From Three thousand communities of practice by Steve Barth
But for me, the accusation that personal knowledge management is somehow antisocial or discounts the importance of collaborative learning and innovation is entirely inappropriate. The whole point is that collaborative work requires more of the individual—not less. And we are ill-equipped to handle those obligations and responsibilities.
The more people there are in a formal or informal network, the more connections and interactions each of us are likely to have. The more interactions we have, the more kinds of interaction we have, and therefore, the more kinds of interaction we have to be capable of handling. Meanwhile, the more interactions we have, the more obligations we have to share our knowledge with other people in the network.
No two members of the community will see that community in the same way. Each of us is the center of our own universe. Even if our communities have the same members, the difference between my community and your community is that I’m in the center of my network and you’re the center of your network. We can each only perceive our networks from the perspective of our own nodes.
I’m 100% agree and to be fair I do not understand (again) why Denham contrasts personal and social sides in PKM instead of looking for synergies between them:
[source] PKM to me is a paradox — knowledge in my world is socially constructed — it is not about organizing your thoughts, learning to use tools or developing individual competences — it is about dialog, community and collaboration.
[source] Getting into a personal huddle, organizing your thoughts and reflecting on the personal past can easily take you away from awareness of real flow and emergence – where it all happens.
I made an updated version for my personal something management model, I’ll call it personal KM until we come up with a better label. I place conversations in a middle (because, as Denham, I think they belong there), but I believe we have to account for the things around it as well. For me personal KM is about being aware of conversations you engage in (both actively and by being exposed to as a lurker), relations that enable them, and ideas that you take from and bring into these conversations.
And I’d love to hear from Denham what’s wrong with this pucture (conversations with him is my very important source of inspiration ;)
Tags: citedCh1, knowledge networker, personal knowledge managementArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/16.html#a1089; comments are here.