Welcome to the PKM Basics Section!

Welcome to Chapter 2, the PKM Basics section of our Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) course. In this section, we'll develop two basic skills that help manage our personal and professional knowledge effectively.

First we'll tackle Email Management. We all know that our inboxes may feel like beasts that are impossible to tame. We're going to explore strategies to organize, prioritize, and manage email more efficiently. We'll learn how to reduce clutter, deal with important messages promptly, and keep our sanity intact amidst the constant barrage of digital communication.

Second, we'll discuss the exciting (and worrisome???) world of Working with Generative AI. Generative artificial intelligence is a powerful tool. We'll look at how AI can help you to generate ideas and polish them. But AI can also get you into trouble and can certainly help you cheat on your work. Therefore, we'll discuss its ethical uses and learn to use AI to augment our own thinking and intelligence rather than replace it.

Chapter 2 is a bit of an island compared to the rest of the course. While our focus in this chapter, like the remaining chapters, is on building skills that will serve you well as students and knowledge workers, the remaining lessons covered in this work focus on building skills and working towards a final project.

In the meantime, let's get started with email and AI.