Tag: pkm

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I’ve been long fascinated by memory palaces. As a primary school kid and again as a teenager when I encountered the concept, I concluded that, while fascinating, they were more effort than what I would gain. My memory was fine, and first conjuring up a set of locations and then visualising evocative things in them to remember something seemed an awful lot of upfront trouble.

In recent months I’ve looked at memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques again. Reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond gave me insights into the role of the spatial brain in remembering, but also mental health and ageing. Reading Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft gave me lots of insights both in various memory methods, as well as the effort and repetition that goes into them and which thus supports learning. Both were fun reads.

I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!

I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace! 😀
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.

Not a whole lot examples of memory palaces used for something ‘real’ and significant to its user.

Do use memory palaces? What do you remember with them for the long term? Why that? Would a note to link to be enough too?

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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 14 and 15 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the second time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I assist with inviting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)?
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 14 and 15 March in Utrecht, but as a student can’t afford the 237 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 15th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the event. It would be great if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)!

In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen

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The past year I’ve had more conversations about personal knowledge management than for a long time before. Regularly questions come up along the lines of what structures should one use, what should one keep in their notes, what are the best tools? Most of my contributions to such conversations boil down to ‘there’s nothing you should do other than what fits you, and I could show you what I do and why that works for me’.
Ultimately I keep thinking people don’t take the P in PKM far enough. I think PKM is personal not just in one way, but in at least three ways.

  1. It is personal knowledge management in the sense that your system is yours only. You do it, build and extend it as you see fit. It can exist independently of whatever other working environments you have, it is fully personally yours. This enables and secures your professional and learning autonomy, allows you to be pro-active. You bring professionalism to its upkeep and tools. When you go someplace else, you take it along with you.
  2. It is management of your personal knowledge. Personal knowledge in the sense of your own networks of meaning, your insights, the expressed connections you made between pieces of it, your associations and verbiage that tie into your internal world. It exists to feed your agency, your combinatory creativity, and is aimed at your own mix of evolving personal interests. It’s there for just you to interact with. This allows you to steer the direction of your own learning intentionally, and enables an activist and artisanal stance towards your interests, professional or otherwise. Your personal knowledge doesn’t need to be understandable or be useful to others. Sharing in context is an act in itself, an output rather than a function.
  3. It is personal management of knowledge. You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you. You create your own mechanisms and algorithms working with your material, and reflect on them. Your system does not need to be understandable or workable for others. Your structures fit your internal world, have their logic and starting point in the fact that your behaviour is pretty predictable to yourself at least. Some of the structures in your system may well be just in your head rather than made tangible in your external system. Some structures may be intentionally omitted to ensure you can surprise yourself with your system, feeding discovery and wonder.

I can’t tell you how to do PKM, I can show you what does and doesn’t work for me and tell you why I think that is. I will tell you to take PKM very personally, and then some more.

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Bookmarked Tools for Thought Library in Zotero (by Chris Aldrich)

This large and interesting collection of books, writings, quotes and other artefacts on note making and personal knowledge management, tools for thought in short, through the ages is something to explore at leisure. It seems to have been put together by Chris Aldrich some two years ago. Great stuff. Came across it in Chris’s Hypothes.is stream, and didn’t immediately realise it was a reference to his own collection.

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Obsidian has released a Webclipper for a variety of browsers. Making it easy to get stuff into your notes from your browser is a key thing to make as frictionless as possible. So this is a laudable step.

I’ve been using the Markdownload webclipper for 4 years.

Both allow you to precisely template what gets saved and in which way when you save a page or a selection on a page. That way I can ensure it ends up in my Obsidian notes tool in a shape that is immediately useful inside that environment.

A key difference is that Markdownload saves to the file system, it simply puts a text file with an .md file extension in a folder I designated, and that is the same folder Obsidian looks for my notes. It can also save through Obsidian though. It’s independent and useful regardless of Obsidian, because of it.

The Obsidian webclipper saves through Obsidian, I suspect so you can leverage whatever you have set up in Obsidian for incoming material. It brings Obsidian to the front and does the saving, and if you want opens the note to continue there. In my case it meant the default template for new notes got applied by the templater plugin, overwriting the material I tried to save. The settings of the Obsidian webclipper does not have the option to save to a folder, bypassing Obsidian.
This to me introduces an unneeded dependency (and the need to figure out suppressing my default template inside Obsidian so it doesn’t overwrite incoming webclippings). To me the fact that Obsidian is a viewer on top of regular text notes on my hard drive is valuable because I can use the files and manipulate them in other tools. I daily read and write those notes outside of Obsidian. It seems many others don’t realise this fully as there is the strong tendency to want and expect Obsidian to do everything (even though the dev team handily shifted that urge to the developers of plugins).

I will stick with the Markdownload webclipper for now.