PKM as structuring your thoughts

Amy Gahran has a different take on personal knowledge management, suggesting that it is more about Arranging Ideas: Knowledge Management in Human Terms:

In my book, knowledge management boils down to arranging ideas. In other words, I prefer to view this as a real human process, not a technological or abstract one.

I see the process of arranging ideas as comprising three core tasks:

  • Recording your thoughts in useful, creative ways that yield even more interesting ideas, context, and insights.
  • Organizing and storing your thoughts with tools that help you easily retrieve, juxtapose, compare, or combine specific ideas.
  • Sharing your ideas and observations with a select group or the world in a way that encourages and enables further mixing, matching, insights, and creativity. (Actually, the "sharing" part is optional, since it's possible for knowledge management to be a strictly individual matter. Still, I think sharing ideas is generally desirable.)

Gahran's perspective is that of a knowledge worker. This perspective hits it for me as well -- how can I structure my thoughts and all the materials that support those thoughts? What do I need to help me do my work most effectively? Some people need new tools. Others need a new ways of seeing things, and they find they need to throw out old tools and use new ones.

[As you might guess, I am attempting to catch up on a long backlog of reading. There is just too much good stuff out there. Fortunately, this post happens to be quite recent.]

4 Comment(s)

Given the staggering number and diversity of human minds that have been at work throughout the history of this planet, at this point there may be no such thing as a truly original thought. It's all been "thunk" before, as someone recently said to me. ... Read More

Given the staggering number and diversity of human minds that have been at work throughout the history of this planet, at this point there may be no such thing as a truly original thought. It's all been "thunk" before, as someone recently said to me. ... Read More

Given the staggering number and diversity of human minds that have been at work throughout the history of this planet, at this point there may be no such thing as a truly original thought. It's all been "thunk" before, as someone recently said to me. ... Read More

» mactella from Maria Norberg

PKM as structuring you... Read More

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This entry was published on July 18, 2004 12:06 AM and has 4 comment(s).

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