Just Seven Things

Personal Knowledge Management: How does Social Media impact?

I had a series of moments a few weeks back when I posted on the Social and Information Web Drug.

I’ve been building up a whole heap of thoughts and feelings on one particular aspect: personal knowledge/ information management. Specifically, I want to start a speculative list of thoughts on the ways that social media is impacting, and may impact further in future.

I am taking a definition of organisational knowledge management and rejigging the words to suggest that we have to manage our own knowledge in the same way that an organisation manages its knowledge:

‘Personal knowledge management could comprises a range of practices used by our consciousness to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows, and how it knows it’

1. We previously had common sources of information: books, journals, online articles, word-of-mouth coaching, best practice sharing, peer reviews, reading lists etc.
2. Social media has taken all of these elements and added rocket fuel: choose your area of interest and people are parsing, snipping, cutting, sharing, distributing and publishing information at an increasingly rapid rate
3. The addition of personal opinion or ‘weight’ seems to deliver the same authority in people’s minds as expert opinion
4. The speed of information gathering, comment addition or ‘grouping’ (adding with other disparate, but relevant information prior to onwards distribution) is increasing, but to what end? The visibility of those using the ‘added-value’ information, and their requirements (unless we argue that it is always the same people that create it) are missing
5. Online applications may be providing the individual with the tools to better manage social media for our own personal knowledge management

There are a bundle of thoughts under the title ‘Personal Knowledge Management’, again on Wikipedia with good links to the following blogs/ articles:

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) — an Update, blog post in How to Save the World by Dave Pollard

My personal KM, Knowledge work framework (PKM + tasks) in Mathemagenic, blog post by Lilia Efimova

Personal Toolkit: Three thousand communities of practice, article by Steve Barth in KMWorld

KM Question of the Week: “What is personal knowledge management? How can individuals manage their own knowledge?”, blog post in Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

More to come, but I’m working towards exploring whether it is possible to define a perfect system of personal knowledge management? (by definition requiring personalisation for you….)