Personal knowledge management, the skill everyone needs but almost no one teaches

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Over the past two years, I've been giving a lot of thought to personal knowledge management. At both the undergraduate and graduate level, we spend a lot of effort teaching students foundational knowledge in their chosen fields, and we deliberately mentor them in fundamental skills such as writing, public speaking, and research. Scant attention, though, is given to one of the most important skills to professionals in the information age. Namely, we do almost nothing to help students develop strategies for managing knowledge.

This strikes me as a glaring oversight, and I've been working to address it in my own classes. Eventually, I'd like to develop an elective course dedicated to personal knowledge management. In the meantime, I've been giving guest lectures to graduate students and postdocs in personal knowledge management, and I've been incorporating those lessons into my graduate courses.

One of the challenges of developing this material is to focus on strategies rather than technologies. Technology is always changing so focusing on notetaking, say, manually in commonplace books or digitally in Evernote is ultimately futile. Much better is to place emphasis on strategies that are technology agnostic, strategies that can be used whether students are using notecards or the most sophisticated apps available on the market.

Another challenge that I've found in teaching personal knowledge management is one of receptivity. By hook or by crook, graduate students and seniors have already survived the academic system up to that point. Their successes come on the heels of hard-won notetaking practices developed largely through trial and error. It's not surprising then, in retrospect at least, that they might not be enthusiastic about learning new approaches or in changing their ways.

The trick to overcoming student reticence, I think, is to develop lessons that show how better strategies can lead to greater productive output, and timing those lessons to moments when students begin engaging with sources of knowledge they haven't encountered before.

I'm still trying to find the right formula for implementing these ideas. For instance, I was excited to develop a new module on personal knowledge management for an introductory graduate course I taught this semester. The timing, I thought, was nearly perfect. Graduate school typically hits students with a slew of unfamiliar information sources, so it seemed like my students would be particularly keen on learning new ways to manage those resources.

Unfortunately, the module fell a bit flat. Students already had elaborate systems for notetaking and knowledge management. They hadn't yet encountered anything their existing systems couldn't handle, and I failed to close the loop by showing them how to turn knowledge management into creative production. The next time I teach that module, I won't make that same mistake!

In the meantime, I plan to incorporate some of these lessons in my undergraduate technical writing course. I suspect that, again, I'll be up against student resistance to changing methods that have been successful for them for the previous 4-5 years. My wedge, though, is that my course is often the first class students have in which they engage with primary research articles. That provides an opening I wouldn't otherwise have, especially if I can help students not only manage their sources, but also to more easily turn those sources into successful assignments for my class.