Phil Houtz

What is a Digital Garden?

The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work. But the text that

Cornell notes for lecture classes

The Cornell notetaking system uses a college-ruled notebook with each page divided into thirds. These sections are for points that the lecturer makes, questions about these points, and a final summary of everything on the page. Ideas are captured in the largest section of the page, each idea getting a couple of lines with ample

Eight tactics for effective PKM

Frand and Lippincott suggested eight tactics for processing information whether it was digital, analog or based on experience. The tactics are based on the “knowledge spiral” proposed by Nonaka and Takeuch. Note that items 1 and 7 are similar in that they establish a set of criteria for the type of information that goes into

Personal Knowledge Management Skills

PKM skills can be boiled down to Or as Harold Jarche puts it, “Seek – Sense – Share” Particular skills include: The essential abilities are how to collect meaningful information from reliable sources and process it in a way that makes it useful to others, when it is needed. One of the essential skills that

The difference between PIM and PKM

The disciplines of Personal Information Management (PIM) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) both have to do with the capture, collection, and curation of information. The main difference between the two disciplines seems to be in the output. For a graduate research paper where source material is captured and used as a factual basis to support

Digital garden as a slower form of information consumption

Tom Critchlow contrasts a “digital garden” against other online information sources such as Twitter. The garden is a public collection of notes, ideas, and musings. You can come back to it time and time again and each time learn something new. Twitter is more like a stream, always moving. And, as the old proverb goes,

Doing one true thing at a time to intensify life

Doing one true thing at a time will intensify the life of that location where you are working. To know if it is a true thing, follow the feeling in your heart. If you do one thing at a time – just a true thing that comes from a carefully considered feeling – that means,

Creating life vs preserving nature

The goal of architecture (and presumably other aspects of human creation) should be to create life.  Alexander makes a distinction between creating life and preserving nature which is generally accomplished by leaving areas untouched, such as in wildlife preserves. Nor is it simply trying to make structures that are compatible with nature. He gives the

Gardens are man-made structures, not nature

We tend to see a garden, even a vegetable garden, as being a little slice of nature. But a garden is entirely a man-made structure. The choice of plants to add to the garden, and the choice of the plants and animals to keep out of the garden, are all done by design. When done

Knowledge spiral for communication of information

In 1995 Japanese professors Nonaka and Takeuchi delivered a paper that looked at some of the problems with acting on explicit knowledge and transmitting tacit knowledge. The problem with explicit knowledge, encoded in manuals and help files, is that there are often gaps between what the technical writers included and the processes that actual users

Personal Knowledge Management

Personal knowledge management is the practice of collecting, classifying, storing, and retrieving information for personal use. It is related to the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) which has to do with information collection and use within an organization. Skills include: Tools include: Practitioners include people ranging from Harold Jarche and his Personal Knowledge Mastery program

Origin of Personal Knowledge Management

Personal Knowledge Management was a term coined by Jason Frand and Carol Hixon at UCLA’s Anderson School for business. It was developed as a way for MBA students to be able to search, categorize, store, retrieve, and use knowledge using personal computers. Several things contributed to a need for this discipline at this time. For

Information farming is a continuous collaborative process

In 1993 Mark Bernstein proposed the metaphor “information farming” as a way to cultivate and share knowledge withing organizations. The farming metaphor stood in contrast to the ideas of information mining (extraction) and information manufacturing (stockpiling) because it emphasised cooperation and community. The idea is that knowledge workers would collaborate on data, refine it, and

A garden is semi-cultivated wildness

A garden is more obviously a living structure because its various parts – trees, flower beds, animals – are all alive. Less visible is the continuous process of unfolding that is taking place, fruit dropping from trees and rotting, being swept away or eaten by birds and insects, a path meandering through the space for

Links to notes should be unexpected

Niklas Luhmann, emphasizing his notion that the Zettelkasten is a communication partner, stressed that links between notes should point to something you might not have thought of on your own. He talks about drawing on the rich network of ideas in the Zettelkasten to accomplish this. He also usese terms like accidental and serendiptiy. The