PKMastery

Personal knowledge mastery

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.

Awareness

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Part of Personal Knowledge Management is seeking sources of knowledge (Seek-Sense-Share).

To be able to seek, first you have to be aware. Wolfgang Reinhardt has looked at knowledge workers, researchers in particular, and examined how they can be aware in their fields of expertise. Wolfgang graciously sent me a copy of his PhD thesis (Awareness: Support for knowledge workers in research networks) which he will be defending on 5 April at the Open Universiteit Nederland in Heerlen.

Wolfgang describes 10 knowledge worker roles that I think are helpful in understanding how all collaborative workers can share their knowledge.

  1. Controller
  2. Helper
  3. Learner
  4. Linker
  5. Networker
  6. Organizer
  7. Retriever
  8. Sharer
  9. Solver
  10. Tracker

Think of these roles, and who will do them, as you start or support a community of practice. There are also 13 different knowledge actions conducted by these researchers, to varying degrees, that Wolfgang has found in his research.

  1. Acquisition
  2. Analyze
  3. Authoring
  4. Co-authoring
  5. Information search
  6. Dissemination
  7. Expert Search
  8. Feedback
  9. Formal & Informal Learning
  10. Information organization
  11. Monitoring
  12. Networking
  13. Service search

How many of these are done on a regular basis, and with some degree of consistency, in knowledge-intensive organizations? How can this be improved?

Finally, the generic model of awareness describes how “the overall awareness of objects declines the further an object is away from oneself”.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Awareness of current practice
  3. Awareness of the local research organization
  4. Awareness of the personal research network
  5. Awareness of the research domain

In complex fields, where various researchers are working on similar problems, it becomes rather important to know who has done what. The challenge for distributed research teams is to find ways of understanding what is happening and ensuring it is communicated throughout the network.

Not only does distributed research need collaborative researchers but there must be an understanding of the role that awareness plays amongst knowledge workers. In complex networks, basic management approaches are no longer adequate.

Some final notes from Wolfgang’s defence:

The term “awareness” in Research Networks is a multilayered term that reaches far deeper than just emulating face-to-face situations in distributed collaboration.

Without supporting the awareness of network researchers, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange will not reach its potential.

Omitting support for social interactions between stakeholders in scientific events amounts to wasting the opportunity to recommend objects and increase the strength of research networks.

The PKM value-add

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Cristina Milos recently tweeted that; “Curating is different from aggregating information. That is why I am not a fan of Paperli or Scoopit.” The curation craze has been assisted by an increasing number of web platforms that enable easy sharing (with emphasis on the word easy). But what value do they really provide, aside from another platform to sell user data or advertising?

During my online conversation (recording on YouTube) with Jane Hart yesterday, we discussed personal knowledge mastery (PKM) and one very important aspect, in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making. Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online. The sense-making part takes effort. It’s why so few people keep at blogging for years, because it takes work.

But sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which  knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like a weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, encourages reflection and reinforces learning. Automating sense-making is antithetical to the rationale behind PKM.

  • Personal – according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation.
    (not directed by external forces)
  • Knowledge – understanding information and experience in order to act upon it.
    (know what, know who, know how)
  • Mastery – the journey from apprentice to disciplined sense-maker and sharer of knowledge.
    (masters do not need to be managed)

It’s not PKM if there is no value created, and I’m not sure if it’s curation either.

 

Net Work Skills

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Imagine if we limited our conversations to only those in the same office.  We would miss out on so many learning opportunities. Well it seems some people are still missing out.  Today, people with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as professionals and in dealing with change. They are engaged in a constant flow of sense-making through multiple conversations.

Every professional needs to be open to continuous learning and to make much of it transparent in order to cooperate with others. Nothing remains the same, and the only way to remain relevant in the network era is to stay connected. This is life in perpetual Beta.

An open attitude is increasingly important. The people who blog or connect on social media can get things done quicker, find answers faster, get advice and just be more effective. All of this requires professional networks and these take time to build the necessary trust before one can even ask for help. For instance, strangers usually have to know something about someone before they will help out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn), one is invisible online unless he or she is already famous. Most of us are not.

It is not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but in recent years the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

With social media, anyone can easily create digital content and collaborate with others without any special programming skills. And the kinds of skills needed for all professionals today are not so much specific social media platforms, but rather changes in attitudes and perspective.

It is getting difficult for anyone to be an expert other than in a very narrow field for a short period of time. Bloggers can quickly get the scoop on professional journalists. As knowledge workers, we are like actors — only as good as our last performance. For a fleeting time, we may be viewed as experts. This erosion in perceived and conferred expertise means that professionals have to become learners themselves and follow the flow of the ever-expanding bodies of knowledge related to their fields. It is a shift away from subject matter experts and toward subject matter networks.

“Creativity is a conversation—a tension—between individuals working on individual problems, and the professional communities they belong to.”~ David Williamson Shaffer

Conversation is an essential part of being a networked professional today. One person cannot know everything, but can add to, as well as benefit from, the knowledge of others by engaging in various online conversations. Social media let anyone join in professional conversations, and conversely, may isolate those who do not.

Professionals immersed in communities of practice, or those continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities, may have a larger zone of proximal development (the gap between a person’s current development level and the potential level of development). They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. Active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in any field.

Being a professional in the network era is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

Fields of knowledge are expanding, new tools are constantly being introduced, and over a billion people are connected via the Internet. However, blogging still stands out as nearly ubiquitous, especially for professional development. Varieties of blogs include text, video, and audio, but blogs are relatively simple, give individuals voice, and enable conversation to flow. One can think of a blog as a professional journal to record thoughts and ask questions of peers.

Each blog post has a unique identifier (permalink) which can be referenced by others, without permission. This is where blogs still remain superior to many walled information gardens, like Facebook. Blogs enhance serendipity. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays but can help make sense of the learning process. The comments between blogs help create networks of conversations around issues or topics.

Even once connected with social media, the critical aspect that remains is attitude. Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the first step in becoming a networked professional. This is an acceptance of a world in flux, and that knowledge is neither constant nor fixed.

Instead of trying to know everything in the field, we can concentrate on knowing with whom to connect. The network becomes all-important. That means embracing an attitude of openness and collaboration—joining others on a journey of understanding. Giving up control is a first step on this journey.

Having a blog, a permanent presence on the web, becomes the jumping off point for deeper professional discussions. I call it my home base. Producing a blog also opens a person up to criticism, so once again, an open attitude to learning is essential.

Networked professionals can no longer rest on their past accomplishments while their fields of knowledge change and grow. 

Through sharing and exposing their work on the web, networked professionals can connect to communities of practice and get informal peer review. There is no way to stay current all by ourselves. With blogs and other collaboration methods, each of us can become a participatory node in various communities of practice.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and knowing who to call becomes more important than having the right answer. But we are all humans and we relate on a human level, which means that we first have to get to know others and develop a level of trust before real sharing can happen. Collaboration is a two-way street.

Finally, critical thinking – the questioning of underlying assumptions, including our own – is becoming all-important as we have to make our own way in the network era. Critical thinking can be looked at as four main activities, which social media can help us achieve:

  • Observing and studying our fields
  • Participating in professional communities
  • Building tentative opinions
  • Challenging and evaluating ideas

In the early 21st century, it’s time for all professionals to develop net work skills.

Notes from 2006

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2006

What good are notes if you don’t review them from time to time? I reviewed my notes from 2004 as well as notes from 2005 last January, so now it’s time to review my half-baked ideas from 2006.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus (We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae)

Curriculum is a solution to a problem we created, wrote Brian Alger, a quote that still sticks with me.

I started thinking about life in perpetual Beta – Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

On the “learning profession”: As a learning professional, it’s time to take a stance. Enabling learning is no longer about disseminating good content. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are no more experts, only fellow learners on paths that may cross.

Foreshadowing my business future in 2011, I wrote that perhaps individual expertise is gradually being replaced by collaborative expertise.

I was asked for one or two sentences on where the field of adult e-learning is going. My response was that the overwhelming majority of the learning needs of Canadian adults are not addressed by formal training and education. In this post-industrial era, adults today require self-directed learning skills to thrive in the unstructured work environments outside of school. Efforts should be focused on the development of practical tools and strategies for adults to learn in a networked information society.

I riffed on Jay Rosen’s theme and wrote about the people formerly known as students:

The people formerly known as students do not believe this problem ”too many individual learners” is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as students are those who were on the receiving end of an oligopolist educational system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few options, and accredited institutions competing to speak their truths while the rest of the population learned in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

My thoughts on a networked world were that in warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of defeated armies.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

Near the end of 2006, I concluded that  in our networked world, modelling how to learn is a better strategy than shaping on a pre-defined curriculum.

 

Collective sense-making

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More of my online sense-making is in connecting to people, not accessing information sources. For instance, I read a few journals but I have dropped several, knowing that other people in my network will find the interesting articles and let me know. I used to read many of the technology blogs, like TechCrunch and Read/Write Web but have dropped them from my feed reader and instead read posts that have been referred via Twitter, Google Plus or blog posts.

The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their knowledge or act as human-powered content aggregators, selecting quality information and discarding the crap. I look for people who have mastered Crap Detection 101.

Aron Solomon [dead link] has noted that:

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

Knowledge in a networked society is different from what many of us grew up with in the pre-Internet days. While books and journal articles are useful in codifying what we have learnt, knowledge is becoming a negotiated  agreement between connected people. It’s also better shared than kept to ourselves, where it may wither and die. Like electricity, knowledge is both particles and current, or stock and flow.

streamThe increasing importance of fluid knowledge requires a different perspective on how we think of it and use it. If change is constant, then the half-life of codified knowledge (stock) decreases. We see this with the increasingly combative debates on intellectual property (IP) expressed as copyright. Both vestiges of an economy dominated by knowledge as stock. The digital world is harshly bumping against the analog world and we are caught in-between.

I think the only way to navigate this change is collaboratively. No one has the right answer, but together we can explore new models of sense-making and knowledge-sharing. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. This is the foundation of personal knowledge mastery. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.