Thursday, January 28, 2010

PKM is much more than "aggregate - filter - connect"

Harold Jarche and Tim Kastelle wrote about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as a process of "aggregate - filter - connect". Stephen Downes criticized the proposed process, noting that it misses the crucial actions of "remix" and "repurpose". I totally agree with Stephen here, that the proposed process provides a VERY simplified vision that captures only a small part of the PKM process.

I would further add that the proposed process also misses some concepts which are also crucial for PKM/learning (in my eyes, PKM and learning are just two sides of the same coin), such as learning from failures and reflection.

In an earlier post, I talked about learning/PKM as the continuous creation of a personal knowledge network (PKN). For each learner/knowledge networker, a PKN is a unique adaptive repertoire of:

- Tacit and explicit knowledge nodes (i.e. people and information) (external level)

- One's theories-in-use. This includes norms for individual performance, strategies for achieving values, and assumptions that bind strategies and values together (conceptual/internal level)


This implies that a learner/knowledge worker needs not only to be a good knowledge networker (i.e. one who has the ability to aggregate, filter and connect as well as to remix and repurpose), but also a good double-loop learner; i.e. one who has the ability to:


- Construct her own representation of the theories-in-use of the whole.

- Reflect

- (Self-)criticize

- Detect and correct errors with norms and values specified by the new setting.

- Inquire

- Test, challenge, and eventually change her theories-in-use (i.e. her private image of the theories-in-use of the whole) according to the new setting.


The main message is that PKM/learning is much more than "aggregate - filter - connect".

1 comment:

Harold Jarche said...

Of course PKM is more than aggregate, filter & connect, but AFC is something that people can easily remember and then dig deeper as they get into it. You are not going to engage most people with a lengthy discourse. For several years, I explained PKM as having 7 components. Nobody used or remembered them. When I switched to 3, my clients could remember and start using them in their conversations. Once the "idea" of PKM was accepted, we could have deeper and more meaningful conversations.

My post is not part of a doctoral thesis but is a further shaping of the simplest message possible. I'm trying to reach a wider audience than educational technologists and knowledge management specialists.