PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

20 years of PKM

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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.

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frames for collective sensemaking

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“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.

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talking to people

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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

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the dying social bookmark

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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.

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crucial knowledge may be impossible to express

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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.

  1. impossible to express,
  2. can be expressed but has not been yet,
  3. expressed in speech but not documented,
  4. recorded knowledge, or
  5. information.

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sensemaking routines

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“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.

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manual sensemaking

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Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices.

Ideas often emerge in the complex domain, which is where people working in a network economy need to be active, probing, and playing. We also need to do shallow dives into the chaotic domain. Neither of these activities will be helped through automation. If anything, automation will make us lazy, or unaware.

The process of seeking out people and information sources, making sense of them by taking some action, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge, are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sensemaking in the complex domain. Sensemaking is acting on one’s knowledge.

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I write therefore I think

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I think this will become a major problem with embedded GPT & LLM appearing in almost every work productivity tool — “Skipping the writing process short-circuits reflection (‘Writing as Thinking’)” —Stephen P Anderson

While they may help to write summaries and presentations, tools like ChatGPT will likely short-circuit the creative writing process.

“For creative endeavors, I never want to have something else come up with my writing. The holistic labor of creative writing is struggling to succinctly translate your own experiences and ideas from your mental space to the physical realm. My ideas and the ways I express them in text are the most precious things I have, the ones that differentiate me from everyone else. Moreover, in the process of generating the written form of your ideas, you come up with different ways of thinking about them.” —Vicky Boykis 2023

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warning — effort required

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Seth Godin discusses Cliffs Notes and how these could be a path to better understanding.

Used as intended, Cliffs Notes and Quicklit were a gold mine of insight. They opened the door for real understanding, and often got to the heart of the literature better than an overworked high school teacher might be able to. —The Cliffs Notes Paradox

But he also notes that even with the widespread availability of these notes, insight in overall society has not improved. When I was in college, I majored in the Arts while most of the students were in engineering or science at Royal Roads Military College. Our cohort was about 25 students and on entering second year, I was given a barrack box filled with Cliffs Notes (and Coles Notes) for our entire curriculum. As the ‘keeper of the notes’ I was responsible for their safe-guarding and adding to the collection. It was a great responsibility.

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