Bonni: [00:00:00] On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed number 213, Harold Jarche discusses personal knowledge mastery.

Production Credit: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:18] Hello and 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.

Bonni: [00:00:47] If you’ve been a long, long time listener to the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, you’re already well aware of the earlier episodes around the topic of personal knowledge management, what today’s guests calls personal knowledge mastery. It’s an essential part of how I do life, how I do learning and I’m so glad to have today’s guest joining me, he is the expert on personal knowledge mastery, Harold Jarche.

Bonni: [00:01:16] He is focused on providing actionable insights for workplace learning. He works with individuals, organizations, and public policy influencers to develop practical ways to adapt to the technological, demographic, and societal changes that are facing us today. And Harold has been described as a keen subversive of the last centuries management and educational models. His clients appreciate Harold for his extensive experience and network. His internationally renowned blog is a “beacon of light in the dark landscape of organizational learning.” And according to one longtime reader, “Harold is one of the best thinkers out there on things related to learning and work.” Harold helps to identify next practices around collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation in an increasingly complex networked world. As Harold says, “work is learning and learning is the work.” Harold Jarche, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Harold: [00:02:22] Thanks very much, Bonni. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Bonni: [00:02:24] Today we are talking about what- The first google search for people might be personal knowledge management. You distinguish your model, and we will describe this a little bit more later on, but as personal knowledge mastery. I wonder if we could start in the middle. Could you talk about knowledge?

Harold: [00:02:45] About knowledge. I mean it’s the difference between data information and knowledge. Recently this model, the DIkW model, data, information, knowledge, wisdom. And the generic model was that each one built upon the other. And I don’t agree with that model because I see if you have the data, you can’t turn data into information unless you have the knowledge to understand the data. So knowledge becomes this sort of over arching human component of this taking information and sharing it, and personalizing it and understanding things.

Harold: [00:03:23] So knowledge is what we are able to do with the stuff that we either know, or what we see, or what we interact with. So the knowledge is very much the human side of that thing. I mean we can talk about knowledge bases and things like that, but for me, knowledge is that human sense making of experience, and exposure, and everything, and messy interactions, and feelings, and culture and all and all those kinds of things. And that’s really what knowledge is. Knowledge is the stuff that we use from which we take action. Right. I use my knowledge to do whatever it is I’m going to do, to go to work, to make a decision, to do anything like that. Maybe it’s not a wonderful dictionary description of it, but it’s kind of a fuzzy place to start.

Bonni: [00:04:18] Let’s backtrack a little bit then. Why does this model focus on the personal when we might expect so much of knowledge, as we traditionally think about it, showing up in a workplace?

Harold: [00:04:31] Well I mean knowledge is I think two things. It’s personal and it’s also social because none of us- as John Donne said, “No man is an island.” And that we are the sum of our interactions ad our experiences with others. We are we are social beings and we are made up of social constructs. So knowledge is both of those things, personal and social. And and in my PKM framework, we talk about both those things.

Harold: [00:05:03] There’s the stuff that you do. But then there’s also the stuff that you’re doing with others. And quite often, it’s that pendulum or that shift on the spectrum of some things you are doing very, very personally and then other things you are doing socially. And then maybe some social interaction you’re reflecting back on that personally. So sort of the swinging between the personal and the social. As I’ve said about PKM, is that PKM, in some ways, is our individual responsibility of a social contract of being engaged citizens, engaged members of communities. And it’s this idea that if we don’t make sense ourselves, how can we help our communities, our societies get smarter and do better things.

Bonni: [00:05:51] I just want want to mention that most of the writing that I’ve seen on this is around the phrase personal knowledge management. But you’ve really made an important distinguishment. I’d like to have you talk now for a while about management versus mastery.

Harold: [00:06:05] Right. So I called it personal knowledge management- it wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my name. I’d mentioned the three people and particularly Lilia Efimova who writes under Mathemagenic. She’s now focused more on schooling. She lives in the Netherlands. And anyway, Lilia was a great inspiration and was writing a lot about this back in the early 2000s. She was looking particularly at knowledge management through blogging between researchers and how they were doing this sort of thinking in progress type thing.

Harold: [00:06:43] And so, really what I started writing about for myself on my blog was Lilia has got this wonderful stuff. Denham Gray is talking about the same thing. Dave Pollard talking about that and I just started learning out loud and just sticking this stuff out there and saying “well I think this is what I’m doing, this is how I’m doing it.” And putting it there. And it really was a very, very small part of my blogging, my consulting or anything like that.

Harold: [00:07:06] But what happened was over time- and over quite a period of time. I started writing about this in 2004. It would have been five, six years later, I think, before some people started picking up. My first client was Domino’s Pizza that wanted to put the PKM framework into their leadership program. And so I realized that hey maybe there’s something here.

Harold: [00:07:27] I don’t know, four or five years ago the management mastery thing- one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to get away from knowledge management, the field itself, KM. And by just slapping a P on the KM, it made it look like it was part of the KM world. And I did not see, I still don’t see, PKM as part of KM. I have a different perspective on it. But really it’s because it’s a capital P. It’s got to be personal. There’s no one model. I have had tech companies contact me who want to have a PKM technology and I say no, every single individual has to develop their own. Because If you don’t develop your own practice, you’re not going to continue with it.

Harold: [00:08:08] And then in discussions with practice- and I think was inside one of my communities of practice actually we were talking about and they said Harold, it’s not management, its mastery.” And I went, “Yeah, you’re right. It is.” And no one else was talking about it. So why don’t you change it to personal knowledge mastery? And I said “yeah.” And the more I use it, the more sense it makes to me because it’s about a person mastering a discipline to which you are never, ever going to get to the end. It’s like Zen. It’s like any other type of yoga or whatever it is that it. Is is that you can always improve. You can always get better. There is no OK check, check, check, check, check, I’ve got it I’m finished, off I go.

Harold: [00:08:46] So that’s why the mastery thing- I think it is because you see this as a lifelong journey and not just as a checkmark or a certificate in the way you go- which is another reason I don’t give out certificates.

Bonni: [00:08:57] You break personal knowledge mastery down into three parts. I’d like to explore each part with you now and then maybe hold off a little bit on talking about specific tools. And then at the end we will get really practical with what you use. I can share what I use. But it’s less about the tools, of course, and far more about the practice. So talk about SEEK, and then we’ll get to SENSE and SHARE. So, how is SEEK part of PKM?

Harold: [00:09:23] Well, the seek part is really about looking out and seeking. There’s a number of different things you can seek. One is- the big part is seeking diversity, seeking diversity of opinion, seeking diversity of perspective, because we know that we need to get other ways of- if we’re dealing with complex problems, which is a complex situation, which most of us are most of us will be, is that we know- and the research is solid on that- is that in diversity is strength.

Harold: [00:09:54] So when I talk to people about the seeking part is that okay let’s think about your professional social networks, who are you connecting with? I run a series of questions. Who you talk to if you have a conflict, if you have a real problem, if you’re going to make a career change or something like that, who you talk to? And let’s take a look at those people and see who they are. And then OK let’s let’s categorize them. When it comes to diversity, there’s no rule of “Ok, I have to have 50 percent women and 50 percent men” or anything like that.

Harold: [00:10:24] However, diversity in general we can say to ourselves, “Am I getting diverse perspectives or am I not?” And if it’s all middle aged men from my culture, well is that a good thing or a bad thing? Am I getting gender diversity? Am I getting cultural diversity? Am I getting educational diversity? All those kinds of things. So I get people thinking about diversity.

Harold: [00:10:46] And I think THE most important type of diversity is diversity of opinion. So my PKM skills become skills around where- maybe I’m going to set up a temporary list or a temporary thread or something like that where I’m seeing this stuff so I’m getting multiple perspectives and I’m going to get a- in Canada, we’ve got five parties and we give members of each of the five parties and then maybe some special interest groups who are talking about these kinds of things. And that’s what I used to understand hydro fracturing because this was a big issue here. And I didn’t know it and I’m not a physicist or I’m not an environmental scientist and I wanted to really figure this stuff out.

Harold: [00:11:26] So I actually had this this little research place where I was using different tools. And I was getting as much information on hydro fracking as possible to try to make up my mind on the good, the bad, the ugly of that. So again, as you do this, you become a better curator. And as a better curator, you hopefully become a better sense maker.

Bonni: [00:11:48] The second component of PKM is SENSING. What is sense and why is it such a vital part of the process?

Harold: [00:11:56] It’s the toughest part. It’s the part that is almost impossible to teach. When people understand sense making, it’s kind of like they get an “aha” moment and they finally go “that’s what this is all about. OK. Now I get it.” But it’s not the kind of thing- and when I run the workshops, sometimes people get it at the beginning and some people never get it.

Harold: [00:12:20] Sense making is how do you take this stuff and then how do you actually do something with it so it changes your opinion, your perspective, your behavior? The sense making thing, you’ve got to do something. Doing could be writing a blog post, that’s where you’re forcing yourself to put the stuff together, to write it, and to stick it out there in public. Doing could be having a conversation, and it’s good to do. Or public speaking, because when you present the stuff publicly, you can be criticized publicly. So you do your homework, right. It depends what it is. And one of the things I’ve learned from working with people is that everybody has a different way of doing their sense making. There is a great example from Madelyn Blair, she’s written a number of books in this general area. Riding the Current was one of her books. Madelyn and I have talked over the years and she was talking about a person that she knows that at the end of the day they drive home. And what she does is she talks to herself about what she saw and what she thought during the day. She actually thinks and learns outloud. She says people looking at her sometimes talking to herself in the car think that she’s a little crazy. But that, for her, is the sense making things.

Harold: [00:13:38] So part of PKM is helping people find a sense making practice, or practices, that they will continue for a long period of time. And it takes a while. We’re going to talk about tools later, sometimes it’s trying new tools, trying them out, seeing if they work for you or they don’t, discarding them, trying something new. That’s part of the adventure too. Let me try this out.

Harold: [00:14:02] Helen Blunden is a friend of mine in Australia. Activate awareness is her company. She really pushes things out and she’s shown how you can use Snapchat for learning really really well.

Bonni: [00:14:17] That’s amazing.

Harold: [00:14:17] Yeah. Yeah. So there’s great inspiration from other people out there doing that.

Bonni: [00:14:21] I’m laughing so hard because Snapchat is one of those tools that I have to pick up once a year or whatever just to make myself feel ridiculous because I completely don’t get it. And I’m just so clumsy and just never master it. But I’m like “I can make myself look like a hot dog on Snapchat” and my kids, just every time they ever saw that icon, they just they wanted to make themselves look like puppies or hot dogs but that’s never been it.

Harold: [00:14:46] I don’t get snapchat either. I’m of a of a certain age, I guess that maybe I will or I don’t. But that’s where Jay Cross, we talked about him. My friend and colleague who passed away a couple of years ago and wrote the first book on informal learning. Jay was always one to try something new and try something different. And I think that that’s part of as get yourself out there as you can get. Back in 2004 or 2005, we ran an online workshop. It was all about sense making using social media for informal learning. We had this worldwide audience, across 20 different time zones. And we, smart guys that we were [sarcasm] – decided that because you have to know the tools and you have to learn how to do the stuff, is we hosted each weekly session on a different platform.

Bonni: [00:15:43] Oh wow.

Harold: [00:15:46] One time, we went through three platforms before we got things going. People were saying “oh this one is blowing up, let’s go to the next one.” What I learned doing that is that you- again, part of that whole notion of putting yourself out- and that’s what a lot of adults and that’s what our society has been all about getting the right marks, get the check mark, graduate move on. CEOs don’t want to be shown as being stupid or ignorant or anything like that, so they don’t venture out on that because they don’t want to look bad. Everything’s got to be massaged and perfect and things like that.

Harold: [00:16:19] And PKM them as this messy thing that… I call my blog the place where I put my half baked ideas. You can’t bake an idea unless you get some half baked ones first, I think. That’s part of the sense making too. And the more you do this, the better you get. Fifteen years ago, I was a really bad writer. And now I write professionally. It’s kind of like- I remember people telling me I should write a blog. And I thought, “What a stupid idea. Yeah, come on.” And finally I had a friend of mine sat me down and he says “you are coming to my house for a beer and I got my laptop here and I’m going to show you what this is” and went through it. .

Harold: [00:17:01] The same thing happened to me over Twitter when someone said “you better get on Twitter” And with both of them, when I started it was kind of like “OK I’m doing it” and if you look at my early blog posts, they are very short and there wasn’t much to it. And it isn’t until after that you get that- a year or two years whatever, 15 years and then you realize I have this treasure trove of like- like you have infertility. I have other ones, maybe not on the blog but in other areas for student resources that I have developed for our boys as they’re going through school. Unschooling because we were seriously looking at unschooling our children. And so putting all of those resources, all those curated things. And I’ve shared them over the years with other people.

Harold: [00:17:49] I had another one on social media use policies, which for a while a lot of people were saying that we need to have an official policy. So I started collecting, curating from all these different companies around the world on what they were doing. But yeah, you’re right it’s that you only see things in hindsight. Right. It’s the difference between- you look at a complex adaptive system and in a machine, something that has complicated the relationship between cause and effect is seeable. I can see it. If I do this, that happens.

Harold: [00:18:18] With a complex system, which all humans are, the relationship between cause and effect is only seen in retrospect. It’s only after you’ve dealt with your teenager that we realized why things happened the way that they happened. The other thing is is that they’re not going to happen the same way the next time. Because this is a complex adaptive system. But over time, you start seeing patterns and putting these things together.

Harold: [00:18:39] So it’s like a physical fitness program. It’s like reading regularly. It’s like you don’t get the lesson until quite a ways afterwards and then you go “oh yeah, this is really good.” That’s why it’s really, really tough. And it also it takes work.

Bonni: [00:19:00] The last part of the process is to SHARE. Can you talk about this process and why it’s important?

Harold: [00:19:07] The sharing part, I think it’s important for a number of different things. Whether it’s in your work, or whether it’s with your family or your community or anything like that is that- one thing that I advise people do is that whatever you do, make it sharable, which is not quite the same as sharing. Ok. Make it sharable. And then, quite often, another thing that I promote is add value to the knowledge.

Harold: [00:19:33] OK. So, before sharing- one of the things I try to do on Twitter is if there’s an interesting link to an article and someone just links the article, I go and I read through the article. If I think this is interesting, I’ll quote something additional about the article which I think is like a key thing. So now you have two pieces of information about that article as opposed to just one.

Harold: [00:19:53] Or I’ll add value to it in terms of hey I think this is good for… X, Y and said type things. The other thing is that- like when we talked about bookmarks- is that okay that’s interesting, but if I come to you and I say “look I have this specific thing I’m interested in.” Okay. Well what I can do is I can go into my social bookmarks, let’s say you have 500 in there. You can search through for the specific thing. And you can go “yeah that one, that one, that one, and that one.” And you can add another tag. OK. So this is this is from Mary Lou. Mary Lou wants the tag and you say “these are the five articles I think that would be the best for you.” It hasn’t taken you much extra time, had you not done those 500, you wouldn’t have that curated list on top of it.

Harold: [00:20:38] But you’ve added value because of the timing, right. You are sharing this when this person is open to accept them. So I think a part of the sharing too is doing it, you share when, where, why things are all together. In some cases, like when I share lessons learned, sometimes they come from work I’ve done several years ago because I didn’t want to share anything that could be perhaps quite confidential information. But three, four years after the fact, it’s not longer really confidential. I talk about it generally. And now it’s appropriate to share it.

Bonni: [00:21:10] Yeah I think that’s really a helpful way- I talked a little bit about a future orientation when it comes to sense making. Then there’s this future orientation to sharing. I had not- as much of your stuff as I had read, it hadn’t stuck in my noggin about making it shareable doesn’t necessarily mean I have to share it right now. But just thinking with that orientation that it COULD be shareable. That’s nice.

Bonni: [00:21:32] I was thinking the other day in the slack channel for Teaching in Higher Ed, someone said “I’m looking for contacts around accessibility because we’re really starting to figure out we have to get doing that better at our institution. Who has contacts?” And I thought “well, I don’t really have contacts, but here’s a link to all my bookmarks on on my bookmarking tool around accessibility.” And then it was funny because throughout the day I realized oh actually I do have contacts. And I found a list serve that I’m a member of and I was like oh I had bookmarked these as possible guests because I don’t know that I’ve done a good enough job on the podcast around accessibility. And so I was able to go back into slack and say not only could he surf through my bookmarks, which he said was really helpful. But I realized actually these potential guests that I had saved in another place- I have it just a list just for potential guests, this might be helpful to you as well.

Bonni: [00:22:20] So it’s really- when we have these systems- this was my disparity of systems, I have got potential guests and bookmarks. They hadn’t quite connected in this instance, but there’s also the body of knowledge that is building up just in terms of my own brain and how it works through these connections.

Harold: [00:22:37] I like your idea of talking to your future self. I think that’s a very good way of thinking about this. It’s likelike planting a garden, you’re not going to harvest it when you plant it.

Bonni: [00:22:50] And sometimes the raw in the moment things are beautiful to read from people. I mean they are helping to change communities, and change minds, and change hearts. And sometimes the messiness of immediate reactions to things, that’s not my forte and that’s not where I want to start. So I like to sort of have things circle around a bit before I share.

Harold: [00:23:14] Well here’s one sort of final thing going on the sharing side of things, we all have some expertise, we all have some knowledge of whatever. I do leadership development and one of the things I talk about is that leadership in the network era is helping make your network smarter, stronger, more resilient, able to make better decisions. And I take it back to I don’t want to live in a network or community that’s dumb because they’re going to make decisions that I don’t think are right. Right.

Harold: [00:23:44] It may be about we’re we’re going to put a four lane highway through the middle of our small town. Right, because we want people to go much faster or something like that. Well I want people to be able to make decisions about the impacts of that. So me sharing and putting things together and sharing models and ways of looking at things, is a way in which I hope that I can help make my network make better decisions. So if you think about that from a Democratic perspective, isn’t that what we all should be doing so that we collectively are making better decisions for our society?

Bonni: [00:24:21] Let’s talk about tools. And just for the audience listening, I wanted to mention that I will be linking to all the tools that Harold shares and we will not be doing a how to however. But if I have tutorials, I will link to them to ones that I have if they’ve been particularly helpful to me. So we’re just going to rattle off some tools and then get to the recommendation segment. So what tools do you find particularly helpful in seeking?

Harold: [00:24:44] Again, I’m very tool agnostic. I actually don’t use that many tools. I do try a lot of different ones out there. So, my general tools for the most part haven’t changed a lot. So I use an aggregator, right? I use a feed reader because that’s a good way to read a whole bunch of different things at a time. I’m currently using Inoreader. I’ve gone through a whole list of them, furl, blog lines, Magnolia, Google Reader, Feedly. Yes, I’ve gone through them all. Magnolia had two servers and they both blew up on the same day. I lost everything on that. But just some way in which you can automate bringing stuff in. And there’s a whole bunch of different tools. If this, then that and different ones. I think you want to have some way of bringing in your collected feeds of news and information and opinion and if you can get them all into one place.

Harold: [00:25:41] So I think having some type of thing to bring it in and some type of aggregation device. There’s a whole bunch of different ones now that I don’t even know them all anymore. In terms of tools though, do link to Jane Hart’s Top Tool’s site. And anybody who’s listening on this please participate in the poll which finishes in September. She’s always looking for what are your top tools for learning as explained on there. You’ll put it up on the link.

Harold: [00:26:07] So seeking, that’s probably the big one, is bringing that in. Twitter and LinkedIn are two networks I am active on. I left Facebook years ago because I don’t like Mark Zuckerberg’s business model. But those are places where I’m getting information because I’m connected to a lot of people. So I connect to people, I seek out different people and then I have different ways of sort of filtering that through. And a lot of it because I’ve been online long enough now is I’m getting them through other people, people who are saying “hey Harold I think you’d like that.”.

Harold: [00:26:39] But those are sort of the main seeking tools I am using and the ones I’ve used for a while. I think Twitter since 2007 and aggregators since 2000. So quite a while now.

Bonni: [00:26:53] Tools for a sense.

Harold: [00:26:56] Sense making is the toughest one. And I’ve used different ones but I’m a blogger. My blog is where it all happens. It is the core of my processing. This is where I work a lot. This is where I learn out loud. That is the public sense making, OK. I also have private sense makeing. So I’m an active member- you mentioned Slack, I’m active in several Slack communities that are private and we’re not allowed to share without permission from everybody else. And we talk about some pretty confidential things. It’s also a place where we can talk about things like “Hey I’m doing this contract with this company. How much should I charge them?” That’s not something I want to put on my blog.

Harold: [00:27:38] So internally are these communities. I’m using Zoom a lot now. Zoom also has long term chat function and I have a pro account so we have a number of threaded discussion groups within Zoom that I have with my partners and colleagues around the world. So that’s where I’m sort of doing that. That’s where I am doing the raw stuff that doesn’t even make it to the blog. Those kinds of ideas and things that circle around in there.

Harold: [00:28:07] I would not really call Twitter a sense making tool. LinkedIn isn’t. So in terms of online sense making, it would it would be the blog. The blog becomes is a half baked ideas. But then I’m doing now about every year, I’m taking all of my blog posts and I’m putting them into it into an e-book. So I now have five of those out and there I am trying to add another layer of value by putting this together. Not just sort of sticking blog posts after each, but getting the themes together, researching it more, really making it a coherent narrative as it goes through. So that would sort of the higher level of that.

Harold: [00:28:47] My public speaking and my client work is the other part in terms of sense making. I’m taking notes, I’m going to conferences, I’m putting this stuff together and then I’m publishing where it isappropriate. All those kinds of things. But really, for me, the core thing is the blog.

Bonni: [00:29:03] And how about for the social bookmarks you had mentioned earlier?

Harold: [00:29:06] Yeah the social bookmarks that they’re kind of halfway between seeking and sense making. So social bookmarks, I currently use Diigo, I’ve used the other ones. There’s other tools like Scoop It that people can use. But really what it is is that when I come across something, I do a quick pretty quick triage. I come across something interesting, I may tweet it and I add a heart to the tweet because I review my favorites every two weeks writing up my Friday Finds. So that’s one. I may think “no this is a long term keeper” and that’s where I will use a social bookmark. Why? Because it’s now findable and unsearchable. And I think there’s lots of different videos and stuff on how to use social bookmarks.

Harold: [00:29:48] The first step in PKM with people who really don’t know about this stuff is I say the first thing you do is free your bookmarks. Use a social bookmark system, even if it’s private. Doesn’t really matter. So that’s where sharable but you don’t have to share. So you can make all of them private, but now you can access them from multiple computers. If these are things for you professionally, do you want to keep them on an institutional computer that maybe you don’t have 6 months, 12 months down the road? So the bookmarking is a great repository. What I always suggest is at least clip the most important part of what you think was in that article. So I read an article, I shave it into my bookmark, I put a clip in there. I may even add a comment. This would be good for this, this, and this. And then I add the metadata with the tags. So, social media, learning, knowledge, whatever.

Harold: [00:30:37] And don’t worry about what those tags are because over time you’ll figure them out. Use as many as possible. A good friend of mine who’s in one of my private charities practice is Thomas Vander Wal. If you know Thomas, Thomas was the fellow who coined the term folksonomy. So folksonomy as opposed to a taxonomy is the aggregate people tagging things and then we see “Oh everybody is using this term. This is now going to be the term that we use.” So a folksonomy is a bottom up taxonomy developed by people interacting with knowledge.

Bonni: [00:31:11] I really appreciate you saying that, of course because it agrees with my current practice so we always love those things, but also because it can be fixed. I mean, every tool I’ve ever used, I could merge two tags together and problem solved. So we just get the tag in there and worry about it later if it’s not perfectly matchy. If you put an s on one and you didn’t put the s on the other, you can correct that later on.

Harold: [00:31:33] Yeah. I mean it’s the whole notion of knowledge flow as opposed to creating these fully baked products. And that’s the big challenge, I think, for a lot of people because they think they have to have the perfect PowerPoint ready for the boss to sign off on. As opposed to, I got like these 50 different things that, yeah they’re kind of crappy right now, but give me half a day and I can put them altogether.

Bonni: [00:31:57] What about tools for sharing?

Harold: [00:31:59] Tools for sharing, I usually look at where people are. And actually the best tool for sharing would be Facebook. But just for personal and ethical reasons, I don’t use Facebook. It just came out that 84 percent of Canadians are on Facebook. So I’m one of the 16 percent that are not. But if the tools you use for cents making are shareable, then the sharing part is kind of taken care of.

Harold: [00:32:24] So if I write my personal narrative on my blog, it’s automatically shareable. People can subscribe to the RSS feed. People can subscribe by e-mail. They can find it through Google, all that kind of stuff. So I’ve made it shareable. So I think in a lot of cases, as we talked about earlier, it’s not so much about the sharing as it is about being ready to share when the moment arrives.

Harold: [00:32:45] I’ve done this many times. When Jane Hart and I work together, we’ll be sitting with a client and they’ll be talking about some subject or something like that and eventually she will sort of go “Ah! I’m sure Harold has written a blog post on that subject.” And I go, “Yeah I think so.” So that the whole notion of having stuff out there so that when the moment arrives you’ve got something.

Bonni: [00:33:10] This is the point in the show where we each get to share some recommendations. And I just wanted to mention that the social bookmarking tool that I like a lot is actually not very social. In fact, the founder designed it such that you don’t set up groups on it, and people can come see, if anyone that visited my page anything I’ve chosen to have be public can be. But it’s not like a social network in and of itself. And so it’s called Pinboard. It’s Pinboard.in.

Bonni: [00:33:38] And the reason I like it is just that it’s such a simpler interface just to look at it. You’ve got a cloud of tags. And the cloud, of course, if I use a tag more, that word appears larger in the cloud. And so you could visually go there and see you know which of her bookmarks does she save more things about than others. But, it- because Diigo, I like a lot. But, right now, when I’m having my doctoral students use it, they like it because they like to highlight things in the annotation and it stays. But it’s so cluttered visually and particularly because that’s how they fund their business model, so there is a lot of advertising up there and they get confused between when am I being advertised to and when is that a bookmark that I actually saved.

Bonni: [00:34:21] I do like Diigo a lot. I recommended it a lot. In fact, that’s what I recommend because I try to have them not have to pay for too many things when they’re just testing them out. But Pinboard is great because of its simplicity.

Bonni: [00:34:30] And then my last recommendation I’ll pass it over to Harold is he mentioned Jane Hart’s Top tools list. This would be a great way for you to make some sense of some of the tools that you use and also to share them. She does it every year. I can’t remember how many years she’s been doing it but…

Harold: [00:34:47] 11.

Bonni: [00:34:50] You could write a quick blog post, but she even just has a form you can fill out. She makes it very, very easy to compile your list. And it’s so fun every year to see what the tallied results are.

Harold: [00:35:03] Yeah. And Jane actually goes through every individual contribution.

Bonni: [00:35:08] It’s phenomenal.

Harold: [00:35:08] It’s personal. So it is hand curated, as they as they say. It’s a really valuable resource. And that’s why it’s one of the exercises I do at the PKM workshop is I get people to go to Jane’s site, take a look at the top tools and select one that they never used and then I want you to test it out. And I want to tell people what you think about it.

Bonni: [00:35:30] Wonderful. Harold, what do you have to recommend for us today?

Harold: [00:35:33] OK first of all you talked to a Diigo. And one thing that I recommend is that when you- there is nothing wrong testing out free tools. But if the tool is useful, pay for it. I’ve gone through so many of these systems that have gone bankrupt. These people need to make money, so pay for them. And so I pay for Diigo and so I don’t get the advertisements and stuff like that. And I pay for Innoreader, which is my aggregator. So that would be the number one thing, is get something that requires you to pay for it and then get the better quality.

Harold: [00:36:08] I have a tool that I recommend to everybody. I was even able to get my wife using it. And it’s not a learning tool. It’s not a seek, sense, sharing tool. It’s a make my life way easier tool. And it’s a password manager. So I use 1Password. It’s a Canadian company, has been around for a number of years. Pretty stable. And what it does is it lets me generate passwords and if I have them in these vaults, secure vaults on all of my computers. And so I know how a unique 20 digit or so password for every single site that I use. I log out and log in, it just finds it. Click, click, click and I log into the system. And I’m good to go.

Harold: [00:36:55] So I only remember one password, which just the master password to get into that. That has made my life so much easier. When Yahoo for the 15th time in a row says “oh our database has been compromised.” I just go in, generate new passwords. It’s different from any other password. So I have much more resilience in that system.

Harold: [00:37:16] If you look at most of these hacks and dumps that have happened is that quite like these celebrities who’s nude photos have been found that they were sharing on whatever system that was. Is that if you actually take a look at what password they were using, you can go like “Aha that was just dumb.” Right. And this way, let a machine make your password because it’s a machine that’s going to try to break it. And I don’t think any human can build a password that’s that good. Plus I don’t have to think about it. Like when you go on a website and it says it has to be eight characters and this and this and this, is an easy click, click, click, click, you set your parameters and go generate a new one. I mean why does anybody want to be generating their own passwords? It’s just crazy.

Harold: [00:37:58] But it took like six months to my friend to beat on my head and say “Harold you have got to do this.”

Bonni: [00:38:03] Oh, yeah.

Harold: [00:38:03] So I think for me that’s that’s the tool that I think is number one.

Bonni: [00:38:08] Well, Harold,it Has been such a pleasure getting to talk to you in person. And I can see your face to you here on Zoom, which we’re using today for the session. And I’m just so honored to get to talk to you and get to know you a little bit more and thank you so much for all of your work.

Harold: [00:38:21] It’s been my pleasure. Thanks very much.

Bonni: [00:38:22] Hoping to get some clients coming your way and I would love to see undergraduate programs adopt this model and get this happening with, as you said, not just with master’s level as well with our students just as they come in. Imagine the power of that.

Harold: [00:38:36] Yeah. I’ve got a lot on PK mastery on the blog. Anybody who wants to take the workshops, I run them. Next on starting 16 of July I think. And it’s kind of neat because it’s people from all over the world. So it’s nice that you get diverse opinions there too.

Bonni: [00:38:51] It’s been wonderful to talk to you. What an honor it has been to be able to talk to Harold Jarche today I’m so grateful for his contribution, of course, not just to this episode, but truly to my life, to my life long learning. Thank you so much for joining us today as a guest Harold. And thank you for your blog, for your prolific presence in this space of trying to navigate complex systems and the complex world.

Bonni: [00:39:20] Thanks to all of you for listening. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly e-mail that will keep you up to date on the links I’ve got so many links. This particular episode with Harold Jarche went a little crazy taking notes and if you want to not have to remember to go to the episode notes but get them in your inbox you can just go to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll get a single e-mail and that’ll help you stay up to date. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

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