Trampling Dinosaurs . . . .

Managers and their companies will have to deal with the 76 million children of baby boomers, born between 1978 and 2000, who have started pouring into offices across the land. Four generations are being asked to coexist at once: traditionalists (born before 1945), boomers (born 1946-1964), generation X (1965-1977), and millennials (alternately known as gen-Y, echo boomers, Net gen, and even "generation why," because they never stop questioning the status quo). Managers will be challenged to minimize the friction and maximize the assets of four distinct sets of work values and styles simultaneously.

The more I teach (a variety of traditional and non-traditional students), I'm more and more aware of the "Culture Clash" as written about in Fast Company Magazine (which I heartily recommend to all business students).

The article goes on to say that

Millennials aren't interested in the financial success that drove the boomers or the independence that has marked the gen-Xers, but in careers that are personalized.

And "personalization" is not a bad thing!!! The Web 2.0 "revolution" has been fueled by those who, rather than taking what corporate America wanted to offer via the web, have instead created a web of their own.

But I also realize that I and many of my teaching colleagues (apologies for pointing this out, folks) are quickly becoming dinosaurs, thinking and teaching "old" methods and skills to students who rapidly discount anything that isn't personally profitable. And no (as the Fast Company articles explains) this won't "wash away with time." These attitudes are here to stay.

My challenge will be to find the right approach to Personal Knowledge Management that will stress the Personal part, make it immediately relevant, but also allowing students to grasp the importance of those skills to the larger organization.

Of course, the humbling possibility is that they will not only catch up, but surpass me--and that they will then teach me how to manage one's own "personal" knowledge.

It's not being kept on my toes that I mind; it's the fear that if I stop to catch my breath, I'll be run over . . . . .

The "Keeping Found Things Found" Project

On the Personal Knowledge Management front, the University of Washington's Harry Bruce is a principal in the Keeping Found Things Found Project. They describe the project:

Much of our lives is spent in the finding of things. Find a house or a car that's just right for you. Find your dream job. Or your dream mate. But, once found, what then?

As with other things, so it is with our information. Finding is just the first step. How do we keep this information so that it's there later when we need it? How do we organize it in ways that make sense for us in the lives we want to lead? Information found does us little good if we misplace it or forget to use it. And just as we must maintain a house or a car, we need to maintain our information - backing it up, archiving or deleting old information, updating information that is no longer accurate. In our digital world, advances in technologies of search and storage have far outpaced balancing advances in tools and techniques that help us to manage and make sense of our information. This project combines fieldwork with selective prototyping in an effort to understand what is needed for us to "keep found things found".

As part of the project, they offer a beta-version of a "Personal Planner," with functionality that seems to cross MS Word with OneNote:

The "My Life Bits Project"

The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. (The title to this post is linked to his website).

As I continue to research my current curricular project of Personal Knowledge Management, I'm constantly reviewing the work of others in the field. While a bit "over the top" for most students, the conceptualization and attempt by Gordon Bell to capture every bit of his life digitally is noteworthy.

In a Michael Card song, he sings that "it's hard to imagine the freedom we find, in the things we leave behind." Personal Knowledge Management is, IMHO, much about what we choose to take, and then conversely, what we do, in fact, leave behind.

Humans become individualized by filtering our "input" based upon past observations, experiences, and preferences. What is boring "elevator" music to some will bring back fond memories in (dare I say "older") others.

The application of taxonomies, the proper hierarchy of various components, and the desired outcome of the information being converted into knowledge are all critical.

I'll be posting from time to time on my curriculum development project, which fuzzily is

"a freshman-level course designed to familiarize students with their personal responsibility to capture, organize, annotate, and collaborate concerning their own journey toward becoming educated persons. The course should introduce various software enhancements to the process, while not ignoring the inter-personal nature of learning. This familiarization should then be habituated so that the knowledge worker can continue to enhance both his own and his organization's collective knowledge and expertise."