PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

The college in perpetual Beta

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I will be speaking at Algonquin College in Ottawa tomorrow and one of the main themes I will be discussing is how networks are changing our communications, work and education systems. It’s called The College in perpetual Beta:

One of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. In this “network era”, work is learning and learning is the work, but what does that mean for traditional education and our continuing professional development? How can we prepare students, staff and faculty for a world where we are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local?

Algonquin College is the largest community college in Ontario with over 18,000 full-time and 35,000 part-time students.

Manual, not automatic, for sense-making

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I started Friday’s Finds three years ago, in an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit. I had been using Twitter actively for over a year at this time and realized that I was not making much sense of it. Now I make a weekly summary of my favourites: reviewed, filtered, and reassessed. The actual tools I use for personal knowledge mastery are quite limited. Google Reader is my aggregator — I link my Delicious & Diigo social bookmark accounts together but mostly use Diigo, I write my half-baked ideas regularly on my blog, and I engage in many conversations on Twitter which I curate here. That’s about it.

I prefer simpler tools that force me to think and connect by myself. If it was automatic I wouldn’t think about it much, but that’s what I want to do; think more, not less. As I mentioned in Personal Information management for Sense-making, George Siemens’s complaint that, “Too many aspects of my sense-making system are manual”, is what I see as a strength of PKM. By keeping sense-making activities ‘manual’, we are forced to do something.

For me, the act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark, all force me to think a bit more than clicking once and having it served up from an automated system. The routine of reviewing my Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds is another manual routine that I find helps to reinforce my learning and (hopefully) add to my knowledge.

I’m describing this in more detail here as some of these issues came up during our PKM Workshop this week.

So without further ado, here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“Integral to the training of an athlete is difficulty, obstacles, and defeat. The same is true of entrepreneurs. —@AronSolomon”

“Lack of trust leads to increase in command & control, which leads to decrease in trust. —@jitterted” —via @flowchainsensei

“Big-city wages, small-town prices” is a damn fine business model. —@gapingvoid

The six human skills that will matter long term [a dissenting opinion] – via @dhinchcliffe

But six will survive, say Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee, no matter how fast and smart computers become. Those skills are: statistical insight; managing group dynamics; good writing; framing and solving open-ended problems; persuasion; and human nurturing. These will define the jobs they think will exist at the end of the universe.

… Indeed, when we view the two researchers’ six skills from the perspective of the boardroom, what appears strikingly absent is any reference to taking decisions.

Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains – via @brianinroma

Today, a new wave of technologies — collaborative or social technologies, most of which appeared only within the last decade — is entering the workplace. But as with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done.

These new technologies hold out the promise of many business benefits. They greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, finding helpful colleagues and information, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.

“free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place —Roger Schank”

I am writing this diatribe for a simple reason. We now have a large amount for money available to start building masters degrees. I am seeking universities who want to work with us, but these universities need to abandon their old models in the new on line space. I would be happy to hear from people who think their university could do that. MIT and Harvard will continue to pretend they are doing something important but free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place. Students don’t typically attend college because of all the great courses. Universities may like to think that but while a Harvard degree may well be worth a lot, Harvard courses are just a form of entertainment.

PKM live with Euan Semple

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Seb Paquet describes the social web as enabling “ridiculously easy group-forming”, and that’s what we did. During our PKM Workshop this week, we discussed the books we would recommend to others. Euan Semple’s “Organizations Don’t Tweet” came up and I mentioned that I had reviewed it. I also suggested that Euan might be available to discuss the book. He graciously agreed to talk with us, even though his work schedule is quite hectic. This evening we set-up a Google+ hangout and Euan talked about several ideas in the book as well as some of his experiences as a change agent in large organizations.

I started the conversation by mentioning the direct connection between PKM and the chapter on Literacy Re-discovered:

Things to remember:

  • Having somewhere to write like a blog or Twitter makes you more aware of what is happening around you.
  • We are communicating more to each other through the medium of writing than we have done for decades.
  • Writing an effective blog post or tweet is a literary skill.
  • Much business writing is badly done and ineffective.
  • The metaphor of the document has become a liability in the era of blogs and Wikipedia.
  • Improving our writing skills and seeing it as part of everyone’s job will improve the effectiveness of our organizations.

A number of other observations were shared, and the group is now gathering its notes together in our discussion forum and continuing to learn together. We practised Seek (find books & authors), Sense (get recommendations for our context), and Share (have a conversation and narrate our learning). It was great to see this in action. It was a real bonus for the workshop, and something we hope to keep doing in future workshops, when the opportunity arises. As Hugh says:

Getting people together across multiple timezones and several countries to have a meaningful conversation is now ridiculously easy. Sometimes we forget just how revolutionary this is.

How blogging changed my life for the better

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I guess I could be described as a hardcore blogger, as I’ve been writing here for over eight years. So I’m going to respond to Hugh MacLeod’s question about the importance of blogging to me.

Like I said many times before, for those of us crazy enough to take it seriously, blogging matters, so does freedom, that’s why I wrote the book. And yeah, we have a duty to convince those less fortunate than ourselves to give it some more thought.

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  1. I live in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada; population 5,000. Even our timezone is unknown to many people. Without my blog, nobody would ever have heard of me. This Spring, I have four speaking engagements out of town (Montreal, Ottawa, Washington DC, Rome). Without my blog, I am sure that IEEE and many other organizations would not have invited me to speak.
  2. My blog is a key part of my professional development and essential to my personal knowledge mastery processes. It’s how I make sense of many things. My blog keeps me connected.
  3. I initially met my business partners at the Internet Time Alliance through my blog. That was a very good thing!
  4. My blog has allowed me to connect to people all over the world. This year alone, I have had visitors from 168 countries. It means that I can often travel to a new city and already know someone at my destination.
  5. In addition, my blog gives me (just a little bit of) credibility with the much younger digital generation ;)

Feedforward

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One of the consultant’s dilemmas is that you have to stay ahead of the curve to remain relevant. Yesterday’s problem doesn’t need to be solved – there’s probably an app for that already. This is why “perpetual Beta” informs all of my work.

I used to work as a training designer but there’s really not much to differentiate one course from another. Training content development has become a commodity and many companies are forced to compete on price. Even performance consulting, a good part of my consulting business for the first five years, is becoming more commonplace (and that’s a good thing). I’m now focused on working smarter, helping organizations integrate learning into the workflow, especially using social media.

More and more people in the workforce are now facing the same challenges as consultants. How can they re-skill and provide services for today’s and tomorrow’s problems, not yesterday’s? Schools don’t help much, with curriculum that is developed looking back at best practices and only reviewed every few years. Off-the-shelf training programs sure aren’t of much use, having been reduced to the lowest, and simplest, common denominator.

As I work with our PKM Workshop, now in progress, I realize that I have to keep things up to date and reflective of the participants’ needs. Before I release an assignment or resource, I have to review it in light of the current context. Sometimes I add in new discoveries just hours before publishing. This is professional development in perpetual Beta. I think more and more professional programming will go this way in time. MOOC’s are another example of this non-fixed curriculum perspective.

There is no normal. We need to think like artists, less concerned with feedback and more focused on feedforward.

Thus, the artist’s job is to dislocate the old media through their art to reveal the ground effects of the new media. McLuhan’s observations are as relevant now as they were forty years ago: The artist is the person in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. S/he is the person of integral awareness. ~ Mark Federman

To learn, we must do

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As I was preparing to start our online PKM workshop last night, I came across one of the best articles that I have read in a long while that reflects the value of what the PKM framework supports. Anne Adrian, in My own serendipitous opportunities, talks about her experiences in online sense-making.

“In 2007 I started blogging with the intention of learning and trying to determine if blogging and other online tools could be useful for my organization.

I did not ask my organization, I just did it.  At that time it could have ended badly for me because I was blind of what was possible. Blogging and connecting led to Google Analytics, Delicious, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter, and now Google Plus. There are many applications that have been useful for a short while and then either their usefulness to me (not to all) died or they died (Google Wave, Buzz, Friendfeed).  I quickly learned the value of open sharing which led me to Creative Commons, open source, open education, and open science.”

“Chance favours the connected mind”, says Steven Johnson. Being connected creates enhanced serendipity. As Anne concludes:

“Putting myself into places (online and physical places) where serendipitous discoveries can happen is not efficient, and of course, cannot be planned. Serendipity helped me discover people, concepts,  and ideas that I would have never known before. Relationships–online, physical, mixed, new and old–and time and space are not easily planned. Serendipity does not map to set goals or plans. Instead serendipity has surprised me with energy, thoughts, knowledge, ideas, concepts, realizations, experiences, and relationships.”

All of this makes no sense unless, as individuals, we engage in our networks and contribute what we have learned or are learning along the way. As Jane Hart mentioned to me in a Skype conversation today, the individual’s role in social learning is as important as the technology or getting people to collaborate. PKM is as much a life skill as a work skill. It is necessary for all knowledge work. It is a framework that can help to develop critical thinking, something often touted by educators, but seldom taught. To learn, we must do.

PKM Workshop: learning out loud

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Sometimes it helps to learn out loud: LOL. That’s why we commit to formalized activities. They can help us try something new.

The Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop provides a loose framework to try out some new ways of learning for yourself, but with a small group of people to help and support you. It’s nine weeks long and you can do everything at your own pace.

This online workshop on adapting to the networked world of work includes tools, tips & techniques from two facilitators who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years. The workshop is for anyone looking to  understand the digital reality of the connected economy. Whether you are a freelancer, work  in an organisation, or want to connect beyond the corporate walls, this is designed to give you a head start in developing a personal sense-making framework.

Here are some comments from our previous workshop:

“There is a saying that “when the student is ready the master (teacher) shows up” and that is how I see this course.”

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.”

“I used a time tracking tool to get a feeling for how much time I spend on seeking, sensing and sharing … So reducing my seeking and spending more time sensing (converting things into high quality content) is my most important goal for the next few months.”

Loose Hierarchies, Strong Networks

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When I wrote that the only knowledge that can be managed is our own, I wanted to highlight that command & control methods do not work well in this network era that is replacing the industrial/information era. In our increasingly complex work environments, we should take the advice of Snowden & Kurtz and the Cynefin framework, described as “loose hierarchies & strong networks” by Verna Allee.
cynefin networks verna allee

While a certain amount of hierarchy may be necessary to get work done, networks naturally route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done cooperatively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices, or case studies to fall back on. Real business value today is in complex and creative work.

Just imagine if the idea that the only knowledge we can manage is our own informed our organizations and our approach to learning and development?

What would education look like? Perhaps like this school in Bat-Yam where children direct their own learning and involve the entire community to help them achieve their personal learning goals (YouTube video). Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would training look like? Perhaps workers would be asked how they learn best and then be supported by the organization to get their work done. Maybe one-hour of compliance training on the LMS would disappear. Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would knowledge management look like? Perhaps every worker would be encouraged and supported to develop a personal knowledge mastery system not tied to enterprise software. Each person would have knowledge artefacts that could be connected to the enterprise but not uniquely owned by it. The organization would support the development of PKM skills. Loose hierarchies, strong networks.

What would your organization look like with looser hierarchies and stronger networks? Probably a lot more human.

Preparing for the future of work with PKM

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Hugh Macleod, one of my favourite cartoonists and someone who really understands the networked economy, recently asked; How Do You Best Prepare For The Creative Age?

Image: Gapingvoid.com

Chris Jablonski at ZDNet identifies five trends driving the future of work as we get virtual, online and global [I think he misses “local” though, especially as energy prices continue to increase]. Trend 4: Adaptive lifelong learning the norm -“Ten years from now, relevant work skills will be shaped by the continued rise in global connectivity, smart technology and new media, among several other drivers.” This is linked to the Institute for the Future‘s graphic of Future Work Skills 2020 identifying six disruptive shifts as well as the skills necessary to deal with them:

  1. Sense-making
  2. New media literacy
  3. Virtual collaboration
  4. Cognitive load management
  5. Novel and adaptive thinking
  6. Social intelligence
  7. Trans-disciplinarity
  8. Computational thinking
  9. Cross Cultural competency
  10. Design mindset

The first four of these skills are ones that the personal knowledge management framework  has been based on. For the past two years I have offered full-day workshops on PKM  at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute, with the final one scheduled for 1 June 2012 (Network Learning: Working Smarter). Feedback indicates that most people would prefer to do this online, so I experimented with a workshop that just finished last week. Here are some comments:

“There is a saying that “when the student is ready the master (teacher) shows up” and that is how I see this course.”

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.”

Future PKM workshops will be either custom designed for organizations who want these onsite, or conducted online at the Social Learning Centre, hosted by my colleague Jane Hart. Here are the details on online PKM workshops.

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own

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“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” – Dave Jonassen

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge mastery in networks, with a distributed, not centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning and in this network era we are now obliged to share that learning. If no one shared what they have learned there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web.