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…
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…
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 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…
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…
Mike Caulfield talks about his collection of notes in his wiki and how they work together as a rich network of ideas. Part of his method is to very carefully describe the relationship between two ideas when he builds his links. These descriptions become ideas in their own right. Caulfield’s links are by nature structure…
When our desire moves us to make something, we begin to naturally start assembling bits and pieces into a kind of order. It doesn’t matter what we are working on, a piece of writing, a painting, a piece of furniture. There is an ordering process that is common to all creative works. The easiest place…
For some time now I’ve been trying to understand how architect Christopher Alexander’s idea of 15 structure preserving transformations might apply to systems outside of physical architecture. Alexander himself noted that his overarching theory about form and life would apply to all kinds of structures. You can strengthen the whole by systematically strengthening its component…
Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers. Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality…
I wrote in my previous post that Tools for Thought Need a Purpose, otherwise you end up a slave to your note system, whether it’s a Zettelkasten or a collection of Evergreen Notes, creating an endless hoard of ideas because why else do you have a PKM system in the first place? Instead you need…
