This blog turned 20 last month — dead blog walking. One of the big challenges that the growth of AI [GPT, LLM, etc.] presents us is connecting with people — not machines — for our sensemaking. A personal blog is a human way to connect. There is no algorithm to filter what others read. They can subscribe, on their terms, and with their chosen technology thanks to real simple syndication (RSS). The great thing about blogging is that there are few rules. You can write as you like, when you like, and as often as you like.
PKMastery
Personal knowledge mastery
skill erosion
If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Automate what was once a skill-developed process and those skills will decline.
“Cognitive automation powered by advanced intelligent technologies is increasingly enabling organizations to automate more of their knowledge work tasks. Although this often offers higher efficiency and lower costs, cognitive automation exacerbates the erosion of human skill and expertise in automated tasks. Accepting the erosion of obsolete skills is necessary to reap the benefits of technology—however, the erosion of essential human expertise is problematic if workers remain accountable for tasks for which they lack sufficient understanding, rendering them incapable of responding if the automation fails.” —The Vicious Circles of Skill Erosion (2023)
One key factor in understanding how we learn and develop skills is that experience cannot be automated. Increasing automation requires that the Learning and Development (L&D) field must get out of the comfort zone of course development and into the most complex aspects of human learning and performance. To understand learning at work, L&D must understand the work systems. Now they also have to understand skill erosion.
dead blog walking at 20
Twenty years ago I started writing this blog. Over 3,600 posts later, it’s still my main tool for making sense of my work and the world.
Only a few months after I started blogging, I heard Tod Maffin, a Canadian digital journalist, on CBC radio state that blogging was dead — already! But I saw my blog as a tool for work, and not necessarily a way to make money, so I marched on — dead blog walking.
What has my blog been good for?
20 years of PKM
This year marks the tenth anniversary of my personal knowledge mastery workshops. Ten years before that I discovered PKM and started working on my own frameworks which grew into client projects, first with Domino’s Pizza for their franchise leadership development program. Subsequent clients included ING Bank, Carlsberg, Citibank, the MasterCard Foundation, United Cities & Local Governments, and many more. What is available today has twenty years of experimentation and application behind it.
The inspiration for the ‘in 40 days‘ format came from my friends at En Nu Online in the Netherlands. Since then, hundreds of people have participated in the program, coming from all continents (except Antarctica of course). The content has changed with the times and will continue to be in a state of ‘perpetual beta’, as I try to meet the changing needs of the modern creative knowledge worker. Several new topics were added in the past year.
auto-marketing
I recently downloaded Sanctum.ai and asked — Write a marketing pitch for Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge mastery online workshop. Here is the unedited response.
frames for collective sensemaking
“The communicative solution to pervasive misinformation is not better facts, but better frames”, concludes Kate Starbird (University of Washington) in Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking. Starbird describes the case of a frame called ‘Sharpiegate’ during the 2020 US Presidential election.
We highlight how, prior to the election, elites in politics and media — including President Trump himself — set an expectation (or a frame) of a “rigged election.” As the election progressed, many of President Trump’s supporters went to the polls (or their mailboxes) and misinterpreted their own experiences through that lens. Later, they went online, sharing those experiences and seeing other “evidence” from around the country, which they interpreted through the same “rigged election” or “voter fraud” frame.
The entire post is worth reading. I want to highlight three insights Starbird found concerning rumors, conspiracy theorizing, and disinformation.
talking to people
In a post called, I am fed up with hiding myself, Mita Williams concludes that academic writing removes authors from their work by turning them into ‘sources’ and ‘references’ and that large language models are doing the same, but making authors even further removed from their work.
In writing this post, I’ve come to realize that the concerns here dovetail with a long-standing bugbear of mine: that libraries overemphasize authority from sources, and does not do enough to support bibliography, a format in which authority derives from people and their choices.
In a separate post, Williams states that, “The alternative to AI is talking to other people.” —Mita Williams 2023-09-19
the dying social bookmark
I have been publicly promoting social bookmarks since 2005, when I was using a defunct tool called FURL. Since then I have used Magnolia, Delicious, Diigo, and Pinboard. The first two are gone and the last two seem to be waning. For example, I cannot access my account settings when logged-in to Pinboard. Others are having no luck getting support from Diigo.
What are social bookmarks? They are like bookmarks on your browser except they are available online from any device, they are searchable, and you can add metadata like hashtags and categories. They can be public or private. The most important aspect is that they are shareable. Here are my Diigo bookmarks and Pinboard pins, as examples.
crucial knowledge may be impossible to express
In many fields, there is some critical knowledge that is very difficult to codify. “It’s the kind of knowledge that is never written down and yet can be crucial, even in the highest of hi-tech enterprises. And you won’t find it in ChatGPT, either”, says John Naughton in The Guardian.
KM expert, Nick Milton discussed the codification of knowledge and created this breakdown.
- impossible to express,
- can be expressed but has not been yet,
- expressed in speech but not documented,
- recorded knowledge, or
- information.
sensemaking routines
“Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.”
—Andrea Jones-Rooy, Professor of data science, NYU
In 2014 I asked — what is your PKM routine? I highlighted the routines of Jane Hart and Sacha Chua, and then described my own. Over time I added dozens of other examples that were shared online. My own PKM routine has changed over these years. My general principles are to keep my routine simple, use as few tools as possible, and limit any automating processes. My last post — manual sensemaking — explains the latter.