Reflecting on PKM
What exactly is Personal Knowledge Management, PKM?
Core PKM concepts (as I see them)
* Knowledge creation / generation is a personal act! - like learning and innovation, the individual is the origin, center stage, key and decisive entity in all knowledge activity.
* Organize your own house! - without a focus on collecting your thoughts, arranging and having access to your personal collection of pointers, links, articles and contacts, you will make little headway.
* Build your brand! - no one else will do it for you, be strong in your own identity, increase your personal intellectual capital.
* Master the PKM tools! - outliners, PIM, blogs. Build an archive, focus on preservation, develop and adopt a personal ontology / worldview.
An alternative view:
* Focus on shared 'safe' spaces, 'Ba', community, listening and social knowledge creation.
* Build social capital, NOT for leverage or what it returns to you, but to help others, cultivate honest social capital and be empathetic
* Knowledge happens via connections & relationships, deep dialog and emergence, not via the collection, arrangement, organization of information objects or access to personal tools.
* Knowledge flourishes in an ecology, needs diversity exchanges and creative abrasion to be articulated and verified.
There is something oxymoronic about a personal social network - the emphasis is in the wrong place!
More on PKM
Steve Barth's view - "his [Denham's] definition and assumptions about PKM are specifically constructed so as to dismiss the whole concept. To do this, he ignores his own key tenets of social-oriented KM, listening and engagement. "
Denham,
After reading this post, I went back and read through some of the various discussions of PKM. You once wrote, "In many ways, my unease with PKM parallels my thoughts on the paradigms that focus on individual rather than social learning." I'm not sure I understand the cause of your unease, but that is likely because I think that KM and PKM are separate topics that should be discussed as such where you seem to believe they are part of the same topic.
Personal KM, as the name implies, is related to individual (personal) learning. How an individual learns new things, and subsequently applies this new knowledge to the job at hand, is a very personal process. I would think that no two people would have the same process, and that many factors go into how an individual learns. Also, as you well know, just because every individual in an organization is learning doesn't make it a learning organization.
General KM, on the other hand, is related to organizational learning, which may or may not rely on any individual learning. In fact, I would submit that it is entirely possible to have a learning organization in which the people that make it up never "learn" anything new.
Obviously, the ideal mix is one where individuals are encouraged to use the tools and processes by which they personally learn the most, while making sure that those tools and processes are integrated into the overall learning process of the organization.
Posted by: Brett | June 28, 2004 at 03:45 PM
Denham,
I guess the truth is somewhere in between :) For me knowlegde is created as an interplay between community conversations and dialogues with self. Both sides are important.
From this perspective PKM is a personal effort to weave these two sides in a most effective way (and: KM is an organisational effort to weave these two sides in a most effective way).
Still... love your opposition... best ideas grow when outcomes of self-thinking are faced with good opponents. Hope to meet one day :)))
Posted by: Lilia | June 28, 2004 at 09:34 AM