This graphic is part of the Seek > Sense > Share PKM model and is based on Five forms of filtering by Tim Kastelle. Here’s a review of the five forms.
- Naive filtering is what too often happens in our knowledge searching. It’s like prairie-dogging, or standing up in your cubicle and asking those close to you for advice. It’s rather hit and miss and dependent on who works nearby and happens to be listening.
- Expert filtering worked when knowledge was more stable but in an interconnected, interdependent, digital world we have to ask, who are the experts? Still, good experts are valuable and I use platforms like Twitter to connect to them, like Michael Geist on Canadian copyright law or Valdis Krebs on networks.
- Networked expertise can be sought through group-sourced information resources, like the curated Working Smarter Daily or in self-created expertise lists like Google+ to create circles of expertise. You can also link to existing communities of expertise/interest such as Dave Gurteen on knowledge management.
- Algorithmic filters can be simple, like typing in a basic search string, or more refined using techniques like Google’s advanced operators. However, they are all based on someone else’s ideas of what is important, programmed in from the start. These filters are beginning to look very dangerous unless you know the underlying logic.
- A good perspective on Heuristic filters is Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection Skills:
“Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.”
this certainly is an important subject – but so sadly the bigger and even more important subject is totally ignored here; the subject of the fact that we all automatically filter every single bit of new information that is taken in by our own minds. ofcourse lots of the filtering is alltogether necessary to preserve whatever sanity we hapen to have. but the problem is that too much of our filtering is imposed by people who do not deserve the power they have to do the filtering. and to make the situation much worse is that most of us don’t notice nor care that this is occurring most of the time if ever.