Category: Personal knowledge mastery

  • My Posts from Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop – Teaching in Higher Ed

    My Posts from Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop – Teaching in Higher Ed

    As part of participating in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, we were given lessons and activities three times a week for six weeks. I had been blogging perhaps once or twice a year for a while now, never feeling like I had found my voice with those posts. Doing that much sharing via the written form seemed daunting, yet I had a strong suspicion that the discipline would pay off. I was not wrong at all on that front.

    Here are the various posts I wrote, along with an overview of the concepts explored in each one.

    01 – Getting Curious About Network Mapping

    Great insight lies in visualizing and analyzing the relationships that surround our work and learning. Networks are fundamental lenses for how we connect, influence, and grow.

    Key themes:

    • Network mapping and the difference between strong ties and weak ties (and how both kinds are essential to a thriving learning network).
    • The habit of giving first and nurturing relationships as network fuel.

    Quote:

    “Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” — Mark S. Granovetter (1973)

    Both strong and weak ties are vital to our learning.

    02 – Let’s Get Curious

    Allowing ourselves to wonder opens up our capacity to learn, connect, and co-create more deeply.

    Key themes:

    • Sparking curiosity means we tap into a power well beyond certainty (as illustrated so well through this beloved clip from Ted Lasso).
    • The world of work is increasingly complex; the very skills that matter now include creativity, imagination, empathy and curiosity.

    Quote:

    “The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity.” — Harold Jarche

    Stay curious, widen our lenses, and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing as the gateway to meaningful growth.

    03 – Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

    Grief, networks, and belonging are deeply intertwined in shaping the places where we learn, grow, and support one another.

    Key themes:

    • The isolation that grief can bring creates a powerful invitation to community when we’re willing to show up with vulnerably.
    • Communities (using Mastodon) and how we sustain communities when the baskets we placed our eggs in (platforms, networks) change or disappear and what that means for our learning ecosystems (I didn’t write about this in the post, but many say the answer is federated networks)

    Quote:

    “If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” — Bonni Stachowiak

    Invest in communities that embrace complexity, invite connection across networks, and hold space for both loss and belonging.

    04 – Engaging with Intentionality and Curiosity

    As I reflected on intentionality this week, I realized that showing up with purpose—not just going through the motions—significantly shapes what I notice, how I respond, and who I become in the process.

    Key themes:

    • Intentionality helps clarify why something matters and helps resist the pull of the urgent and focus on the important.
    • Analyzing who Harold Jarche follows on Mastodon offered an opportunity to reflect on my aims for the network.

    Quote:

    “Show up for the work.” — Bonni Stachowiak

    Jarche also gave some examples of the practices on which PKM is built upon, such as narrating our work and sharing half-baked ideas.

    05 – Scooping Up Adulting and the Benefits of Being Curious

    Moving through life’s messy, liminal spaces requires curiosity, humility, and movement.

    Key themes:

    • The relevance of the Cynefin framework in helping us learn in the complex domain.
    • The value of formal and informal communities and open knowledge and formal knowledge networks as our learning ecology.
    • Curiosity as a pathway through liminality: staying attuned to what is becoming.

    Quote:

    “In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.” — Harold Jarche

    This Learning in the Complex Domain post by Jarche is likely the most important one for me to revisit from all that I read throughout these six weeks, as I’m still struggling to understand the Cynefin framework.

    06 – Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now?

    It’s still wild to me that RSS isn’t as common as navigating websites.

    Key themes:

    • A well-curated set of feeds via an RSS aggregator turns passive reading into active sense-making.
    • RSS remains undervalued in the age of algorithmic feeds, yet when we control our own feed-ecosystem we reclaim agency over where our attention goes.

    Quote:

    However, I’m picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via Unread on my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb. — Bonni Stachowiak

    I was also glad to learn from Jarche about subscribing to Mastodon feeds and hashtags via RSS, though I haven’t experimented with that much, yet, since the Tapestry app does a lot of that for me.

    07 – Can You Keep a Secret?

    Understanding the frameworks behind our media tools unlocks far deeper insights than simply reacting to what comes our way.

    Key themes:

    • Exploring Marshall McLuhan’s Media Tetrad helped me see every medium as doing four things: extending, retrieving, obsolescing, and reversing.
    • Applying the tetrad to the smartphone made visible how it extends access and connection, obsolesces older single-purpose devices, retrieves communal spaces, and reverses into distraction and isolation when pushed too far.
    • This kind of analysis invites me to pause, notice, and interrogate the media I use daily rather than assume they’re neutral or benign.

    Quote:

    “The reversals are already evident — corporate surveillance, online orthodoxy, life as reality TV, constant outrage to sell advertising. The tetrads give us a common framework to start addressing the effects of social media pushed to their limits. Once you see these effects, you cannot un-see them.” — Harold Jarche

    Analyzing these media tools heps us choose how to engage with them, rather than passively being shaped by them.

    08 – Fake News Brings Me to an Unusual Topic for this Blog

    It is critical to engage in ways to increase the likelihood of us being able to identify fake news. .

    Key themes:

    • The articulation of four primary types of fake news — propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and clickbait — as outlined by Harold Jarche.
    • How propaganda intentionally spreads ideas to influence or damage an opposing cause; disinformation deliberately plants falsehoods to obscure truth.
    • The persistence of conspiracy theories despite lacking evidence, and how clickbait uses sensationalism to manipulate attention and action.

    Quote:

    Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. – Renée DiResta, as quoted in El País

    Our identities get so wrapped up in what we believe, it can be so challenging to consider how we might be part of combating fake news in our various contexts.

    09 – From Half-Baked to Well-Done: Building a Sensemaking Practice

    It can be so generative to share thoughts before they’re polished and this openness fuels learning, creativity, and connection.

    Key themes:

    • Half-baked ideas make space for iteration: they invite others in, rather than presenting a finished product that shuts conversation down.
    • Sharing early thinking helps me stay curious, flexible, and less attached to being “right.”
    • When we release ideas in progress, we give our networks something to build on, remix, or nudge in new directions.

    Quote:

    If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. — Harold Jarche

    Let ideas be emergent rather than complete so that learning can unfold collaboratively.

    10 – The Experts in My Neighborhood

    Jarche introduces us to various PKM roles for this topic.

    Key themes:

    • Our learning ecosystems benefits from curating a diverse set of experts to help navigate complexity.
    • Through my PKMastery practices (bookmarking, sense-making, sharing), I can engage with expert ideas over time.
    • The real value comes not from one “expert,” but from a network of thinkers whose disagreements and different perspectives stretch our own thinking.

    Quote:

    “Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.” — JA Westenberg

    The value of PKM is in curating many voices, cultivating a “neighborhood” of experts to follow, listen, question, and to build a rich, networked sensemaking practice rather than rely on single voices alone.

    11 – Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

    Turning toward connection can be one of our strongest antidotes to imposter syndrome.

    Key themes:

    • Network weaving reframes “Do I belong here?” to “Who can I bring together?” — shifting the energy from proving my worth to creating belonging.
    • Connecting people, ideas, and stories becomes my purpose: not to be the smartest person in the room, but to serve as a bridge, curator, and connector.
    • Vulnerability matters: acknowledging I don’t have all the answers, but inviting others to learn out loud anyway.

    Quote:

    A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z. – Valdis Krebs

    This reminder feels like fuel for the next leg of my PKMastery journey — leaning into weaving networks as practice not just for growth, but for belonging and shared strength.

    12 – I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here

    Growth often comes not from jumping to answers but from staying curious, experimenting, and traveling alongside fellow learners.

    Key themes:

    • Fellow seekers offer empathy, solidarity, and space to wrestle with ideas, often more supportively than experts alone.
    • As described by Harold Jarche, combining curiosity with connection can help transform seekers into knowledge catalysts, nodes in our networks who learn, curate, and contribute meaningfully.
    • Innovation and insight often emerge through playful experiments (half-baked ideas) from the beginner’s mind held by seekers.

    Quote:

    Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines. — Harold Jarche

    Seeking is not a sign of weakness, but as a source of collective curiosity, connection, and growth.

    13 – What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible

    There is strength in making invisible processes and decisions visible.

    Key themes:

    • When we narrate our work, we open up pathways for real-time collaboration and shared learning rather than one-way transmission.
    • Narration allows for experimentation: sharing work in progress de-commodifies knowledge.
    • It shifts the emphasis from polished deliverables to ongoing learning — not just focusing on the final product, but how we got there, and what we learned along the way.

    Quote:

    The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice. — Harold Jarche

    Narrating our work offers a window into our process of learning.

    14 – No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking

    As I reflected on systems thinking, I found myself returning to how challenging (and how necessary) it is to see beyond events and into the structures that shape them. Revisiting Senge’s The Fifth Discipline reminded me just how often we can slip into reacting instead of zooming out to notice patterns.

    Key themes:

    • How easy it is to fall into organizational “learning disabilities,” like assuming I am my position rather than part of a larger whole.
    • Chris Argyris describes the phenomenon of “skilled incompetence,” where groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning.
    • The invitation to practice systems thinking collectively, not just individually.

    Quote:

    You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. – Peter Senge

    Sitting with this reminded me that lest we fall victim to skilled incompetence, we need to continually nurture the humility and curiosity to keep looking wider, deeper, and more generously at the forces shaping our organizations and our work.

    15 – Asking as a Way of Knowing: PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander

    The potential for adding value through PKM helps make our contributions much richer when paired with curiosity, generosity, and intentional sharing.

    Key themes:

    • PKM isn’t just about what I read or bookmark — it’s about how I transform that input through asking questions, sense-making, and offering what I learn into shared spaces.
    • Public sharing (through podcasting, writing, conversation) complements private learning — the two together deepen meaning and foster connection.
    • “Adding value” can look like holding space for others’ learning — asking curious questions, offering resources, and modeling openness rather than trying to prove expertise.

    Quotes:

    Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you. — Maria Popova

    It was great getting to see this all in action, through a dinnertime conversation with Bryan Alexander.

    16 – The Gap

    Fear and self-doubt often keeps us from beginning and from recognizing how much value we hold even before we “arrive.”

    Key themes:

    • There’s often a gap between where we are now and where we want to be — but that gap doesn’t diminish the worth of what we’re already learning and creating.
    • True learning requires embracing vulnerability: pursuing new practices.
    • Public sharing matters: showing work in progress reminds me (and others) that learning is ongoing and that we don’t need to wait until we’re “expert enough” to contribute something meaningful.

    Quote:

    “The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.” — Tim Kastelle

    Commit to practice, to sharing, and to staying open to becoming someone who learns out loud.

    17 – Walking With PKM: Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice

    Stepping away from busyness — even just to wander — creates the space for real insight and creative thinking.

    Key themes:

    • Walking becomes a practice of reflection: giving my brain space to wander and surface ideas.
    • Learning isn’t always quantifiable.
    • The value in a consistent PKM practice allows me to my own capacity to notice, wonder, and ultimately learn.

    Quote:

    Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness. — Harold Jarche

    PKM is part discipline, part letting go of the busyness, and part listening to whatever emerges.

    18 – The Last Step Toward the First Step

    “Mastery” is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing.

    Key themes:

    • Value lies not in perfection, but in consistency: the small acts of sharing half-baked ideas and imperfect work.
    • What I do contributes to a larger learning ecosystem: by sharing what I learn, I contribute to collective sense-making and encourage others to do the same.

    Quote:

    It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other. — Ronald Burt

    The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

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  • The Last Step Toward the First Step – Teaching in Higher Ed

    The Last Step Toward the First Step – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This final PKMastery workshop post is what I’m referring to as the last step toward the first step, meaning that while I’m through with the formal/structured activities and curated lessons from Harold Jarche, there’s such tremendous potential for even deeper learning, with a renewed commitment toward PKM.

    Jarche shares a report from many years ago about the most valued Future Work Skills. He writes of how: “The report identified six drivers of change.

    1. Longevity, in terms of the age of the workforce and customers
    2. Smart machines, to augment and extend human abilities (quite obvious since 2023)
    3. A computational world, as computer networks connect
    4. New media, that pervade every aspect of life
    5. Superstructed organizations, that scale below or beyond what was previously possible
    6. A globally connected world, with a multitude of local cultures and competition from all directions

    Ten future [present] work skills were derived from these drivers and these were seen to be critical for success in the emerging network era workplace. In 2014 a relatively simple infographic was published to show the relationship between these drivers and skills. Of these 10 skills, four compose the essence of personal knowledge mastery:

    1. sense-making
    2. social intelligence
    3. new media literacy
    4. cognitive load management

    Participants in the workshop are then invited to focus on which competency we would most like to develop in, as part of our overall PKM practice. I’m torn between sense-making and cognitive load management. While further understanding of systems thinking and sense-making practices would certainly help me in my ongoing learning, I recognize my lack of sufficient discipline for what a focus on cognitive load management might bring me.

    Throughout this process of blogging my way through Harold Jarche’s Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, I essentially wrote the equivalent of half of a book. When I tell myself that I don’t have time for certain pursuits in my life, these past six weeks would seem to counter those self-limiting beliefs. While I’m not actually interested, necessarily, in writing a book for other people at this exact moment, my shift in focus to a more reflective and open writing style for all these posts has felt liberating. As Ronald Burt shares:

    It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.

    Having no idea who will ever read these words, but knowing that the writing practice this workshop has instilled in me has been tremendously helpful in my own sense-making. James Lang would say I’m getting lots of practice writing to an imaginary audience and that has felt good. By Jarche asking us to engage on Mastodon and to use the #PKMastery hashtag, I’ve been able to share my work with a niche audience, reconnecting with people I hadn’t been in regular touch with for a long while, in addition to meeting a couple of new people along the way.

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  • Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    I love to walk. Sometimes I do it alone (almost always listening to either music or podcasts), though most often walks these days are facilitated by an invitation from one of our kids to go for an evening walk. I’m at the POD25 conference, so have been missing my night time walks. Right now, I’m holed up in my hotel room, doing some reflecting, writing, and a bit of grading.

    Instead of feeling guilty, I’m overwhelmed with supportive messages about how healthy this is. First, let’s start with walking. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking about this practice:

    Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society — and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

    The pull to keep producing and soaking in every bit of ROI from my university paying for this trip is strong (not because of them, I should say, but because of my own sense of needing to “get the most out of limited budget dollars”). Yet, learning cannot be perfectly quantified in terms of financial metrics, despite corporations’ and governments’ strong desire to do so. Jarche reminds us of the importance of leaving room for time and context to enrich our learning.

    We cannot tap into our innovative capacities without being open to radical departures from the predictable, planned path (an example of which might be the typical professional conference schedule). And yes, sometimes that means not engaging in every planned session at a conference, like the one I’m participating in this week.

    Jarche writes:

    Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness.

    As we wrap up our time together, Jarche invites those of us participating in his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop to reflect on our experience these past six weeks. Here I go, in responding to his questions:

    Q. What was the most useful concept I learned from this workshop?

    A. It wasn’t really a concept, rather a practice. I benefitted by committing to a regular writing practice throughout the workshop, which provided opportunities for rich reflection and deepened learning. The structure of the workshop allowed for that to take place (plus me being a person who is a bit of a completist and wanting to blog through all 18 of the opportunities for reflection and activity that Harold provided).

    Q. What was the most surprising concept that has changed my thinking about PKM?

    A. I had seen Jarche write about McLuhan’s media tetrad in the past, but didn’t slow myself down enough to absorb much of anything, at the time. However, given my commitment to practice PKM throughout this experience, I wrote about the concept for the first time, and even shared the framework as a part of a keynote I gave a month or so ago.

    A diamond-shaped diagram illustrating McLuhan’s media tetrad. The center diamond is labeled “Medium.” Four surrounding diamonds describe its effects: the top says “Obsolesces — a previous medium,” the right says “Retrieves — a much older medium,” the bottom says “Reverses — its properties when extended to its limits,” and the left says “Extends — a human property.” The image is adapted from jarche.com

    During the keynote, I couldn’t remember the word “tetrad,” when the idea came up later in the talk (as in after the slide had long since disappeared). I had attempted to come up with a word association on the plane ride out to Michigan, but it had failed me, in that moment.

    “Think of the old arcade game, Tetris, plus something being “rad” (like in the 80s)”, I told myself. I was definitely learning out loud and performing retrieval practice in real time, as I eventually cobbled together audience participation input and finally got myself there.

    A few things I’ve learned about myself, cognitive science, and other human beings remind me of these principles. For starters, my embarrassment in not knowing, but still struggling through and reaching the side of knowing means I’m unlikely to forget the word in the future. Plus, people aren’t looking for other humans to be perfect. It is through our vulnerability and relatability that we might most often have an opportunity to make an impact on others. At least I believe that may be the case for me… as I wasn’t meant to be the expert, as my primary role in this world, I don’t think. I would rather be known as someone who is curios, which I’ve heard enough times to start to believe that it is true.

    Q. What will be the most challenging aspect of PKM for me?

    A. I still need to learn more about the concepts and frameworks involving navigating complexity, including one I’ve come across in the past, but never got much further than confusion, previously: cynefin. Jim Luke (who I met a gazillion years ago at an OpenEd conference) has offered to share his wisdom about cynefin with Kate Bowles and I sometime in the next couple of months. He replied to me on Mastodon about cynefin:

    I find it a very useful heuristic in thinking about community, higher ed, any activities that are organized and care-centered, etc.

    This exchange wouldn’t have occurred, had it not been for Harold structuring the PKM workshop around engaging on Mastodon, by the way. This is going to be a gift that keeps on giving, I believe. While my connections there are still small in number, they are strong with competence, care, and creativity.

    I’m glad that I can now pronounce cynefin without first locating an audio clip of someone else saying it. I’m useless at phonetic spelling, so that stuff doesn’t often help me in the slightest. I do still have to look up how to spell it each time. My brain feels slower with the learning when a word is pronounced differently than it is spelled. I still have to occasionally slow myself way down when spelling my own last name, so I won’t let myself feel too bad about still not being able to spell cynefin without help.

    Q. Where do I hope to be with my PKM practice one year from now?

    A. I would like to be in a more regular practice of blogging a year from now. I tend to save up blog post ideas that are super laborious for me (at least the way I approach the task, in those cases). I like doing posts for Jane Hart’s Top Tools 4 Learning votes (like my top ten votes from 2025). But given how extensively I write and link in those posts, they take many hours to complete. I also have enjoyed doing top podcast posts, drawing inspiration from Bryan Alexander’s wonderful posts, like this one about the podcasts he was listening to in late 2024.

    My post from late 2024 about what Overcast told me I had listened to the most that year was less time consuming to write, than ones I had done in the past. But I felt weird only going from the total minutes listened as my barometer, when I think that other podcasts are far more worthy of acknowledgement than some of the ones I wound up having listened to the most that year. This 2021 Podcast Favorites post took forever to write and curate, but is more emblematic of the ways I would most like to celebrate all the incredible podcasts that are out there (or at least were publishing, at the time I wrote it).

    If I put some creative constraints on myself, in terms of the time I would allow myself to commit to any individual post, I suspect I would have a lot more success with this aspect of PKM. I so appreciate the way that Alan Levine, Maha Bali, and Kate Bowles write in more reflective, informal ways. I’ve been pushing myself throughout this workshop to just get the ideas I’m having in the moment out there, to tell stories that are snapshots of my sensemaking processes, and to be human and allow myself to show up in the messiness that is indicative of the learning process.

    Gratitude

    My deepest gratitude goes to Harold Jarche for such a well-designed, impactful learning experience through his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop. I had been telling myself that I would do it at some point for years, now, and finally realized that there wasn’t really ever going to be a “good time” for there to be six weeks without something big happening (conferences, speaking gigs, etc.). So Harold has been able to travel with me on airplanes, sat with me in airports, and is currently in my hotel room in San Diego at the POD 2025 conference. This is only metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know, he is in Canada right now. Though I am not surveilling him and he does seem to travel a lot, at least as it compares to me.

    I’m also feeling thanks for those people who allow themselves to learn out loud and take the risks of being openly curious and worrying less about being “right” or “perfect” all the time.

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  • The Gap – Teaching in Higher Ed

    The Gap – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the elements that prevent us from most deeply practicing Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) in our lives. A big piece involves fear, the worries that we couldn’t possibly know enough, or being talented enough, to contribute anything to the discourse. I’m at the POD Conference this week in San Diego and have been thinking about my own, long-term desire to get better at sketchnotes, while realizing that the only way you do something like that is to start out not-so-good, and establish a regular practice that could contribute to you getting better.

    People often use the metaphor of a gap existing between where we are and where we want to be… We forget the value we might possess along the way. Daniel Sax starts out his video called THE GAP by Ira Glass with text that appears on the screen, in the form of a dedication of sorts. The words initially say:

    For everyone in doubt

    After a few seconds, an additional line of text appears:

    Especially for myself

    How many of us can relate to those feelings of doubt?

    How often do we ponder what they prevent us from achieving?

    After that compelling two-line introduction, Sax shows what I think is a printing press in action, though I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, during the first part of the video. Ironically, I wrote in my last post about how Bryan Alexander embodied PKM at a dinner, recently, but I didn’t write much about the other people who were there. However, I realize now that one of the people is working on her doctoral research and it is on Black women who were printmakers in the 1930s, I believe it was. My mind flashed, as I revisited watching Sax’s video, thinking that this doctoral researcher would surely know if what I think I’m seeing here is actually that.

    Before now, I hadn’t really paid much attention to Sax’s video description on Vimeo. However, my curiosity was rewarded, by getting to discover that Sax made this video, because he was inspired by another one and wanted to experiment with his own creation. He writes:

    I made it for myself and for anybody who is in doubt about his/her creative career. I also think that Ira Glass’ message isn’t only limited to the creative industry. It can be applied to everyone who starts out in a new environment and is willing to improve.

    I encourage you to stop and watch Sax’s video: THE GAP by Ira Glass and reflect on the different ways he conveys his messages and ideas, throughout. I wonder how long it took him to do the spoon full of noodle letters, spelling out his thoughts for that 2-3 second part.

    Back to Sax’s video description, he ends with a series of expressions of gratitude, to all of those who got him to the point of creating his piece. He thanks David Shiyang Liu, who has a graphical, text-based depiction of Ira’s words about storytelling (which really could be about any new pursuit). Sax continues to thank the people who made his video possible (I suggest going to the video description and witness a wonderful example of giving credit where credit is due).

    As Jarche begins to wind down the PKMastery Workshop and invites us to start our PKM practice (if we haven’t, already), he quotes Tim Kastelle:

    The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.

    Jarche uses his book reviews and Friday’s Finds as examples of his PKM practice lived out. He’s been at that for such a long time now, I look forward to each post, as they get released and show up in my RSS feeds. Despite having learned so much over the 10+ years I’ve been following his work, taking this PKM workshop has accelerated my learning exponentially. There’s nothing like doing all the sensemaking and sharing that I set myself up to do when I committed to blogging publicly throughout the six weeks of the workshop.

    My PKM

    While I’ve got a ways to go and it is still quite early in my practice, I’m enjoying revisiting books from authors I have interviewed for Teaching in Higher Ed via a new video series I’m calling Between the Lines. This series is helping me experiment more with video as a medium, as well as supporting my ongoing learning about teaching and learning. I also have a playlist of me practicing Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework for fact checking. I’m realizing I probably need to do some more thinking about the playlists as categories of different types of videos, but I also have this playlist of technology for teaching and learning.

    Of course producing and hosting the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is a huge part of PKM for me. Here are some unpolished thoughts about how seek-sense-share shows up through this 11-year adventure.

    Seek

    I get new guest ideas from past podcast guests, conferences I attend, books I read, PR people I now know from book publishers, and from things that show up on my RSS feeds. The point I’m at in my seeking process is actually more so that I need to find ways to filter out the vast number of ideas for possible interviews that come my way and be more disciplined and discerning about saying no (either to myself, or to others).

    Sense

    In preparing for interviews, I do a ton of sensemaking, thinking through the themes that are narrow enough to not be all over the place, but also not overly prescriptive, lest I miss what is emerging in the moment. I read digitally and typically highlight way too much of the book. Sometimes I mindmap my ideas, or just type up themes and reorder ideas. Creating the show notes for each episode also helps me extend the learning opportunities from each conversation.

    Share

    The podcast gets shared on all the major podcast directories and services. YouTube recently revised their policies to now allow for RSS feeds from audio-only shows to come through on their site (Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on YouTube). Spotify represents a growing Teaching in Higher Ed audience and has some nice features for more engagement than on other platforms, such as being able to ask listeners a question about what they took away from listening.

    Hope

    My hope is that I’ll forever continue to live in the gap and experience the positive benefits of being willing to be fueled by the vulnerability required to learn out loud.

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  • PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander – Teaching in Higher Ed

    PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I’m in San Diego at the POD Network conference this week, which means I get to observe myself in action as I attempt to moderate all the wonderful nuggets of potential learning coming my way, while recognizing that I need to keep some type of self restraint, lest I get too overwhelmed with all that is coming at me at one time. This conference brings together people in the field of educational development, who work closely with faculty to heighten teaching effectiveness in a higher education context.

    This topic from Harold Jarche’s PKM workshop focuses on adding value. Jarche shares 14 ways to acquire knowledge from the quintessential PKM practicer, Maria Popova at The Marginalian, and her review _You Can Do Anything_ by James Mangan, written in 1936. He then categorizes the methods in terms of how they align with PKM in this graphic from Jarche:
    PKM and 14 ways to acquire knowledge]

    Much of what I have thought of as the seek part of my PKM practice has to do with receiving (which may be classified here as reading and listening). What I realize I have been doing for more than a decade through podcasting also fits well here: asking. Had you asked me to map out my podcasting adventures on top of the seek-sense-share model, I certainly could have given you a rudimentary framework with examples, but I’m enjoying this far more expansive way of thinking about those practices specific to the work I do for the podcast. The PKM I do more as a solo endeavor (reading RSS feeds and bookmarking a bunch of items each day) compliments the more regular, public sharing I do through the podcast.

    Since I’m at the POD Conference this week, trying to balance out the desire to capitalize on the many opportunities to connect with a need for alone time, as well, I accepted a dinner invitation that I knew would go past my normal bedtime. I tend to wake up super early and therefore head to bed far earlier than most people. However, I had a sense that this dinner would be worth it and it was.

    One of the people I got to sit and talk a long while with was Bryan Alexander. I know him from having interviewed him twice, now, for Teaching in Higher Ed. He brilliantly exemplifies what a long-term PKM habit looks like through his hosting of The Future Trends Forum, the Future Trends in Technology and Education Report (FTTE Report), and his blog. At the dinner, I witnessed Bryan’s voracious curiosity and his embodiment of what it looks like to ask, as part of one’s PKM pursuits.

    Popova writes about asking:

    Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you.

    Bryan asked questions throughout dinner and peaked my curiosity about the others’ video watching, podcast listening, tv/movie watching, and book reading habits, among other things. I enjoyed adding a couple of items to my Sequel App queue. I wish the app had a listing of items I have added, presented chronologically, as unless I add a note to an item, I don’t wind up remembering who suggested something to me. I’m pretty sure Bryan suggested Pluribus to us, though it also easily could have been Tom Tobin, from earlier in the evening. Actually, now that I think about it, whatever Tom had suggested did get a note added to it, at the time, so I’ve added a h/t note re: Bryan Alexander for Pluribus (h/t = tip of the hat, on internet parlance, as in who do you want to give credit to for suggesting something to you, as you share it).

    It may seem strange that I like remembering who recommended things to me, after the fact. To me, that’s part of my sensemaking and ongoing relationship deepening habits. In this case, Pluribus is a scifi show, which is a genre I used to think that I didn’t like, which I’m quickly realizing was probably never the case, I just didn’t explore it much in the past. Since Bryan is a futurist, I’m intrigued by the sorts of fictional works that shape his thinking on an ongoing basis. Now I’m wondering if it was Tom Tobin who recommended the show, or maybe both of them did. Hmmm…

    As I review all of the ways Mangan articulated for acquiring knowledge, I’m realizing the extent to which Bryan Alexander embodies all of those in his practice. It was such a delight to get to talk to him for an extended period of time, without the normal nerves of getting ready to press record for a podcast interview, or to have just finished talking with him for an episode and then needing to quickly close down the conversation at the end of our scheduled time together (I could talk with him for hours, which was proven this week!). I’m excited to talk to him at the beginning of December for an episode that will air in January about his forthcoming book:

    Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, by Bryan Alexander

    He gave a keynote here at POD25 about the book’s themes, as well, so between reading it in the coming ten days and having heard him share via his address, I feel that much more excited about our upcoming conversation.

    One might think that someone who knows as much as Bryan does would be the person doing the most talking at the dinner table. However, close observation of Bryan’s conversational habits would quickly reveal his heightened curiosity in settings like that, taking in what’s being shared, and setting up even more possibilities for each person to engage in the conversation.

    I’m going to look forward to returning to these 14 ways to acquire knowledge and considering even more the ways in which I get to witness them in practice during events like the one I’m at this week.

    PS. My deep gratitude to Olivia from OneHE who extended the invitation for the wonderful dinner with such curious, interesting people, including Bryan. 

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  • No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking – Teaching in Higher Ed

    No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    As we round down our time in the PKMastery workshop, I’m now presented with a topic that is both familiar, yet still incredibly challenging for me: systems thinking. One of the best books I read in my MA was The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. I discovered that I didn’t have a digital copy (where I like to keep highlights) and was fortunate to find it on sale for $1.99, plus a digital credit that made it “free”.

    The key dimensions of the disciplines of the learning organization are listed by Senge in the introduction:

    • Systems thinking: He describes here how rain happens, with a bunch of different events that happen across distance, time, and space, yet: “… they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.” We use systems thinking to be more effective at seeing the full picture and associated patterns, as well as to find ways to facilitate change.
    • Personal mastery: Senge distinguishes the multiple meanings of the word mastery. Yes, it can mean dominance over another, yet can also have to do with proficiency. He defines personal mastery as, “…the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.”
    • Mental models: These baked in assumptions, over-generalized beliefs impact how we understand and explain what happens and the actions we take as a result of those paradigms.
    • Building shared vision: Organizations that achieve great things do so through leadership capacity at developing a shared perspective on where the organization is headed. Senge describes: “When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar “vision statement”), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.”
    • Team learning: Senge encourages us to look to the Greeks’ practice of dialog vs discussion. When we are in dialog, our ideas are free-flowing and we can build a capacity to suspend our assumptions and actually think together. In contrast, the word discussion has ties with word like “percussion” and “concussion” and the idea of competitive ideation can take place.

    Senge describes how the fifth discipline is systems thinking, because it weaves together the other disciplines toward intentional transformation. When we can visualize something better, we can understand it more effectively, as Jarche illustrates in a story about when NASA first released a picture of the earth, taken from space. He writes how:

    There are many ways to use visualization to understand data better. The real value of big data is using it to ask better questions. Visualization can be a conversation accelerator.

    Taking existing systems and using visualization to surface the ways the various parts of the system shape the other parts is vital in increasing our individual and collective abilities to learn.

    What Holds Us Back From Being a Learning Organization

    In chapter two, Senge writes about what he calls organizational learning disabilities. I’m not sure he communicates in such a way to support more of an asset-based framework for disability that many of us have become familiar with today. But I still want to list and describe them here, as this was my biggest takeaway from the book, reading it more than twenty years ago.

    1. “I am my position”

    “When asked what they do for a living, most people describe the tasks they perform every day, not the purpose of the greater enterprise in which they take part. Most see themselves within a system over which they have little or no influence. They do their job, put in their time, and try to cope with the forces outside of their control. Consequently, they tend to see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position.”

    1. “The enemy is out there”

    “When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused. Like the person being chased by his own shadow, we cannot seem to shake them.”

    1. The illusion of taking charge

    “All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise… True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems. It is a. product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.”

    1. The fixation on events

    Senge describes how we evolved out of societies where people had to be focused on events to survive, like watching for the saber-toothed tiger to show up and be able to respond immediately.

    “Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.”

    1. The parable of the boiled frog

    “Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic… The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it’s as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we can’t see anything at 33-1/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.”

    Remember that this is meant to be a metaphor to help us explain this phenomenon. No frogs were harmed in sharing this boiling frog apologue.

    1. The delusion of learning from experience

    “Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.”

    1. The myth of the management team

    “All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person’s view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it’s usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn from.”

    Senge goes on to describe what Chris Argyris from Harvard calls “skilled incompetence” (gift, non-paywalled article from HBR)- groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning. Since we’re talking frogs a lot in this series of PKM posts, I can’t help but bring up another illustrative story having to do with skilled incompetence.

    The cartoon character Michigan J Frog would only dance and sing when the man who found him was alone. Any time that someone else entered the picture, the frog just sat there, making normal frog noises. Here’s a look at his antics:

    Looks to me like skilled incompetence and also some seriously skilled frog theatrics (but only when no one is looking).

    What Comes Next

    The next part of The Fifth Discipline is something Senge calls “the beer game.” It is a memorable look at what happens when we are unable to see the entire system, but only one part of it. Let’s just say there’s a supposed shortage of beer, and then lots and lots of beer. But you should read it, as I’m nowhere capturing the marvelous metaphor that is the beer game.

    Readers are also instructed how to map systems in this book, though it is a practice that I never mastered. Jarche links to Tools for Systems Thinkers: Systems Mapping, by Leyia Acaroglu. which gives a great introduction and series of maps to use to explore complex ideas. Acaroglu illustrates their value by describing:

    As a practicing creative change-maker, I use systems mapping tools like this all the time when I want to identify the divergent parts of the problem set and find unique areas in which to develop interventions. I also use them to gain clarity in complexity, and find it especially useful when working in teams or collaborating because it puts everyone on the same page.

    I pretty much want to take every class that Levia and her team have available on the Unschool of Disruptive Design site. I’m also thinking I had better settle myself down a bit and wrap up this PKMastery course before biting off anything more. That, plus a couple of big conferences coming up I still need to prepare for…

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  • What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible – Teaching in Higher Ed

    What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    Jarche informs us that when we narrate our work, we don’t experience knowledge transfer, but what we do get is greater understanding. Our individual, self-directed learning is difficult to codify, he explains, and is more focused on relationships and expertise. When we narrate our work, focusing on decisions and processes, we make that work more visible to others. This means we can experiment and share knowledge, learning together in real time. The results of this thinking together results in enterprise curation, where we can more easily codify knowledge and experience the results of our earlier efforts.

    network era knowledge flow individual mastery informs knowledge management Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) requires tools and time to seek, sense, and share knowledge

    The value of social bookmarks are hard to see, at first. However, over time, especially when combined with the use of feed aggregators and readers, we eventually get to witness the power of PKM as a discipline. I’ve been using Raindrop.io bookmarks for years, now, and enjoy having shareable bookmarks (which I can surface, when a situation encourages that practice), yet most of my collections are private. One that is now public is my growing collection of AI articles, in both an RSS feed and just a browsable page.

    I do find myself cringing a bit as I save items there, knowing that I certainly don’t endorse each link I save and the topic of AI is so controversial and polarizing. I’ve got everything up there from the world as we know it is crumbling to its core to fun hacks to use AI to build you a rocket ship to the moon (or load your dishwasher) or some such thing.

    Jarche states that our emphasis when we narrate our work should be on making our thinking accessible, but to avoid disrupting people with what we choose to share. He writes:

    The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice.

    One practice Jarche mentions under his tips and links section is to keep a journal. While I’ve not been good at this practice since my teenage years long ago, I did find many of these 6 Ways Keeping a Journal Can Help Your Career compelling. In Episode 425 of Teaching in Higher Ed, I share Viji Sathy’s and Kelly Hogan’s suggestion to keep a “Starfish” folder. There are variations of the beloved story of the starfish, including this Tale of the Starfish page from the Starfish Foundation with a powerful video describing the power in making a difference for a single starfish, even if we can’t rescue them all.

    I have kept up with digital encouragement folders for years now, both on my email accounts, as well as in my file directories (across my personal and professional domains). While not a journal, exactly, these stories and words can bring me encouragement during difficult times.

    I’ve been paying for the Day One Journal App for years now, though entirely languish in my practice of journaling. I would switch over to Obsidian, which has the benefit of future proofing any notes I take using Obsidian, since they are just text files sitting wherever I want them to be (as in if the app went away, the text files are still there and readable).

    However, Day One brings together all the TV and movies that I’ve watched, all my social media posts and images, and all the videos I’ve favorited on YouTube. I use Sequel to track what I want to watch, which then optionally integrates with the free Trakt service, which allows for an IFTTT rule to add an entry to Day One each time I mark something as watched in Sequel. In case you’re wondering about how I accomplish this, I found these two automations on IFTTT and never had to change a thing.

    Perhaps someday I’ll go down a rabbit trail of trying to figure out a longer-term, non-subscription based model for collecting all those memories across all those different services and not locking myself into DayOne. For now, I’m enjoying revisiting this glimpse of these two upside down kind of people from 2017….

    Two kids stand on their heads, upside down in a cushioned swivel chair

    …and then having this song from Jack Johnson start playing on the soundtrack of my mind for what I’m sure will last at least a few hours.

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  • I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    Sometimes we think we need experts, sure. But we shouldn’t dismiss the power of finding fellow seekers. There are times when an expert might help us, but also times they leave us behind or otherwise are unable to contribute to our growth. They may not have sufficient beginner’s mind or childlike curiosity. We may need the empathy and lack of judgement that can be possible with someone who is still wrestling through these same ideas, themselves.

    I’ve often tried to coach students in showing them the ways that they can help their professors, when they often think their only possible role is as one being the receiver of help. Similarly, when we are in a seeking role, we aren’t able to see the ways we can add value to the learning process for ourselves and others. We can wrestle with trying to give the appearance of competence versus staying in the seeker’s mindset and focusing on curiosity and wonder. This hesitance at potentially looking foolish to others in our incompetence can not only hold us back from learning, but also cause us to feel alone. It is vital to connect with other seekers and experience the benefits of those roles within our networks.

    Jarche writes:

    Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines.

    I sure hope Harold is right about cross-disciplinary innovation expanding, as we need that more than ever. In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein instructs:

    Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead… start planning experiments.

    The Value of Experiments

    What are experiments? Epstein describes them by introducing physicist Andre Geim and his “Friday night experiments” (FNEs). It was through these endeavors that Geim won not a fancy Nobel Prize, but an Ig Nobel (which Geim shares with collaborator M V Berry via their Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons piece, available through the Internet Wayback Machine). The Ig Nobel is bestowed on those who at first seem like they’re doing something ridiculous. From Wikipedia:

    The Ig Nobel Prize (/ˌɪɡ noʊˈbɛl/) is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. Its aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word “ignoble”.

    A serious researcher, Geim is (as of 2025) the only person to both win a Nobel and an Ig Nobel prize. Those who are in line to potentially win an Ig Nobel are first informed, such that they can determine if the satirical nature of the designation might be detrimental to their research careers. For his FNEs, Geim was experimenting with levitating frogs with magnets and was awarded the satirical prize for that less “serious” work. Through another FNE, Geim wound up developing “gecko tape,” which was based on the properties of geckos’ feet. These less serious experiments contributed to his more “serious” research, which ultimately led to his prestigious receipt of a Nobel Prize.

    A lump of graphite, a graphene transistor, and a tape dispenser.

    This 2010 image of a lump of graphite, a graphene transistor, and a tape dispenser, items that were given to the Nobel Museum by researchers Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov to reflect their Nobel research. Before their discoveries, it was believed to be impossible to create material that could conduct electricity in such thin layers as graphene is now able to, which has opened up even more possibilities in both material science and electronics.

    In his first-person narrative from his 2010 Nobel Prize, he describes how his Russian literature tutor critiqued his writing for trying too hard to parrot experts vs trusting his own intuition. Geim writes:

    My tutor said that what I was writing was good but it was clear from my essays that I tried to recall and repeat the thoughts of famous writers and literature critics, not trusting my own judgement, afraid that my own thoughts were not interesting, important or correct enough. Her advice was to try and explain my own opinions and ideas and to use those authoritative phrases only occasionally, to support and strengthen my writing. This simple advice was crucial for me – it changed the way I wrote. Years later I noticed that I was better at explaining my thoughts in writing than my fellow students.

    I once was able to interview a recipient of the Ig Nobel for Teaching in Higher Ed: Episode 591 – Rethinking Student Attendance Policies for Deeper Engagement and Learning with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer. Danny is the one of these two collaborators with this great honor. Take a look at the incredible title of the piece that won him the Ig Nobel: Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, by Daniel M. Oppenheimer Imagine how bummed I was that despite me being so excited to ask him more about it, my nerves got the best of me and I entirely forgot to ever mention it during our conversation for the podcast.

    Researching Versus Searching

    Epstein describes in Range the ways in which the novice mindset gets weaved together with the expert mindset in such transformative ways. He reveals how us being willing to be vulnerable in our not knowing and early experimentation through an art historian’s description of how Geim is emblematic of this willingness to stay in the not knowing longer. Epstein tells how:

    Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,” Lewis wrote.

    My friend, Naomi, and I always joke with each other about our “rabbit trail” emails back and forth to each other. I often wish there were a better expression that more precisely evokes the delight that can come from a diversion. Two years before he won the Nobel, Geim was asked to explain his research process. He described how instead of always going deep, he likes to stay in the shallow and move around. He described:

    I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.

    Seeking as Doing

    Jarche illustrates how when trust is low that doers, connectors, and catalysts can address the limitations of credibility that exist in the roles of professors, stewards, and experts. He asserts: We Need Less Professing and More Doing. He describes how someone like Zeynep Tukekci can be not a medical professional herself, but so gifted at weaving “knowledge from many disciplines into a coherent narrative.”

    Jarche stressing the doing part made me think of Mike Caulfield, who says that novice fact checkers need not to solely focus on critical thinking, but he would rather we all get far better at teaching critical doing skills. I’ve been having a blast following Mike’s own critical doing skills as he documents his experiments with in what ways AI may be able to help with critical thinking/doing. He is in the process of learning out loud, as he identifies the less helpful approaches for trying to use AI for fact checking and where he sees promise for achieving better results than most people would be able to come up with, themselves.

    In a lot of ways, I’m seeing Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop as my own set of small experiments. In Dave’s recent Coaching for Leaders Episode 747, he interviews Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Le Cunff explains how:

    The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind.

    Sounds a lot like PKM to me… Until next time. For now, it is dinnertime around here and we ordered Cheesecake Factory. It’s good to be back home. In the meantime, here’s for our individual and collective ability to see clearly now, as we practice PKM together.

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  • Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I’ve been traveling this week, so got a bit behind on my reflections on Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) workshop. The other thing that is a bit frustrating, is that I haven’t been disciplined about my typical sensemaking habits and practices and seem to have lost the notes I took on a video he shared about something new to me: network weaving. At some point, maybe my reflections will resurface (my digital inboxes are overflowing, at the moment, and search seems no use to me if I can’t even find the haystack that the needle may be hiding in with those notes). That’s all just to say, I’m all over the place right now.

    Network Weaving

    I stubbornly don’t want to rewatch the video at this exact moment. I’m sitting in an airport, next to an outlet with all my devices happily charging until it is time to get on my first of two flights for the day. To say that I am a person with battery anxiety is an understatement. Here’s what I remember about watching Networks: Weaving People, Ideas and Projects, though, mixed with the connections I found with other ideas I’ve encountered in the past.

    June Holley describes network weaving as connecting people, ideas, and projects. Hearing her describe the generosity and intentionality involved in network weaving had me reflecting on Coaching for Leaders Episode 279 with Tom Henschel: How to Grow Your Professional Network. Prior to listening to that conversation between Dave and Tom, I had thought about networking more as something I was never very good at, but tolerated, since I knew it was necessary in most professions.

    Tom described different types of networking and it was then that I realized I actually loved it and did it all the time; just that I hadn’t thought of what I enjoy doing falling under the category of networking. I enjoy meeting someone new and then identifying who else I know that is into the same stuff that they’re into. I think what Tom was describing is a lot like June Holley’s description of network weaving. Jarche shares this short Network Weaving 101 article from Valdis Krebs, which describes how this process is all about “closing triangles.” Krebs writes:

    A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z.

    This makes so much sense to me, instantly. Some of the other content that Jarche has shared has been challenging for me to take in (which I appreciate, as he’s stretching me and helping me grow). But this one, I feel like I get on a more instinctive level. Like I’ve been doing something for much of my life, without having a word for it, yet experiencing such joy each time it happens.

    Imposter Syndrome

    I’m also realizing that one of the ways I try to calm my nerves when preparing to do a keynote or workshop may very well be embodied by the idea of network weaving. The lizard part of my brain starts to tell myself that I have nothing to offer (this gets exasperated by being in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city, after sitting too long on airplanes all day). One of the best listener emails I ever received came from Itamar Kastner in Scotland. He said that he knows I’m a fan of music and thought I might enjoy Grace Petrie, and English Folk singer-song writer “in the protest singer tradition of Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie,” he explained over email. Yes, indeed, Itamar was spot on in recommending Grace Petrie’s Nobody Knows That I’m a Fraud:

    To thwart the less sophisticated parts of my brain that make me wonder what I’m doing in a hotel room, preparing for the next day’s adventures, I work to shift my focus away from how I am feeling and what I might like people to experience in the session with me. I even try to shrink it down more than a bunch of nameless faces and think about a single person and where they may be struggling and potentially feeling alone or like a failure in some way. What sorts of imposter syndrome symptoms might otherwise be relieved through my vulnerability in not having everything figured out, yet learning out loud, anyway? How might that posture provide fertile ground for others to do the same?

    The second half of how I can calm my nerves is to remember that my job isn’t to talk about what I do in my own teaching, necessarily. Rather, I get to share these incredible stories and point people back to the source of inspiration that I’ve found through the podcast across all these years. This feels very much like what I now understand to be a form of collective network weaving (as in connecting many people to new ideas, people, and projects. The last eleven and a half years, I’ve been fortunate to get to talk to people from all over the world who love teaching and learning (just like me). The stories within those conversations are limitless sources of hope, practice, and feelings of solidarity.

    Jackie Shay offers the final piece of the puzzle for unraveling those feelings of insecurity that can be present for so many of us, by the way. I realize that last sentence mixed at least two metaphors at once, but give me a break. I’m sitting in an airport, remember? 😂 On Episode 571: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Through Joyful Curiosity, Jackie asks:

    Why can’t we recognize that these different types of intelligences have just as much value as intellectual intelligence?

    I’m not supposed to ever be even close to the smartest person in the room. Not even close. But curiosity and connection? Those are two pursuits I’ve enjoyed my whole life and are forms of intelligence to be valued and cultivated in ourselves and others. As we prepare to share our sensemaking process with others, how about we stop trying to out-perform the imaginary room of intelligent people we’ll be talking at and start working on creating conversations that spark imagination?

    Jackie Shay is tremendously good at getting people curious and engaged. I remember so vividly talking to Jackie about my memories of camping with my family in Joshua Tree as a little girl and getting swept away in all the specifics that flooded into my mind. Then, I felt like I should pull back and joked about revealing a bigger focus on capitalism than I had hoped for a conversation about nature/science. My brother and I used to have a whole economy we had built out of the various elements in the desert back then, like the quartz crystals and different types of plants.

    Jackie laughed with me, but also let me know that sorting and categorizing things (as we had done with the different elements there in the desert) was actually a big part of science. We were doing science, even though I didn’t have a word for that at the time (and clearly didn’t in my embarrassment feeling like no one wanted to hear about my childhood memories until she pointed out to me that we had been doing science, without realizing it). I recalled Alexis Pierce Caudell recommending Categories We Live By: How We Classify Everyone and Everything, by Gregory L. Murphy on Episode 527. While I wish I had finished reading it by now, but it sits in the virtual pile of books I’ve started but have yet to complete. It’s not a science book, though, well… except maybe the varieties related to library science and information technology. I obviously need to read the book before I should be commenting on what it is and isn’t. Sigh.

    Two young kids about the age of six and eight stand in front of hills in the background and stone structures in the foreground. The stones make up the shape of walls and other structures.

    I don’t think at all that this picture of my brother and I was actually taken in Joshua Tree. I’m going to have to see if I can find one in the photo albums I haven’t quite gotten to scanning yet. But it reminds me of our imaginative life that we had when our family would take trips together.

    Closing Triangles

    As Valdis Krebs described, network weaving is all about closing triangles. At the keynote I gave for the ETOM conference today, I didn’t exactly close a triangle. However, I got to spend some time with a couple of past Teaching in Higher Ed podcast guests. Christina Moore discussed Inclusive Practices Through Digital Accessibility on Episode 293 and Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning on Episode 456. VaNessa Thompson helped us discover How to Engage on Social Media on Episode 416.

    Three women stand at the front of a large lecture hall in front of a colorful presentation slide

    VaNessa and Christina already know each other and I know them. Still, this memory we now share tightens the bond between us and now creates a triangular relationship between the three of us. Again, not necessarily closing triangles here. But certainly doing something new with going from one-on-one relationships and now having this shared triangle to remember and potentially strengthen in the future.

    PS. My talk was aligned with the conference theme (innovation). I had some fun with alliteration and divided the talk into: 1) innovation 2) imagination and 3) imitation (which was kinda like curation, but I just couldn’t break the alliteration streak I was on there). In my reading for the topic of connectors, I just saw a quick reference in Beth Kanter’s piece that Jarche shared about how helpful network weaving can be when we’re “stumbling through the fog of innovation.” I like that phrase “fog of innovation” and only wish I had come across it before today’s keynote. 🤦‍♀️🫠

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  • The Experts in My Neighborhood – Teaching in Higher Ed

    The Experts in My Neighborhood – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    The topic of how expertise is no longer valued today is often discussed. I realize that I am walking through well-trodden pathways, as I bring it up in these reflections on experts today. In The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, Tom Nichols writes:

    These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.

    In today’s post, I want to think less about the societal and educational concerns I have about the death of expertise and more about how I might continue to attempt to inculcate habits that can keep me from dying that same death, myself. Part of that practice involves finding and curating many experts to help shape my thinking, over time.

    PKM Roles from Harold Jarche

    For this topic, Jarche invites us to use a map of personal knowledge mastery (PKM) roles to determine where we currently reside and where we would like to go, in terms of our PKM practice. He offers this graphic as part of his Finding Perpetual Beta book:

    On the Y axis, we can sort ourselves into doing high or low amounts of sharing. As I wrote previously, my likelihood of sharing is in direct relation to the topic I’m exploring. However, as Jarche recommended social bookmarking as one way of sharing, perhaps I was selling myself short when I categorized myself as not likely to share anything overly controversial. I have over 35 thousand digital bookmarks on Raindrop.io and add around 10-20 daily. However, I’m more likely to be categorized as highly visible sharing in terms of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and the topics I write about on the Teaching in Higher Ed blog.

    On the X axis, our activities are plotted on a continuum more toward high or low sense-making. A prior workshop participant of Jarche’s wrote:

    We must make SENSE of everything we find, and that includes prioritising–recognising what is useful now, what will be useful later, and what may not be useful.

    Given my propensity for saving gazillions of bookmarks and carefully tagging them for future use, combined with my streak of weekly podcast episodes airing since June of 2014, when it comes to teaching and learning, I’m doing a lot of sense-making on the regular.

    These are the (NEW) Experts in My Neighborhood

    Taking inspiration from Sesame Street’s People in Your Neighborhood and from Jarche’s activity related to experts, I offer the following notes on experts. When I searched for people within teaching and learning on Mastodon, I found that I was already following a lot of them. I decided to then look at who people I already follow are following:

    • Ethan Zuckerman – UMass Amherst, Global Voices, Berkman Klein Center. Formerly MIT Media Lab, Geekcorps, Tripod.com
    • Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. – Professor, researcher, writer, teacher. I care about content moderation, digital labor, the state of the world. I like animals and synthesizers and games. On the internet since 1993. Mac user since they came out. I like old computers and OSes. I love cooking. Siouxsie is my queen.
      • I was intrigued by her having written a content moderation book called Behind the Screen. I know enough about content moderation to know that I know pretty much nothing about content moderation.
      • She hasn’t posted in a long while, so I’m not sure how much I’ll regularly have ongoing opportunities to see what she’s currently exploring or otherwise working on

    Other Things I Noticed

    As I was exploring who people I follow are connected with on Mastodon, I noticed that you can have multiple pinned posts, unlike other social media I’ve used. Many people have an introduction post pinned to the top of their posts, yet also have other things they want to have front and center. One big advantage to Bluesky to me has been the prevalence of starter packs. The main Mastodon account mentioned an upcoming feature involving “packs” around twenty days ago, but said that they’re not sure what they’ll call the feature.

    Sometimes, scrolling through social media can be depressing. I decided that the next time I’m getting down on Mastodon, I should just check out what’s happening on the compostodon hashtag. It may be the most hopeful hashtag ever.

    The Biggest Delight From the Experience

    Another person who was new to me as an expert on Mastodon was JA Westenberg. According to JA Westenberg’s bio, Joan is a tech writer, angel investor, CMO, Founder. A succinct goal is also included on the about page of JoanWestenberg.com:

    My goal: to think in public.

    As I was winding down my time doing some sensemaking related to experts, I came across a video from Westenberg that was eerily similar to what Jarche has been stressing about us making PKM a practice. I can’t retrace my steps for how I came across Joan’s video on Mastodon, but a video thumbnail quickly caught my eye. Why You Should Write Every Day (Even if You’re Not a Writer) captured my imagination immediately, as I started watching. In addition to the video, there’s a written article of the same title posted, as well.

    As I continue to pursue learning through the PKM workshop, I’m blogging more frequently than I may ever have (at least in the last decade for sure). Reading through Joan’s reactions to the excuses we make when we don’t commit to writing resonate hard. We think we don’t have time. How about realizing we’re not writing War and Peace, Joan teases, gently. Too many of us get the stinking thinking that we don’t have anything good to say or that this comes naturally to people who are more talented and articulate than we are. Joan writes:

    Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.

    Before I conclude this post, I want to be sure to stress the importance I’m gleaning of not thinking of individual experts as the way to practice PKM. Rather, it is through engaging with a community of experts that we will experience the deepest learning. A.J. Jacobs stresses that we should heed his advice:

    Thou shalt pay heed to experts (plural) but be skeptical of any one expert (singular)

    By cultivating many experts whose potential disagreements may help us cultivate a more nuanced perspective on complex topics. When we seek to learn in the complex domain, the importance of intentionality, intellectual humility, and curiosity becomes even more crucial. Having access to a network of experts helps us navigate complexity more effectively.

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