Introduction to Personal Knowledge Management

What is personal knowledge management (PKM)?

What is personal knowledge management (PKM)? Well, I'd hazard a guess that we depend largely on two main sources to search for, locate, and retrieve information, either daily or for more extensive work. These two sources are the people we know and the search engines we use on a daily basis, like Google. Relying on these two kinds of sources can get us by for many things. At times, though, we will require more rigorous sources because the task at hand requires better information or the risks involved in making a decision are weighty enough to require more certainty. Good, thorough information may reduce our uncertainty or enable us to measure levels of uncertainty, and this is helpful when making decisions, writing papers, completing projects, and working at our first major job. Therefore, in this book our first learning goal is focused on information sources, and specifically to:

  • become aware of the variety of information sources that exist,
  • learn how to search those sources for relevant information, and
  • learn how to evaluate the relevant information that we find.

This covers part of what we mean by personal knowledge management. In addition to being able to be aware of, to locate, and to evaluate information, it is also important to manage that information and to develop good workflows that help with that. What I mean is that, it can be great that we know that UK Libraries exists and that we can use it to locate good information, but if we don't use the library or other great resources available to us because we're not in the habit, then what's the point of all this good information? And what's the point in having access to all these information technologies to become informed, to do good things, and to make our lives better and easier?

I want to live in a good information age rather than merely an information age. Therefore, our second learning goal is focused on the tools and technologies that will help us build personalized information and knowledge workflows. As stated above, often the point of acquiring good information is to do some task or to make a decision. A good workflow is good if it fits our style, or our way of getting things done, because that makes the workflow more likely we'll adopt the workflow and stick with it. A good workflow also maximizes our use of good sources of information and our desired outcomes, like a paper for a class, a project for a boss, or a decision that involves some uncertainty.

Our second learning goal is, therefore, focused on personal knowledge workflows, and specifically, to:

  • become aware of the tools and technologies designed to manage personal knowledge workflows,
  • learn how to use these tools and technologies, and
  • incorporate these tools and technologies into our personal knowledge workflows

Our final learning goal focuses on outcomes and builds off the first two goals. Specifically, our final goal is to develop habits using the tools and technologies that incorporate a variety of good sources of information to accomplish a task or make a decision. That is, we want to take advantage of the many kinds of information sources that exist, to make it a habit of using those information sources in a habitual, personalized, effective way, but in the end, we often want to accomplish some task and get things done (e.g., write a paper or create a software program) or make a decision that involves some risk (e.g., buy a house or choose a healthcare procedure). In those cases, having a personal knowledge workflow that incorporates high quality sources of information facilitates accomplishing such tasks or making such decisions.

Topic Outline

To accomplish the three goals above, this book covers:

  • the differences between information sources and resources,
  • how to find new kinds of information sources and resources,
  • how to use reference management software,
  • how to search the web and databases, and
  • how to evaluate information sources.

This book is also project based. We will use the material and tools covered here to produce content for a Wikipedia article that you have selected.

Email Management

I start this book by covering two basic topics in Chapter 2: email management and generative AI. We begin with email management because email continues to be an important means of communication, especially in professional contexts, and because our inboxes can easily become overwhelming. As a result, we can miss out on important information when our inboxes are overloaded. Therefore, we will discuss ways to handle email effectively.

Generative AI

I wrote the first version of this book during the summer of 2022, just a few months before the public release of ChatGPT and later Google's Bard (now Gemini). ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI chatbots are designed to have human-like conversations. Each are super useful, interesting, and may even be fun to use. Each can produce papers, code, and help you (and me!) understand more about a variety of topics and issues. To make my point, I asked ChatGPT and Gemini about what they do. Here is what ChatGPT told me in 2022:

I am ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI. I am designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the inputs I receive. I have been trained on a wide variety of data sources, including books, articles, websites, and other written content, allowing me to provide information and engage in conversations on a wide range of topics. My purpose is to assist users like you in finding answers, offering explanations, generating creative content, and engaging in meaningful discussions. However, it's important to note that while I strive to provide accurate and helpful information, I may not always be perfect, and there are limitations to my knowledge and understanding.

And here is what Bard told me in 2022:

I would describe myself as a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.

Here are some of the things I can do:

  • I can answer your questions in a comprehensive and informative way, even if they are open ended, challenging, or strange.
  • I can generate different creative text formats, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc. I will try my best to fulfill all your requirements.
  • I can translate languages.
  • I can write different kinds of creative content.
  • I can help you with your tasks, like setting reminders, making lists, and playing music.
  • I can control your smart home devices.
  • I can help you stay organized and on track.
  • I can be your friend and companion.

I am still under development, but I am learning new things every day. I am excited to see what the future holds for me, and I hope to be able to help you in many ways.

In my experience, I have enjoyed using these services because each can make various tasks a bit easier. But there are two things to note. First, I've learned that there's a difference between using them and using them well, just like there's a difference between entering basic search queries into Google search and using advanced search queries.

Second, do not use them as a substitute for your own thinking. I like my brain and what it can do. Activities like reading, writing, coding, and conversing are activities that help me learn and help me think, and that's good for my brain and for me. I think, therefore, I am, wrote the philosopher René Descarte several centuries ago, and we want to be wary of how much we ask AI to think for us at the risk that we stop thinking for ourselves.

Therefore, we will spend a little time about on generative AI and learning how to use it well and ethically. This means we will learn how to use it augment our thinking and manage what we're learning, rather than to replace our thinking.

Remaining Lessons

In Chapters 3 and 4, we focus more on the fundamentals of PKM. In Chapter 3, we learn how to use the two major information resources: the library and the web. We also learn about reference managers, which are a lot like advanced bookmarking applications. Applications like these help us build our own collections of information sources, use those sources as needed, and are key to developing a personal knowledge workflow.

In Chapter 4, we learn the basics of information search, or information retrieval, and how it works on the web and in bibliographic databases, like we find using our library. We also cover how to recognize relevant information and then evaluate it.

In Chapter 5, we begin to focus on our final project, which is to edit a Wikipedia article. We will cover additional resources, both from the library and the web, in order to find relevant information for our chosen Wikipedia page. We will also use our reference manager to help with the project. Chapter 5 is where we work to build out our personal knowledge workflow using the tools and techniques we covered in prior chapters.

Conclusion

We live in a knowledge society. Recognizing that, the goal of this course is to become effective at using the tools to locate, evaluate, and use information in order to build personal knowledge workflows. Let's get started.