Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Personal knowledge mastery
“ninety percent of everything is crap” —Sturgeon’s Revelation
“Twitter is often derided as a forum for gossip and nonsense, which it also is. But I find more serious discussion of critical issues, more sources shared and claims checked here than in most of the mainstream media.” —George Monbiot
While 90% of what is shared on Twitter may be crap, a critical eye and good information filters will reveal the 10% that is great. Good personal knowledge mastery practices will lead to filter success.
Seventeen years ago I was introduced to PKM by Lilia Efimova.
To a great extent PKM is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides. Companies should recognise that their employees are not “human resources”, but investors who bring their expertise into a company. As any investors they want to participate in decision-making and can easily withdraw if their “return on investment” is not compelling. Creativity, learning or desire to help others cannot be controlled, so knowledge workers need to be intrinsically motivated to deliver quality results. In this case “command and control” management methods are not likely to work.
Taking responsibility for own work and learning is a challenge for knowledge workers as well. Taking these responsibilities requires attitude shift and initiative, as well as developing personal KM knowledge and skills. In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.
Karen Caldwell calls personal knowledge mastery — ordinary creativity (3.5 minute video). I think this is a great analogy as PKM is something that anyone can practice and improve. Karen asks what does ordinary creativity mean for you as a “social learner, digital author, prosumer, digital audience, and consumer”. She identifies ways to present information such as dual coding theory.
Dual-coding theory postulates that both visual and verbal information is used to represent information . Visual and verbal information are processed differently and along distinct channels in the human mind, creating separate representations for information processed in each channel. The mental codes corresponding these representations are used to organize incoming information that can be acted upon, stored, and retrieved for subsequent use. Both visual and verbal codes can be used when recalling information. —Psychology Wiki
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For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us and surpassed humans with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sensemaking, cooperation, and novel thinking.
We live in a networked world. Is it even possible for one person to have sufficient expertise to understand a complex situation such as this pandemic? So do we rely on one subject matter expert or rather a subject matter network?
I have noted many discrepancies between advice from our Chief Medical Officer of Health as opposed to a network of experts who I follow on Twitter. Our CMOH has been responsible for producing some of the most complicated public health guidelines and even our local CBC radio station staff could not come to an understanding of the concept of a ‘steady ten’ — Do these circles overlap? How long can they last? What about children going to school in contact with others? Talking with other people I have noticed that everyone interprets it differently. This is a failure to communicate.
Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Caputova, was elected in March 2019, and surprisingly showed a way out of the populist quagmire that many countries find themselves in. The tribal affiliations retrieved by the previous corrupt government, particularly via social media, were what Caputova had to counter in order to get elected.
She addressed these tribes not by creating a new tribe, but by discounting the tribal perspective and focusing on the population’s common humanity instead. In this case, it worked. Understanding The Laws of Media, especially the retrieval quadrant gives us a tool to counter the negative effects — or potential reversal — of new technologies like social media. This is real media literacy.
In 2010 we conducted a project to cultivate a fully engaged, high performing workforce through rapid, collaborative, informal, & self-directed learning at a US-based health insurance company of about 20,000 employees. It is summarized in the working smarter case study.
Jump ahead a decade and similar issues continue to face large organizations.
My recent client challenge with Citibank in 2019/2020 can be summed up as — How do you improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and sensemaking in a globally distributed company with over 200,000 employees?
In my PKM workshops we discuss the differences between communities and networks. This includes the dark sides of communities as well as the constant doubt and outrage on social media. My general advice is to seek diverse perspectives in social networks but to seek more private, trusted communities for deeper conversations and understanding.
I use Twitter to show how to seek new ideas and opinions by selecting who to follow to create human knowledge filters. The list feature on Twitter is useful in following specific topics and fields. Following, or muting, certain hashtags can also refine what you find on Twitter.
The best feature of Twitter is that you do not have to follow people who follow you. The relationship is asymmetric, just like blogging. In addition, you can still set your stream of people you follow to “see latest tweets first” so that the Twitter algorithm does not decide for you. Of course you have to constantly switch to latest tweets, as Twitter prefers to feed its algorithm to you. Twitter is not your friend. You don’t have to be on Twitter, but I still find it a useful platform for teaching about online social networks. There are also, for now, third-party applications for Twitter, like Tweetbot.
I spent the first 21 years of my working life with a regular pay cheque, lots of formal training, and a fairly regular schedule. Leaving the Army I worked at a university and a few years later for an e-learning startup. In 2003 I found myself without an office or a pay cheque and few prospects for local work. It was a similar situation to what many people faced this Spring with lock downs and job losses due to the pandemic.
After 17 years of distributed work, remote informal learning, and connecting with clients via video conferencing I think I have learned a bit about the ‘new normal’ many people are now facing. One early experience was running the Informal Learning Unworkshop online with Jay Cross, which cemented the idea of perpetual beta in my work.
Harold Jarche is a true pioneer. Nine years ago [2005], long before online activities were commonplace, we conducted a series of Unworkshops on the topic of web-based learning. We relied on free software. Our students came from Australia, Lebanon, Canada, Austria, the Azores, and points in between. Lessons were both synchronous and offline. To give people exposure, we used a different platform each week. I can’t imagine anyone (aside from Harold) crazy (and innovative) enough to sign up for something like this.” —Jay Cross (1944-2015), founder Internet Time Alliance
I am following up from thoughts on the cynefin framework and how it has informed my own work since 2007. We are almost at the end of our exploratory looking at ways in which personal knowledge mastery and cynefin may be connected, and I hope this will lead to better ways of sensemaking in uncertainty.
The first concept that I would like to use is — levels of abstraction. Low levels of abstraction mean that information and knowledge are understandable to few people. The lowest level would be me understanding something only to myself. Higher levels of abstraction would make this more understandable to more people, but losing nuance and context in the process. High levels of abstraction are good for things that everyone should understand, such as the symbols and markings on a map.
