PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

professional learner’s toolkit

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Jane Hart describes a Modern Professional Learner’s Toolkit as having several components: resources, networks, devices, etc. I have used Jane’s framework to look at my own practice.

Browser & Search Engine: I use three browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and two search engines (StartPage & DuckDuckGo). Each browser has different security and privacy settings, depending on what type of resource I need to access. For example, some sites will not give you access if you use an Ad Blocker. On Chrome I have no extensions, and only use it to access LinkedIn and Google services, which I know track me. On Firefox I have several privacy tools.

Trusted Web Resources: CBC News provides me with a Canadian perspective while The Guardian and BBC give me different ones. I also read Spiegel in English. I ensure online security by using a password manager: 1Password.

Curation Tools: My aggregator of choice is Feedly and I keep social bookmarks in Diigo. Long reads go to Pocket.

Course Platforms: I have not taken a formal course for a very long time.

Social Networks: My preferred conversational and sharing network is Twitter. I am using LinkedIn more frequently but have stopped posting to its Pulse platform and keep all my posts on my blog. I left Facebook many years ago.

Personal Information System: My blog is my main personal information system, hence this post. Other sense-making and reflection is done offline, with handwritten notes or text files kept in an active folder.

Blogging Tool: This blog is built on WordPress open source software, designed and hosted by Tantramar Interactive.

Preferred Office Suite: I use the Apple iWork suite: Keynote especially.

Communication & Collaboration: Zoom for meetings and video conferencing is my preferred platform and I have a Pro account which is well worth the $15/month price. I am also active in communities of practice hosted on Slack and SocialCast.

Smart Device: I have one iPhone, and not even the latest. The most used app is the camera.

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how we learn – review

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How We Learn by Benedict Carey is focused mostly on memory and learning for recall but it is a good read and there is likely something new about learning here for anyone. Carey is a journalist who went through much of the research on memory in order to make sense himself. By synthesizing and comparing the research on memory and learning, he has done a great service to the non-academic.

One of the first principles discussed is how memory works: “Any memory has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.”

‘Yet there are large upsides to forgetting, too. One is that it is nature’s most sophisticated spam filter. It’s what allows the brain to focus, enabling sought-after facts to pop to mind … “The relationship between learning and forgetting is not so simple and in certain important respects is quite the opposite of what people assume,” Robert Bjork, a psychologist as the University of California, Los Angeles, told me. “We assume it’s all bad, a failure of the system. But more often, forgetting is a friend to learning” … Using memory changes memory — and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.’

Carey, paraphrasing Louis Pasteur, says that, “Chance feeds the tuned mind”. When we are tuned to a problem or topic, our mind sees more related cues. “When we are working on a paper about the Emancipation Proclamation, we’re not only tuned into racial dynamics on the subway car, we’re also more aware of our reactions to what we’re noticing.”

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systems thinking

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Leyla Acaroglu has an excellent post on Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking.

“In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy … *There are way more than six, but I picked the most important ones that you definitely need to know, and as we progress through this systems thinking toolkit series, I will expand on some of the other key terms that make up a systems mindset.” —Leyla Acaroglu, 2017-09-07

These are practical tools to improve anyone’s practice of personal knowledge mastery and I look forward to the rest of the posts in the series [scroll to end]. I have taken the six tools and added how they can be used in PKM.

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the medium is the message

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Hossein Derakhsahn states that with social media platforms like Facebook, “The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger”. He goes on to describe how the web started as a text-based medium but has flipped into a new form of broadcast television.

“Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It’s telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates’ appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment’s motto of ‘Dare to know’ has become ‘Dare not to care to know.’” —WIRED 2017-10-19

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creating resilient knowledge networks

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The personal knowledge mastery framework is a combination of seeking knowledge, making sense of it, and sharing it with others. It can become a long-term discipline of individually constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. Two key variables are how we make sense of knowledge and how we share it, in order to:  seek > sense > share.

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intellectual craftsmanship

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I was recently referred to a most interesting article, Intellectual Craftsmanship, via Nicole Martin who had recently completed my PKM Workshop. It is a part of C. Wright Mills’ larger work, The Sociological Imagination (1959).

“Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.” —Google Books

The above description aligns with the personal knowledge mastery framework: PKM is a unified framework of individually-constructed enabling processes to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society.

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our collective learnscape

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In 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that journalism is no longer the sole domain of professionals [my highlights].

[96] A second preliminary question is what the new defence should be called.  In arguments before us, the defence was referred to as the responsible journalism test.  This has the value of capturing the essence of the defence in succinct style.  However, the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists.  These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.  I agree with Lord Hoffmann that the new defence is “available to anyone who publishes material of public interest in any medium”: Jameel, at para. 54.

Source: Grant v. Torstar Corp., [2009] 3 SCR 640, 2009 SCC 61 (CanLII), par. 96, <http://canlii.ca/t/27430#par96>, retrieved on 2017-09-19.

It is not just our perception of what is news and what makes a journalist that has changed but our collective understanding of what is literacy and what should be the focus of education. Our relationship with knowledge is changing as we move into a post-print and post-channel era. It is becoming critical for democratic societies to have educated and engaged citizens sharing their knowledge, given this new age of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity (UCaPP) to our digital surround. This new literacy makes us all journalists. The network now decides who has the authoritative voice once reserved for professional journalists.

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preparing for perpetual beta

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The latest technology gadget or silicon valley ‘disruptive’ business model is merely incremental change. But I am convinced that we are living in the middle of an epochal change. I use David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model (2009)  to explain that we are shifting from a tri-form society, where markets dominate, to a quadriform society, where networks dominate. This new societal form will be one of working and learning in perpetual beta.

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Sensemaking and the power of the humanities

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What is Sensemaking?

Christian Madsbjerg, in Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, describes sensemaking as an interaction with fellow humans in the real world.

“Sensemaking is practical wisdom grounded in the humanities. We can think of sense making as the exact opposite of algorithmic thinking: it is entirely situated in the concrete, while algorithmic thinking exists in a no-man’s land of information stripped of its specificity. Algorithmic thinking can go wide — processing trillions of terabytes of data per second — but only sense making can go deep.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. 6

Why Sensemaking?

“Too many of the top cadre of leadership I have met are isolated in their worldview. They have lost touch with the humanity of their customers and their constituents and, as a result, they mistake numerical representations and models for real life. Their days are sliced and diced into tiny segments, so they feel they don’t have time to wander around in the mess of real-world data. Instead, they jump into a problem-solving process and a conclusion without understanding the actual question.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. xiv

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future of work influencers

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I don’t put much stock in lists and ‘best of …’ rankings as they rarely tell you the methodology behind the system. When Antonio Santo (@akwyz) shared a list of the top 50 influencers on ‘the future of work’, I asked about the methodology. Vishal Mishra, CEO of Right Relevance, kindly obliged.

“The Right Relevance score of an influencer for a TOPIC represents the authority within the social community for that topic, say for e.g. ‘machine learning’, of that influencer. It is a normalized score ranging from 10 to 100. This numeric influence is then inductively applied to the topical content curated by that individual for measuring relevance.

The process is fully algorithmic and leverages ML, semantic analysis and NLP on unstructured data at scale. It is primarily graph based and involves performing a 2-level proprietary people rank”
—Influencers Topic Scores & Rankings

I use Twitter as a medium to teach people how to find experts and how to build a knowledge network. This is a core part of my PKM Workshop. Understanding the algorithms behind search results and rankings is an important network era literacy, and I am glad that Right Relevance (RR) shares some of this.

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