Sunday 6 April 2014

8 years of Working Out Loud thoughts #PKM

As the course on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is well on its way, one of the steps to reflect on and improve the PKM is about making a summary of Working Out Loud (or set out actions if this is the first time to be working out loud = sharing what you do through your own social media in order to build an active network that supports you and which you in turn can support).

I have been Working Out Loud for the last 8 years, and my main knowledge areas have been eLearning options as stand-alone options as well as partnerships with other institutes, mobile learning, continued medical education tools for training, and mobile learning solutions for developing regions. This took me on a very steep learning curve. Especially as mobile learning in developing regions was quite a new feature when I started on that track (and top management was not convinced mobile learning would be a good training option - first projects were paid out of my own pocket).

Why did I work in the open? 

  • It allowed me to connect with the few peers that were out there, somewhere on the globe
  • to share what I learned with others who are contemplating to roll out similar projects
  • keeping track of what I did learn, and how I solved certain challenges (a personal learning archive)
  • building a network that I could consult and feed back into. 
  • It is part of professional activism: sharing consciously to plea for open science, open commons, openness overall


Looking back at those last 8 years, how can I make improvements? Which actions will I take?

  • Challenges and failures should be shared more frequently. It does not feel good for the ego, and in some cultures failure just is not discussed, but failure is part of the essence of failure. 
  • Increase curation (synthesizing and disseminating what other peers do). I need to reconnect with my 'top notch 50' peers. I have been reducing my 'reading what others do' in the last few months and this resulted in more of an isolated feeling. The reason why I started to link less to others was due to time management challenges, a professional identity shift (from corporate solution to academic research), and loosing track on my own personal knowledge management overall. 

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