PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

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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filter failure is not acceptable

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Fake news. PR hype. Content marketing. Advertorials. Click bait. Propaganda. Doublespeak. Newspeak. Yellow journalism. Shock jocks. Post-truth. Spam. Phishing.

Digital information comes from all directions, and much of it from dubious sources or with the intent to misinform. Today, it is just too easy to create, replicate, and share digital information. As a result, we are enveloped in it. This is why ad blockers on browsers have become so popular. It’s why everyone needs spam filters for their email. Filter failure is not acceptable in the digital workplace. But neither is living in an information bubble.

The challenge for any organization dependent on knowledge is to ensure that implicit knowledge from those closest to customers and the external world informs the explicit knowledge that is shared throughout the company. Knowledge flow has to continuously become knowledge stock. Individuals practising personal knowledge mastery have to be an intrinsic part of organizational knowledge management. Knowledge comes from and through an organization’s people. It is not some external material distributed through the chain of command.

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a liquid stream of facts

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“Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.” —Kevin Kelly

This is perhaps the most succinct rationale for disciplines like personal knowledge mastery (PKM). We can no longer rely upon traditional gatekeepers of information and knowledge. Each of us must engage with others and develop trusted knowledge networks. None of us are smart enough to handle all the connections in our digital lives on our own. We need to use both our human networks and our machines in concert. Let me give just two examples.

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the discerning mind

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“I find that discussing an idea out loud is often the way to kill it stone dead.” —J.K. Rowling (attrib.)

In the PKM framework of Seek > Sense > Share, the latter may seem easy but it does not always equate to helping others make sense. Some people are good at recognizing all the contextual signals in the workplace, making implicit connections, and then identifying something that might be useful to share. It usually takes time and practice to be a discerning sharer of knowledge. Sometimes an idea is not ready to share. Sometimes it helps to share a ‘half-baked idea’. It depends. PKM requires a discerning mind.

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the world needs knowledge catalysts

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“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.” —Carl Sagan

When people are presented with a problem the first urge is to resolve it. If the computer does not work, they want it fixed. Then they can move on to what they were trying to do in the first place. But quite often the source of the problem did not go away. People also need to understand how the problem was created. This requires time and effort to learn. But when the problem is gone, there is little incentive to learn about the implications and complexities that created the problem.

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integrating personal knowledge mastery

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I developed the personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework for myself, beginning in 2004, as a way to make sense of all the digital information flows around me and to connect with others to improve my practice. In 2012 I was contacted by Domino’s Pizza to help incorporate the PKM framework into their leadership training (PDF). Last year Jane Hart and I worked with The Carlsberg Group to add PKM into their Learning Leaders Program.

PKM is applicable to any organization though it takes some effort to develop it for a specific context. An excellent example of this is posted as four articles by the Listening & Spoken Language organization, Hearing First, whom I first met in 2013. Below are some highlights from these posts showing an integrated approach to using PKM for continuous learning.

To learn more, my PKM open workshops are conducted four times per year. If your organization would like to improve workplace learning and knowledge-sharing, then contact me about a private engagement for co-creation as a service.

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knowledge-sharing, post-technology

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Your organization just implemented an enterprise collaboration platform. Now what?

Most large organizations today have some kind of knowledge-sharing platform. The recent announcement of Jive’s purchase shows that this field is consolidating with a few large players dominating. The arrival of Workplace by Facebook may even limit tool choice more. For example, Jive sells for $5 – $16 per seat, while Facebook’s Workplace is $1 – $3 per seat, with no lock-in. Facebook Workplace is also free for non-profits and educational staff. Given the diminishing choices, enterprise knowledge-sharing today is even less about the technology.

Over many years of working with enterprise knowledge-sharing and collaboration tools I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now? Quite often the answer is: the same as we did before. Even with fewer tools to choose from, the biggest challenge is changing behaviours. This takes time. Therefore training is not the solution. A course will not result in behaviour change. Practice and feedback are needed, as well an environment that reduces barriers to seeking out knowledge, having time to make sense of it, and sharing it with discernment.

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