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Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a concept that has grown out of a combination of knowledge management (KM) and personal information management (PIM) and cognitive human abilities. Image File history File links Information. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that they carry conviction without supporting information or reason. ... In rhetoric, a tautology is an unnecessary (and usually unintentional) repetition of meaning, utilising different words, i. ... abstraction in general. ... Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning. ... Personal information management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related and not... Cognitive The scientific study of how people obtain, retrieve, store and manipulate information. ...

More particular, the Personal KM is focused on helping an individual be more effective -- to work better. While the focus is the individual, the goal of the movement is to enable individuals to operate better in groups and in corporations as well. This is as opposed to the traditional view of KM, which appears to be more centered on enabling the corporation to be more effective by "recording" and making available what its people know.

A core focus of PKM is 'personal inquiry', a quest to find, connect, learn and explore.

PKM is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. They need processes and tools by which they can evaluate what they know in a given situation, and then seek out ways to fill the gaps when needed. This frequently implies technology, but one can be good at PKM without much in the way of special tools. Knowledge worker, a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. ...

PKM has recently been linked to social bookmarking, blogging or k-logs. The idea is individuals use their blogs to capture ideas, opinions or thoughts and this 'voicing' will encourage cognitive diversity, promote free exchanges away from a centralized policed knowledge repository that is additional to ordinary work. Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Some organizations are now introducing PKM 'systems' with some or all of four components:

• Just-in-time Canvassing - templates and e-mail canvassing lists that enable people looking for experts or expertise to identify and connect with the appropriate people quickly and effectively
• Knowledge Harvesting - software tools that automatically collect appropriate knowledge residing on subject matter experts' hard drives rather than waiting for it to be contributed to central repositories
• Personal Content Management - taxonomy processes and desktop search tools that enable employees to organize, subscribe to, publish and find information that resides on their own desktops
• Personal Productivity Improvement - 'knowledge fairs' and one-on-one training sessions to help each employee make more effective personal use of the knowledge, learning and technology resources available to them, in the context of their own work

PKM Skills

Skills associated with personal knowledge management.

• Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.
• Manage learning. Manage how and when the individual learns.
• Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.
• Organizational skills. Personal librarianship? Personal categorization and taxonomies.
• Networking with others. Knowing what your network of people knows. Knowing who might have additional knowledge and resources to help you
• Researching, canvassing, paying attention, interviewing and observational 'cultural anthropology' skills
• Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpreting.
• Creative skills. Imagination, pattern-recognition, appreciation, innovation, inference. Understanding of complex adaptive systems.
• Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.

Criticisms of PKM

Not everyone agrees that the focus on the individual is a good thing, or that PKM is anything more than a new wrapper around personal information management (PIM). Most notably, some argue that knowledge is never an individual product - that it emerges through connections, dialog and social interaction. See Sociology of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. ...

PKM has been associated with a focus on personal branding, responsibility for personal learning, personal networking - using networking engines (Ryze, Friendster, LinkedIN) and management of individual documents, thought and writings. These activities do not illustrate the rich reach of the concept.

PKM Software

• Personalbrain
• Personal wiki
• mindManager
• e-mail, calendar, task managers
• weblogs (with a Web feed)
• Wiki
  • Semantic Wiki

Weblogs (with RSS) and wikis are emerging as important elements of some organizational 'bottom-up' PKM systems. Other useful tools include Open Space Technology, cultural anthropology, social bookmarking, stories and narrative, mindmaps, concept maps and eco-language, single frames and similar visualization techniques, just-in-time canvassing tools, automated knowledge harvesting tools, and Google Desktop and similar desktop content management tools. All these tools are self-organizing and self-managing tools, introduced ad hoc by self-forming groups within an organization to facilitate knowledge sharing and personal content management. Personal wikis allow people to link information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a similar way to how a community wiki links information across the internet. ... MindManager Pro 6 is the latest version. ... A typical web feed logo A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. ... Look up Wiki in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A Semantic Wiki is a Wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages beyond structured structrued text and hyperlinks. ...

The use of MediaWiki as a combination knowledge management/project tracker/note taking/document generation software has been suggested. MediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, including some of the largest and most popular ones. ...