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.]