Clemente, B. E., & Pollara, V. J. (2005). Mapping the course, marking the trail [personal knowledge management]. IT Professional, 7(6), 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2005.149
Clemente_Pollara_2005_Mapping the course, marking the trail [personal knowledge management].pdf.
Notes
Summary
The source provides an brief, popular overview of motivations and history of personal knowledge management.
Analysis of evidence, credibility, rhetorical strategies
The authors are professional researchers working in the space of PKM, thus credible in so far as they know the history and current affairs of their time. The evidence brought to their point involves Vannevar Bush’s memex machine, Internet browsers, their own developed prototypes, and other kinds of knowledge management research.
Discussion of how the source will be used in my argument
This source will provide a justification for the term PKM as a tool that enables a user’s personal inquiry.
Annotations
Imported: 2024-04-05 11:54 am
core emphasis is personal inquiry—an individual’s quest to find, connect, learn, and explore
The act of writing, diagrammed in Figure 1a, forces the writer to organize and clarify thoughts about a subject—that is, to understand the essence of the mental model well enough to cogently communicate it to someone else.
judge a written work’s value mainly by its effectiveness in communicating information to the reader
The reader (see Figure 1b) must share enough of the model of the subject area to interpret the text properly.
Because “understanding” a text requires interpreting it within the context of a model, it is not our goal to have a PKM tool understand the text—that would be an attempt at artificial intelligence. Rather, we want to enable the user create simple, intuitive models that, although far from complete, are useful. These models, as shown in Figure 2, act only as an intermediate step between the text and the user’s mental model.
A PKM system is meant to help a user explore mental models. Not “understanding text,” on it’s own, only to supplement a creative user.
an optimal information forager is someone who best solves the problem of maximizing the rate of valuable information gained per unit cost, given the constraints of the task environment
Although some commercial tools consider highlighting a kind of extraction, this seems a mischaracterization. If the user starts with 6,000 documents, the result is 6,000 colorized documents.
allow users to model information in ways that are most meaningful to them, to extract that information, to aggregate it, and to analyze it
This will accelerate their work and let them communicate information about their process to colleagues