Take, for instance, the examples of TiddlyWiki or all of the different wiki instances related to GTD. Although they are wikis per se their main primary use is that of a PKM tool for individuals to organise their thoughts on the web, so this is the aspect that I am talking about regarding the usage of wikis as PKM tools, not the social networking and communities aspects related to them, like, for instance, Wikipedia.

As I said, what I am trying to do is perhaps trying to look for an alternative way of making use of all of the different tools put together out there in the social software space so that knowledge workers get a chance to decide what they would want to use and how they would want to use them, i.e. individually or as part of the communities themselves. At the end of the day it is their choice, not the tools’ .

When you start to put social networking, relationships, communities into the mix, I feel you are moving away from the core principles of PKM which center around the individual, concentrate on personal responsibility for learning, focus on organization of individual ideas, thoughts, beliefs and knowing.

For me PKM = blogs while KM = wikis

It seems to me, the kind of PKM you advocate is very much towards the social side of the spectrum – almost so much it is hard to call it PKM at all!!

Re: your comments on:

“It is interesting to see you writing about social bookmarking, wikis, tagging, web2.0 and (social networking?) as personal KM tools. The irony is you need others to contribute to make these work and this may be at the opposite end of the spectrum from PKM.”

You would have to agree with me that although these may be social tools they would still need to start at some point, right? I mean, I tend to agree with your thoughts that all these social tools may not be very much related to PKM, but the way I have been seeing all these has always been as a way to self-organise the information and knowledge available to knowledge workers themselves where they pre-select, filter, think over and finally push over / decide to promote that same information / knowledge into the social space. That, to me, unless I got it wrong is also what PKM is all about, more than anything else because it still is about that user-generated content where they are in control of the information, they manage it in such a way that they decide what would be the best form to go ahead and share it, whether it is going to go to a wiki, or through social bookmarks, tagging, etc. etc.

To me it all starts with the self-thinking process of self-promotion of the information that knowledge workers feel is worth while sharing. Then from there on to the social tools where I tend to agree with you that over there it is the group that then digest that information but in principle it is coming through the knowledge worker who decides what to share and how to share it with others.

“[...] this is not what traditional PKM has been all about”

That may well be the case, but then again the way traditional KM and PKM has been considered is not necessarily what may be happening at the moment right now with all this user generated content through social software and Web 2.0. Perhaps we should go ahead and take a look into it and revisit PKM overall. What do you think ?

Thanks again for the feedback !

Blogs, VoIP, podcasts which enable publishing, ‘voicing’, personal branding, networking and one-way communication are far closer to the PKM end of the spectrum than the others.

Now I’m with you, networking, CoPs, many to many communication and open access / editing are certainly key knowledge creation and knowledge work affordances, but they require social interaction, dialog, conversation, shared thinking and common language – this is not what traditional PKM has been all about.