the same and yet, I didn’t do it often enough that, I would remember them. I’d have to go back and I’d have to find the previous email. I finally got smart and I just created a TextExpander snippet. What Bonni said about snippets is the way it works, you basically create it once, you put it in TextExpander and then you create a little keyboard snippet. I remember mine was like z system fail or something like that, or paperwork fail. I would type that in and it would populate the entire email with the entire direction step by step.

I remember when this would happen, I’d get responses from people like, “Wow, what a detailed set of instructions you came up with so quickly.” After they sent messages, like within an hour, we’d have all the details out to them. It was because I thought through it once. I think this is the trigger point for you thinking like TextExpander may be useful for you. If you have situations that happen where you regularly find yourself going back to prior emails, for example, and copying and pasting something that you’ve sent to someone else. I’m going to use this for recommendation letters so you can template the things that stay the same. Then you can spend more time customizing the things that you want to spend more time customizing. TextExpander is huge for us and we both use it every single day.

[00:39:17] Bonni: TextExpander.com/podcast and tell them you heard about it from Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:39:23] Dave: Thank you for sponsoring us, TextExpander. We’re big fans over here.

[00:39:27] Bonni: This is the point in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Mine’s a little bit of a hodgepodge but Dave’s will bring us back to some consistency with today’s episode, I think. I wanted to mention that Remi Kalir has been on the podcast a number of times. He is an expert among many things at what is known as social annotation. Just the ability to have a set of readings or a set of materials where multiple people can come in and highlight things, put their notes in the margin and to be able to do that as a community. He let me know that the 2020 NCTE Annual Convention was going on and that they were doing what is known as a marginal syllabus. I think it was even maybe a mini-marginal syllabus if I remember correctly. The conference, by the time you will be hearing this will have concluded, but that’s the really nice thing about social annotation is that it lives on well beyond an event.

The readings that they collected for this particular marginal syllabus are just so powerful including one, I specifically would like to call out, Talk to Teachers by James Baldwin and I would encourage you to go have a look at the NCTE Annual Convention marginal syllabus, as well as specifically, that reading that’s contained in there called the Talk to Teachers by James Baldwin.

If you’ve never used Hypothesis before, it is a great tool to be able to have your own highlights and to share or to keep private your own notes and reflections on reading so I’d encourage you to use that as an opportunity to get started. Secondly, on a completely different note, but Dave, this is– we’ve been talking about a lot of tools, I’d like to share a new tool that I came across It’s specific to the Mac operating system, it is called Hook.

What it lets you do is it takes away some of the friction of trying to find information. I’ve been doing a lot of work on strategic planning for my institution. When I sit down to do the work, I always have a number of documents that all sort of talk back and forth, or I wish they would talk back and forth to each other. I’ve got the main document with the table of contents and the narrative, but I also have these explainer sheets somewhere else and then reference materials.

Hook lets you create a hook back and forth between documents, between files, between websites and create really a menu of easy to access, easy to navigate. Some of you may have heard of the two-minute rule before. It comes up in something like getting things done. If something’s going to take you less than two minutes, you should just do it right now. Well, he is introduced with Hook the two-second rule. It should be that quick to be able to get back and forth between documents that you want to be able to inform one another, whether that’s files, web pages, tasks, emails, and more.

If you’re on Mac OS, checkout Hook, it’s really cool. I’m just starting to experiment with that and I’m looking forward to learning even more about it. Dave, I’m going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:42:39] Dave: Well, I have one big recommendation, and then possibly a second or third. I’d like to recommend a book that I read four or five months ago. The name of the book is How to Take Smart Notes. The subtitle is One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning, and Thinking for Students, Academics, and Nonfiction Book Writers. It’s really a fabulous book and it is the author Sönke Ahrens, I’m sure I’m saying his name wrong so apologies.

Really this is a powerful overview of a system called … which has become– it’s not a new system, but it has picked up a lot of speed on the internet in the last year or so from folks who are interested in doing a lot more work on what we’re talking about today, personal knowledge mastery, but also really doing more detailed, capture of notes and writing. I think particularly for academics, this is a really powerful system that’s worth a look.

Just as an example, I was looking at the Amazon listing earlier today, Bonni, I think when I read this book six months ago, it had 150 reviews on Amazon, today it has 500 some. It’s really taken off in the last few months. A lot of people have used this as a seminal book for this model. … is too complicated to go into here at any length but if this episode has peaked your interest about thinking about what systems you may use to be able to capture and make sense of the world and then do something with that, especially those of you who are researchers and are producing things, I think … is a wonderful system to look at.

There’s two pieces of software that have both emerged in the last six months to a year that I also think are probably very useful for you to take a look at. They’re both different. They both have positives and negatives, but they both work very well with the … system. One of them is called Obsidian, I’ve been using that for the last several months for my writing. Then there’s another one called Roam Research.

If you are– especially if you do research, taking a look at some of these new systems and note-taking methodologies and software that’s out there now that is really growing like wildfire, I think is a really wonderful thing that potentially is a great addition to your personal knowledge mastery.

[00:44:53] Bonni: Dave, thanks for joining me on today’s episode number 339 about personal knowledge management reprised.

[00:45:01] Dave I’m glad to be here. We should probably say a shout-out to Harold Jarche as well, who’s been a past guest on your show. I know you’ll put a link to his website in here. The notes here, so many wonderful resources on his site, obviously just scratching the surface today.

[00:45:15] Bonni: If you have yet to subscribe to the Teaching in Higher Ed occasional update, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Sooner or later, I’ll get around to having those updates be a little bit more regular, and then when I do, you’ll be all connected and ready to get future updates. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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.