The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise. I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a…
Niklas Luhmann observes that in order to think in any constructive way he must write down his thoughts. This seems to be one of the main purposes of his Zettelkasten note-taking system – capturing thoughts and refine them by writing them down, reflecting on them, changing them. In addition to capturing thoughts in his notes,…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
A traditional story or novel is made up of crises or decision points where one or more characters determine the eventual outcome. In Jose Luis Borges’ 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” the main character travels to a small village with winding streets which promise to take him to a labyrinth. This labyrinth is…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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 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,…
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…
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…
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 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…
