Personal Learning

Learning took on a different meaning when the Internet was capable of providing online lessons and when university can record and share their lectures via the Web 2.0 video portals such as http://academicearth.org/, http://www.youtube.com/edu. when i searched for the term KM Teaching, the above links were discovered from a personal blog. This is very much different from the way I studied during my Secondary and Junior College days where we were not able to leverage on the internet for our research.

Additional PRM

I did a search and found this article which focused on other personal records such as tax, warranty statements etc http://www.shrednations.com/articles/personal-records-retention.php. For me, we simply destroy contents that have passed the valid date range and we open plastic files to keep track of credit card bills. But lately many organisations are encouraging electronic statements eg. Telcos like Singtel, majority of Banks, online warranty update e.g. Canon products, Investment companies such as poems are encouraging estatements. Another example will be the Ministry of Defence which engages it's reserve pool via online portals http://www.ns.sg/nsPortal/index.jsp. I still keep the little green book that recorded my reservist incamp just for keep sake and for remembrance.

PRM

PRM stands for Personal Records Management. When i was in my primary school days, I remembered my father used to have a old paper file that recorded all our identification number on the front cover of the file. The file also contains all our birth certificates, educational qualifications, pass ports. Once my sisters were married, my father will then hand over the documents to her so that she can start managing on her own. I also remembered when i had to apply for my first scholarship, I had to photocopy my certificates and to stamp them as "Certified true copies" before handing them to the Scholarship team. When I started my official KM journey, I came across the Registry which is a central holding area where all official records are filed. They were centrally managed once and then due to reorganisation they were decentralised. We then looked at how to transform the hardcopy registry to a digital registry and I like to draw this analogy, where we individually can also transform our personal records management. One way will be to scan all our certificates, qualification, testimonials to digital pdfs which is OCRed (Optical character recogniable so as to allow the search engine to index them for future retrieval. These scanned pdfs can then be filed electronically into our hard drives.

Using the ASHEN model to guide my pkm.

I like to use the ASHEN model to guide our PKM capture process so that we cover majority of the artefact. The ASHEN model was introduce by Dave Snowden. I also came across this article entitled ‘I only know what I know when I need to know it - embracing the active management of tacit knowledge’, thinking back this statement is quite true as we will only find out when we need information/knowledge and to know when we need to know something. We tend to find out the latest research for the required answer when asked.

Name cards and more name cards

How do we manage names cards which we collect, exchange when we meet new friends at work, play, seminar, courses?

I recalled when i used to teach at an IT training firm that I will make it a point to exchange name cards to keep in touch with my students so that they can contact me if they encounter any issues or problems. We had name card albums, then came the name card scanners, then came the electronic version of name cards by beaming from our pdas. There are new ways offered by web 2.0, one is to invite people to your social networking sites and provided they do accept you as a friend and you will then be connected. Other ways will be to type out their contact details in a Mind map or any customer contact database. I am trying these last few methods to capture and to connect with people.