|
What is personal knowledge management?
Jerome Martin |
|
Each of us has a lifetime of experience, education, anecdotes, stories we have never told anyone, memories, cultural resources and mental baggage that our families and society have left with us. We also have rooms full of books, papers, birthday cards, photographs, and notes from the classes and workshops we have taken, income tax forms for the last twenty years (if we are Canadian), and a computer full of files, memos, what-once-was-new software that we still have not tried or mastered, and the names and addresses of most of the people we know. We know far more than we remember: those of us who are old enough know where we were when we heard that John F. Kennedy was shot and, if we are Edmontonians, we know where we were when we learned that Wayne Gretzky was traded. I can remember random facts from University classes and the names of most of my classmates – and I remember enough about economics to know that I will never become an economist. However, I have a blend of experience and skills which is different from anyone’s – and so do you. How can we use these resources effectively? How can we even know what our resources are? Personal knowledge management is knowing what knowledge we have and how we can organize it, mobilize it and use it to accomplish our goals – and how we can continue to create knowledge. Most of the papers about knowledge management discuss it in terms of companies and institutions, even though they say that most knowledge exists in people’s minds, not the files of organizations. So knowledge walks around every day, and if employers do not recognize it and champion it that same knowledge walks out the door and down the street. Continua >>> |
|
