I don't want to throw any shade on people who enjoy setting goals for yourselves in a new year. Hooray to Taylor Kay Phillips, who took over Lyz Lenz's Dingus of the Week post this time, and said that she wants New Year's Resolution Wet Blankets to settle down and let other people have their things. This year, one reflective approach that is resonating with me immensely this time around comes from Robert Talbert, in the form of his My Start/Stop/Continue for 2026 post. CW: He's a bit down on resolutions in the beginning, but if you're a big fan of setting them, just skip to his Start section about Going Analog and enjoy seeing what he's up to…

Start: Creating with Regularity

Through an impulse purchase via Instagram advertising, I bought a year-long membership to the Art Makers Club at the tail end of the year. This all started with our son asking if he could participate in our revised advent plans for the holiday season (my goodness did our first attempt ever fail miserably) by doing digital art, instead of the watercolor the rest of us were doing. He likes using Procreate and mentioned offhand that it was one of those kinds of apps that you buy once (as in I/we already own it), which didn't become relevant until weeks later, when I considered this purchase.

My Art Makers Club purchase didn't start with an entire year, but rather a highly structured course. The Kickstart Your Creativity with Procreate got me excited from the premise. I'm a huge fan of being able to track my progress toward goals, so the included progress tracker was super appleaing to me. Wait a second? I get to take 15-20 minute tutorials from an encouraging, down-to-earth, clear communicator and learn to actually use an app I already own instead of continuing to gather virtual dust, like I had been? And I get to save my various drawings in the form of a tracker all along, so I can see how far I've come and where I'm going?

That was the hook, but it kept getting better from there. I also got a second Kickstart Your Creativity Course to go with it. But wait. There's more. A ton of other courses, such as:

• Imaginative Map-Making in Procreate
• Getting Started with Procreate Dreams: Animation for Everyone (ever since seeing Mike Wesch's very first animation video 10+ years ago: The Sleeper, I've dreamed of learning animation)
• Easy, Eye-Catching Animations in Procreate
• Realistic Paper Cut Illustrations in Procreate

There are ~5 other full length courses and then a bunch of previously-recorded live sessions, the opportunity to be a part of a community of people going through the courses, etc. I have now drawn from the orange through the poppy, as of January 3, 2026, not too shabby a result of a person who hasn't really taken art classes before.

Depending on how you define art, of course…

I also had bought one copy of Daily Drawing Prompts: A Year of Sketchbook Inspiration, by Jordan DeWilde for my Mom for Christmas and “accidentally” ordered a second copy for me. It has provided supplemental opportunities for reinforcing some of the skills I'm learning through the more structured courses.

As excited as I clearly am about these drawing resources, I want to keep my definition of regular creation broad. Alan Levine recently shared his reflections on having achieved an entire year of capturing daily photos throughout 2025. He has previously been such an inspiration for me in those years when we don't quite check every single box that we had hoped to… as in those years when he didn't quite get to 365 days/photos. Still, it was fun to see him share stories of what his daily photo habit looked like in 2025 and in years past.

I don't want to say up front that I'm shooting for a daily goal. My streaks habits seem to be multiplying and I don't want to put too much pressure on myself. As of today, I've used the Bend App to support 280 days of stretching. However, they let you “reset” your streak, once you've been consistent with it. So somewhere around 4-5 days, I missed stretching. But the following day was able to restore my streak without resetting the counter. I would love something like that for my daily create goal that is emerging, but I also am not inclined to figure out a whole system at this exact moment.

Stop: Checking Work Email on My Mobile Devices

This is one of those “I should 100% know better” things. I've gotta stop checking my work email on my mobile devices. One reason has to do with overall productivity. In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Annie Murphy Paul describes the benefits researchers found of working on a large display (versus on a laptop or mobile device):

When using a large display, they engaged in higher-order thinking, arrived at a greater number of discoveries and achieved broader, more integrative insights. Such gains are not a matter of individual differences or preferences, Ball emphasizes; everyone who engages with the larger display finds that their thinking is enhanced.

Before reading The Extended Mind, I always felt like I worked more effectively at either of my two big-screen set ups (home and work offices), but Murphy Paul uncovered a number of researchers exploring this hypothesis much more soundly than my anecdotal evidence. I just feel better and more able to focus in constructive ways when I'm engaging with my work via a large monitor.

Another reason I don't want to keep doing this in 2026 is just that it tends to get me feeling all the negative feels during a time when I'm not going to proactively going to be able to dig in with problem solving or attempts to communicate about issues. If an email is going to evoke a sense that things aren't right in a particular context, why not wait until I'm “in the saddle” and ready to “ride” toward a resolution vs stewing in the frustration needlessly. I don't get that many emails that make me angry, by the way. I've got it pretty darn good in that department. But even if it is just an email that is going to require some kind of follow up, I tend to delay taking any steps toward moving forward until such time that I'm back at my computer. Why not just enjoy the time more in whatever context I may have been in when I succumbed to the temptation to just “dip my toe” into my work email to “check in”.

As I prepare to live into this commitment (once again, as I have failed at this in the past), I will revisit Robert Talbert's Grand Unified Theory of Academic Email: Fixing the Missing Piece of the Clarify Process, as he helps those of us who may have a tendency to over-function to ask ourselves if whatever may have bubbled up in our email is actually ours to do something with… I would probably do well to re-listen to Brené Brown's Unlocking Us Podcast Episode: On Anxiety, Calm, and Over-/Under-Functioning. And Karen Costa's conversation with me on Episode 505: How Role Clarity and Boundaries Can Help Us Thrive.

Rinse and repeat. I feel a playlist coming on…

Continue: Finding Times to Go to Jazzercise with My Mom

Speaking of playlists, I've been having a bunch of opportunities to find great workout music, since I've been driving to Oceanside a number of times each week during this holiday break. If you've been listening to Teaching in Higher Ed for more than a couple of years, you may have “met” my Mom back on Episode 462: Teaching Lessons I Learned From Mom. During the episode, I read her a column I wrote for EdSurge about her: Teaching Lessons I Learned from Mom and then reflected with my mom on the death of her sister, Judy.

It takes ~45 minutes to make the drive from where I live to the Oceanside Jazzercise location where my Mom takes classes. The class, itself, is an hour, and then it's another hour to say my goodbyes and get back home. Yes, that's three hours anytime I go take a class with her. However, I've been telling myself that if I set a goal to take a class with her once or twice a month, during regular work weeks, and then a few times a week when we are on Spring break, that it would quickly add up to a whole lot more joy in my life. I rarely take lunch breaks at work, though I do often go for walks during the day with work friends (and sometimes former students, etc.). I'm having this inner dialog with myself about how much time I would actually “lose” from work if I were to keep this commitment vs what I would “gain” from the experiences.

Lest anyone reading this feel like you want to “fix” my stinkin' thinking on this front and tell me stories about how much time you wish you still had with someone you've lost… you may be somewhat relieved of your duties to know that I've already put some things in motion toward this idea. Kerry Mandulak (who has been on Teaching in Higher Ed a couple times before) was down in Oceanside with her family this past week and we hung out together after I went to Jazzercise with my Mom. She raved about the Airbnb where her family was staying. I've already booked one in the same complex for Spring Break and blocked out four opportunities to join my Mom for Jazzercise that week.

I'm headed down to the Lilly Conference on Tuesday and will stop and do a class with her on the way down. At this point, I just need to block a few more times in my calendar for Spring 2026 and I'll have just the structure I need to turn this all into a reality and a bunch of memories with my Mom… That, plus an ever-growing playlist of energizing workout songs…

Related Goals

Robert Talbert mentions how poorly people, in general, tend to do with our resolutions. However, on my goal-setting, I tend to do ok, much of the time. To that end, I plan on continuing a few other things throughout 2026. I commit to:

• Read at least 24 books (connect with me on StoryGraph, if you want to see how that's going and what I'm reading)
• Keep stretching daily using the Bend App
• Continue closing my Apple Watch rings (currently at an 845 days streak, which kinda scares me a bit, just because I think occasional breaks are ok and even healthy to take)
• Apply to present at a conference at another country with a couple of collaborators and see if we're successful at getting to share our work in an entirely difference context than I will have ever experienced in my life (and I used to travel a ton for work in my younger days, so that's saying something)
• Air an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed each week for the entire year, keeping yet-another streak alive… making it 12+ years of consistent conversations about teaching and learning

What are you up to in the new year? Anything you're committing to stoping, starting, or continuing?

Last night was our daughter’s dance recital. She is 11 and in middle school now, and the performance combined the middle school and the upper school. It was such a delight to see all these performers come together, and I kept being reminded of so much of what I’ve learned about learning and teaching through the experience of watching them.

The Practice

In James Lang’s book Small Teaching, he tells a story about small ball. I don’t know a lot about baseball, and I probably know more about baseball from reading the description Jim has of something called small ball than I know about anything else in the sport. That may not be true, but that’s how it feels, often. Perhaps that’s because his book has meant so much to me and this idea of small ball, where you focus on the basics.

I may get some of this wrong because I am not picking up the book and going back and referencing it at this exact moment. Sometimes I feel like I know the book by heart. But Jim talks about just this idea of: now we’re going to run the bases, or now we’re going to hit the ball, and all the things. Those fundamental skills—those things we want to cultivate. James Lang doesn’t say this, but as a set of Lego pieces so that we can achieve enormous heights and something beyond perhaps what even the teacher might have imagined possible. That’s possible when we first start with the basics: those fundamental building blocks.

And while I don’t know a lot about baseball, I do know a fair amount about dance. I spent 11 years of my life, for example, taking ballet lessons. Our version of small ball in a ballet class was the warm-up. I still can vividly picture the barres that would be brought out. Some were affixed to the walls permanently in the studio, but others would be placed out in the middle of the room. They were in varying heights, and you would come in and select where you wanted to stand. Where you chose had to do with your place in the room as well as the height of the barre appropriate for you.

Dancers of all levels would come together—whether this was something they did professionally or as a hobby—and we would begin with pliés and relevés in first position, second position, third position, and so on. This became a culture. A practice. It was a small ball experience. It was necessary to warm up our bodies together and move in unison like that, with the music guiding our pace and tempo.

Then we would move the barres out and get ready for the floor routines. As I reflected on these memories of ballet class, I am reminded that each time I smell a cigar while walking in our neighborhood, I think there must be someone nearby who smokes one occasionally. Our ballet teacher used to smoke cigars, and I’m always reminded of him—which, the juxtaposition of smoking and ballet always cracks me up to this day. Certainly a lot has changed about smoking as I share these words with you in the year 2025, thank goodness.

The Rehearsal

As I reflect back on our daughter’s concert, I think about the ways in which rehearsals help shape us. It’s the process of getting ready for that performance. And as we’re getting ready, we do different kinds of rehearsals. Sometimes they’re in costumes, sometimes not. Sometimes we wear makeup, sometimes not. Sometimes the lights are there, changing the dynamics of what the performers can and can’t see and where the visual emphasis gets placed for those watching.

Some early rehearsals are more what are called blocking—just getting familiar with the space. When we move our bodies to one part of the space, what will that experience be like? Some of this I’m drawing from my background in theater, where you do dry run-throughs that are blocked and you learn how you’re going to move about the stage. Anytime I do a speaking engagement, I try my best to get some time in the space where I'll be sharing, doing some blocking of my own. I try never to be a high maintenance person, so I seek to build upon the strengths of the existing space and how I might draw on it to engage people during the time we'll have together.

Another aspect of their performance last night was the student and faculty collaboration. I reveled in the differing levels that came together. Some of the faculty have been professional dancers and choreographed many of the routines. But you also had middle school and high school performers who choreographed their own pieces. That was so delightful to see.

Even in the group performances, you would have standout performers—those who do this seven days a week. Our daughter’s friend goes to lessons and rehearsals and performances seven days a week. It is a huge focal point of her life and their family. Our daughter's dancing is solely reliant on what they do during the school day at this point. But in the group performances, they are able to pull together the unique strengths of each performer and create something that is invisible to the audience—because they all reach a certain level of high-quality expectations.

Then those who can do, in some cases, acrobatic flips or pirouettes with four rotations, as opposed to the beginners who can do just one—what a delight it is to see differing levels come together in synergistic ways. Their differences become assets rather than flaws, thanks to talented choreography, commitment to rehearsing, and the drawing out of one’s unique strengths.

The Emergent

This morning, while reflecting on all of this, I came across a video of a couple of dancers I’m not familiar with. The Instagram algorithm “knows” me well and will feed me videos I enjoy. These performers are dancing the Lindy Hop.

I did the Lindy Hop in my 20s and loved it so much that I would go to multiple group lessons—usually three or four each week. I would take at least one private lesson each week, and then I would go out dancing one or two nights a week. I had an annual pass to Disneyland and would go there by myself, take the tram in by myself, not knowing whether I would see anyone I knew—just to be around the dancers and to hope I would get a chance to dance with others. It was such a special time in my life. I would go to sleep at night and dream. That’s how much the Lindy Hop meant to me.

I don’t come across it as much these days. It seems West Coast Swing has taken over more of the dance world I used to be part of. So anytime Lindy Hop comes across my screen, I will definitely want to watch what’s happening.

Many of these dances—including the Lindy Hop—have a basic eight count. As you become more practiced, you’re able to let the music change things up. Much swing music has what are called breaks, where a measure shifts and varies the pattern. The dancers and the music create such amazing playfulness and interaction. It is so fun to watch.

A song with lots of breaks in it is Shiny Stockings, sung here by the great Ella Fitzgerald:

In the U.S., as well as many other countries, there are swing dance competitions. I don’t see many Lindy Hop competitions anymore, but I still enjoy Jack and Jill competitions. A lead’s and a follow’s names get drawn from a hat, and a DJ plays a song they’ve never heard. I love watching Jack and Jill competitions because of the improvisational nature of them.

The Lindy Hop dance I saw this morning looked similar—though these dancers clearly dance together regularly and this wasn’t a competition but a demo. It didn’t appear to be fully choreographed. I could see subtle moments where the follower responded to the lead in real time. To an untrained eye, these steps would look 100% planned. But because I know the context—likely a camp or workshop in Spain—I can pick up on the improvisational clues.

I've started following Nils and Bianca on YouTube and look forward to watching many more of their dances in their back catalog. Their demo of Hey Baby from Rock That Swing 2018 is a delight and I'm confident that there's so much good dancing coming my way in the future, via Nils and Bianca's channel. In case you didn't believe me earlier when I said that they weren't performing, here's another example of what it looks like when they are: Good Rockin' Daddy – Etta James – Stuttgart 2022.

As I think back on last night’s very planned dances at our daughter's recital and this morning’s emergent dance, I’m struck by how emblematic all of this is of teaching. The rehearsals, the planning, the choreography—and finally the performance—enable us as educators to respond to the emergent, the uncertain.

Teaching as Planned Structure and Emergent Possibility

Mia Zamora on Episode 475 talked about planning for that—how to create structure such that we have equipped ourselves for all of the unexpected. She says on that episode:

Intentionality and listening are important qualities for facilitation.

I love how Mia and so many others help us consider the ways in which our intentionality, our planning, our putting structure around teaching and learning can help create communities ready to come together and navigate the unknown. Way back on Episode 218 Alan Levine shared about courses as stories. He and Mia co-taught the Net Narratives class together and used ‘spines' as a metaphor for how they structured that class for the emergent.

Randomly (or perhaps not), Alan writes about fractals in a recent post, as it relates to the emergent. He quotes an OEGGlobal colleague in a Slack post as writing:

In everyday language, especially in adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy, fractal refers to the idea that:

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.”

If you want organizations, communities, or movements to be compassionate, equitable, and connected, those qualities need to show up in the small day-to-day interactions, too.

So: small patterns = big impact.

Alan goes on to describe how fractals inspired the structure of ds106, a course (and ongoing community) designed from its roots to be open, center on digital storytelling, and creating community.

I'll let you go read Alan's post to discover more of his thoughts on the emergent, but for now, all I can help but think of is wondering if Alan saw this video clip of Hasan Minhaj talking to a 13-year-old math genius (Suborno Isaac Bari) about fractals.

Ever since initially viewing the clip, I have had a growing curiosity about fractals, knowing practically nothing about them before that moment. I am also reminded of how difficult (impossible?) it is to measure learning, just like trying to accurately measure a coastline.

Or measure just how good a dance recital was…

As part of participating in Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, we were given lessons and activities three times a week for six weeks. I had been blogging perhaps once or twice a year for a while now, never feeling like I had found my voice with those posts. Doing that much sharing via the written form seemed daunting, yet I had a strong suspicion that the discipline would pay off. I was not wrong at all on that front.

Here are the various posts I wrote, along with an overview of the concepts explored in each one.

01 – Getting Curious About Network Mapping

Great insight lies in visualizing and analyzing the relationships that surround our work and learning. Networks are fundamental lenses for how we connect, influence, and grow.

Key themes:

• Network mapping and the difference between strong ties and weak ties (and how both kinds are essential to a thriving learning network).
• The habit of giving first and nurturing relationships as network fuel.

Quote:

“Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” — Mark S. Granovetter (1973)

Both strong and weak ties are vital to our learning.

02 – Let’s Get Curious

Allowing ourselves to wonder opens up our capacity to learn, connect, and co-create more deeply.

Key themes:

• Sparking curiosity means we tap into a power well beyond certainty (as illustrated so well through this beloved clip from Ted Lasso).
• The world of work is increasingly complex; the very skills that matter now include creativity, imagination, empathy and curiosity.

Quote:

“The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity.” — Harold Jarche

Stay curious, widen our lenses, and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing as the gateway to meaningful growth.

03 – Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

Grief, networks, and belonging are deeply intertwined in shaping the places where we learn, grow, and support one another.

Key themes:

• The isolation that grief can bring creates a powerful invitation to community when we’re willing to show up with vulnerably.
• Communities (using Mastodon) and how we sustain communities when the baskets we placed our eggs in (platforms, networks) change or disappear and what that means for our learning ecosystems (I didn't write about this in the post, but many say the answer is federated networks)

Quote:

“If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” — Bonni Stachowiak

Invest in communities that embrace complexity, invite connection across networks, and hold space for both loss and belonging.

04 – Engaging with Intentionality and Curiosity

As I reflected on intentionality this week, I realized that showing up with purpose—not just going through the motions—significantly shapes what I notice, how I respond, and who I become in the process.

Key themes:

• Intentionality helps clarify why something matters and helps resist the pull of the urgent and focus on the important.
• Analyzing who Harold Jarche follows on Mastodon offered an opportunity to reflect on my aims for the network.

Quote:

“Show up for the work.” — Bonni Stachowiak

Jarche also gave some examples of the practices on which PKM is built upon, such as narrating our work and sharing half-baked ideas.

05 – Scooping Up Adulting and the Benefits of Being Curious

Moving through life’s messy, liminal spaces requires curiosity, humility, and movement.

Key themes:

• The relevance of the Cynefin framework in helping us learn in the complex domain.
• The value of formal and informal communities and open knowledge and formal knowledge networks as our learning ecology.
• Curiosity as a pathway through liminality: staying attuned to what is becoming.

Quote:

“In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.” — Harold Jarche

This Learning in the Complex Domain post by Jarche is likely the most important one for me to revisit from all that I read throughout these six weeks, as I'm still struggling to understand the Cynefin framework.

06 – Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now?

It's still wild to me that RSS isn't as common as navigating websites.

Key themes:

• A well-curated set of feeds via an RSS aggregator turns passive reading into active sense-making.
• RSS remains undervalued in the age of algorithmic feeds, yet when we control our own feed-ecosystem we reclaim agency over where our attention goes.

Quote:

However, I'm picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via Unread on my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb. — Bonni Stachowiak

I was also glad to learn from Jarche about subscribing to Mastodon feeds and hashtags via RSS, though I haven't experimented with that much, yet, since the Tapestry app does a lot of that for me.

07 – Can You Keep a Secret?

Understanding the frameworks behind our media tools unlocks far deeper insights than simply reacting to what comes our way.

Key themes:

• Exploring Marshall McLuhan’s Media Tetrad helped me see every medium as doing four things: extending, retrieving, obsolescing, and reversing.
• Applying the tetrad to the smartphone made visible how it extends access and connection, obsolesces older single-purpose devices, retrieves communal spaces, and reverses into distraction and isolation when pushed too far.
• This kind of analysis invites me to pause, notice, and interrogate the media I use daily rather than assume they’re neutral or benign.

Quote:

“The reversals are already evident — corporate surveillance, online orthodoxy, life as reality TV, constant outrage to sell advertising. The tetrads give us a common framework to start addressing the effects of social media pushed to their limits. Once you see these effects, you cannot un-see them.” — Harold Jarche

Analyzing these media tools heps us choose how to engage with them, rather than passively being shaped by them.

08 – Fake News Brings Me to an Unusual Topic for this Blog

It is critical to engage in ways to increase the likelihood of us being able to identify fake news. .

Key themes:

• The articulation of four primary types of fake news — propaganda, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and clickbait — as outlined by Harold Jarche.
• How propaganda intentionally spreads ideas to influence or damage an opposing cause; disinformation deliberately plants falsehoods to obscure truth.
• The persistence of conspiracy theories despite lacking evidence, and how clickbait uses sensationalism to manipulate attention and action.

Quote:

Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. – Renée DiResta, as quoted in El País

Our identities get so wrapped up in what we believe, it can be so challenging to consider how we might be part of combating fake news in our various contexts.

09 – From Half-Baked to Well-Done: Building a Sensemaking Practice

It can be so generative to share thoughts before they’re polished and this openness fuels learning, creativity, and connection.

Key themes:

• Half-baked ideas make space for iteration: they invite others in, rather than presenting a finished product that shuts conversation down.
• Sharing early thinking helps me stay curious, flexible, and less attached to being “right.”
• When we release ideas in progress, we give our networks something to build on, remix, or nudge in new directions.

Quote:

If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. — Harold Jarche

Let ideas be emergent rather than complete so that learning can unfold collaboratively.

10 – The Experts in My Neighborhood

Jarche introduces us to various PKM roles for this topic.

Key themes:

• Our learning ecosystems benefits from curating a diverse set of experts to help navigate complexity.
• Through my PKMastery practices (bookmarking, sense-making, sharing), I can engage with expert ideas over time.
• The real value comes not from one “expert,” but from a network of thinkers whose disagreements and different perspectives stretch our own thinking.

Quote:

“Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.” — JA Westenberg

The value of PKM is in curating many voices, cultivating a “neighborhood” of experts to follow, listen, question, and to build a rich, networked sensemaking practice rather than rely on single voices alone.

11 – Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

Turning toward connection can be one of our strongest antidotes to imposter syndrome.

Key themes:

• Network weaving reframes “Do I belong here?” to “Who can I bring together?” — shifting the energy from proving my worth to creating belonging.
• Connecting people, ideas, and stories becomes my purpose: not to be the smartest person in the room, but to serve as a bridge, curator, and connector.
• Vulnerability matters: acknowledging I don’t have all the answers, but inviting others to learn out loud anyway.

Quote:

A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z. – Valdis Krebs

This reminder feels like fuel for the next leg of my PKMastery journey — leaning into weaving networks as practice not just for growth, but for belonging and shared strength.

12 – I Can See Clearly Now The Frogs Are Here

Growth often comes not from jumping to answers but from staying curious, experimenting, and traveling alongside fellow learners.

Key themes:

• Fellow seekers offer empathy, solidarity, and space to wrestle with ideas, often more supportively than experts alone.
• As described by Harold Jarche, combining curiosity with connection can help transform seekers into knowledge catalysts, nodes in our networks who learn, curate, and contribute meaningfully.
• Innovation and insight often emerge through playful experiments (half-baked ideas) from the beginner’s mind held by seekers.

Quote:

Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines. — Harold Jarche

Seeking is not a sign of weakness, but as a source of collective curiosity, connection, and growth.

13 – What Happens When We Start Making the Work Visible

There is strength in making invisible processes and decisions visible.

Key themes:

• When we narrate our work, we open up pathways for real-time collaboration and shared learning rather than one-way transmission.
• Narration allows for experimentation: sharing work in progress de-commodifies knowledge.
• It shifts the emphasis from polished deliverables to ongoing learning — not just focusing on the final product, but how we got there, and what we learned along the way.

Quote:

The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice. — Harold Jarche

Narrating our work offers a window into our process of learning.

14 – No Frogs Were Actually Harmed in Describing Systems Thinking

As I reflected on systems thinking, I found myself returning to how challenging (and how necessary) it is to see beyond events and into the structures that shape them. Revisiting Senge’s The Fifth Discipline reminded me just how often we can slip into reacting instead of zooming out to notice patterns.

Key themes:

• How easy it is to fall into organizational “learning disabilities,” like assuming I am my position rather than part of a larger whole.
• Chris Argyris describes the phenomenon of “skilled incompetence,” where groups of individuals who get super good at making sure to prevent themselves from actually learning.
• The invitation to practice systems thinking collectively, not just individually.

Quote:

You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. – Peter Senge

Sitting with this reminded me that lest we fall victim to skilled incompetence, we need to continually nurture the humility and curiosity to keep looking wider, deeper, and more generously at the forces shaping our organizations and our work.

15 – Asking as a Way of Knowing: PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander

The potential for adding value through PKM helps make our contributions much richer when paired with curiosity, generosity, and intentional sharing.

Key themes:

• PKM isn’t just about what I read or bookmark — it’s about how I transform that input through asking questions, sense-making, and offering what I learn into shared spaces.
• Public sharing (through podcasting, writing, conversation) complements private learning — the two together deepen meaning and foster connection.
• “Adding value” can look like holding space for others’ learning — asking curious questions, offering resources, and modeling openness rather than trying to prove expertise.

Quotes:

Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you. — Maria Popova

It was great getting to see this all in action, through a dinnertime conversation with Bryan Alexander.

16 – The Gap

Fear and self-doubt often keeps us from beginning and from recognizing how much value we hold even before we “arrive.”

Key themes:

• There’s often a gap between where we are now and where we want to be — but that gap doesn’t diminish the worth of what we’re already learning and creating.
• True learning requires embracing vulnerability: pursuing new practices.
• Public sharing matters: showing work in progress reminds me (and others) that learning is ongoing and that we don’t need to wait until we’re “expert enough” to contribute something meaningful.

Quote:

“The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.” — Tim Kastelle

Commit to practice, to sharing, and to staying open to becoming someone who learns out loud.

17 – Walking With PKM: Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice

Stepping away from busyness — even just to wander — creates the space for real insight and creative thinking.

Key themes:

• Walking becomes a practice of reflection: giving my brain space to wander and surface ideas.
• Learning isn’t always quantifiable.
• The value in a consistent PKM practice allows me to my own capacity to notice, wonder, and ultimately learn.

Quote:

Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness. — Harold Jarche

PKM is part discipline, part letting go of the busyness, and part listening to whatever emerges.

18 – The Last Step Toward the First Step

“Mastery” is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing.

Key themes:

• Value lies not in perfection, but in consistency: the small acts of sharing half-baked ideas and imperfect work.
• What I do contributes to a larger learning ecosystem: by sharing what I learn, I contribute to collective sense-making and encourage others to do the same.

Quote:

It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other. — Ronald Burt

The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.

This final PKMastery workshop post is what I'm referring to as the last step toward the first step, meaning that while I'm through with the formal/structured activities and curated lessons from Harold Jarche, there's such tremendous potential for even deeper learning, with a renewed commitment toward PKM.

Jarche shares a report from many years ago about the most valued Future Work Skills. He writes of how: “The report identified six drivers of change.

1. Longevity, in terms of the age of the workforce and customers
2. Smart machines, to augment and extend human abilities (quite obvious since 2023)
3. A computational world, as computer networks connect
4. New media, that pervade every aspect of life
5. Superstructed organizations, that scale below or beyond what was previously possible
6. A globally connected world, with a multitude of local cultures and competition from all directions

Ten future [present] work skills were derived from these drivers and these were seen to be critical for success in the emerging network era workplace. In 2014 a relatively simple infographic was published to show the relationship between these drivers and skills. Of these 10 skills, four compose the essence of personal knowledge mastery:

1. sense-making
2. social intelligence
3. new media literacy
4. cognitive load management

Participants in the workshop are then invited to focus on which competency we would most like to develop in, as part of our overall PKM practice. I'm torn between sense-making and cognitive load management. While further understanding of systems thinking and sense-making practices would certainly help me in my ongoing learning, I recognize my lack of sufficient discipline for what a focus on cognitive load management might bring me.

Throughout this process of blogging my way through Harold Jarche's Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, I essentially wrote the equivalent of half of a book. When I tell myself that I don't have time for certain pursuits in my life, these past six weeks would seem to counter those self-limiting beliefs. While I'm not actually interested, necessarily, in writing a book for other people at this exact moment, my shift in focus to a more reflective and open writing style for all these posts has felt liberating. As Ronald Burt shares:

It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.

Having no idea who will ever read these words, but knowing that the writing practice this workshop has instilled in me has been tremendously helpful in my own sense-making. James Lang would say I'm getting lots of practice writing to an imaginary audience and that has felt good. By Jarche asking us to engage on Mastodon and to use the #PKMastery hashtag, I've been able to share my work with a niche audience, reconnecting with people I hadn't been in regular touch with for a long while, in addition to meeting a couple of new people along the way.

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

I love to walk. Sometimes I do it alone (almost always listening to either music or podcasts), though most often walks these days are facilitated by an invitation from one of our kids to go for an evening walk. I'm at the POD25 conference, so have been missing my night time walks. Right now, I'm holed up in my hotel room, doing some reflecting, writing, and a bit of grading.

Instead of feeling guilty, I'm overwhelmed with supportive messages about how healthy this is. First, let's start with walking. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking about this practice:

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society — and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

The pull to keep producing and soaking in every bit of ROI from my university paying for this trip is strong (not because of them, I should say, but because of my own sense of needing to “get the most out of limited budget dollars”). Yet, learning cannot be perfectly quantified in terms of financial metrics, despite corporations' and governments' strong desire to do so. Jarche reminds us of the importance of leaving room for time and context to enrich our learning.

We cannot tap into our innovative capacities without being open to radical departures from the predictable, planned path (an example of which might be the typical professional conference schedule). And yes, sometimes that means not engaging in every planned session at a conference, like the one I'm participating in this week.

Jarche writes:

Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness.

As we wrap up our time together, Jarche invites those of us participating in his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop to reflect on our experience these past six weeks. Here I go, in responding to his questions:

Q. What was the most useful concept I learned from this workshop?

A. It wasn't really a concept, rather a practice. I benefitted by committing to a regular writing practice throughout the workshop, which provided opportunities for rich reflection and deepened learning. The structure of the workshop allowed for that to take place (plus me being a person who is a bit of a completist and wanting to blog through all 18 of the opportunities for reflection and activity that Harold provided).

Q. What was the most surprising concept that has changed my thinking about PKM?

A. I had seen Jarche write about McLuhan's media tetrad in the past, but didn't slow myself down enough to absorb much of anything, at the time. However, given my commitment to practice PKM throughout this experience, I wrote about the concept for the first time, and even shared the framework as a part of a keynote I gave a month or so ago.

During the keynote, I couldn't remember the word “tetrad,” when the idea came up later in the talk (as in after the slide had long since disappeared). I had attempted to come up with a word association on the plane ride out to Michigan, but it had failed me, in that moment.

“Think of the old arcade game, Tetris, plus something being “rad” (like in the 80s)”, I told myself. I was definitely learning out loud and performing retrieval practice in real time, as I eventually cobbled together audience participation input and finally got myself there.

A few things I've learned about myself, cognitive science, and other human beings remind me of these principles. For starters, my embarrassment in not knowing, but still struggling through and reaching the side of knowing means I'm unlikely to forget the word in the future. Plus, people aren't looking for other humans to be perfect. It is through our vulnerability and relatability that we might most often have an opportunity to make an impact on others. At least I believe that may be the case for me… as I wasn't meant to be the expert, as my primary role in this world, I don't think. I would rather be known as someone who is curios, which I've heard enough times to start to believe that it is true.

Q. What will be the most challenging aspect of PKM for me?

A. I still need to learn more about the concepts and frameworks involving navigating complexity, including one I've come across in the past, but never got much further than confusion, previously: cynefin. Jim Luke (who I met a gazillion years ago at an OpenEd conference) has offered to share his wisdom about cynefin with Kate Bowles and I sometime in the next couple of months. He replied to me on Mastodon about cynefin:

I find it a very useful heuristic in thinking about community, higher ed, any activities that are organized and care-centered, etc.

This exchange wouldn't have occurred, had it not been for Harold structuring the PKM workshop around engaging on Mastodon, by the way. This is going to be a gift that keeps on giving, I believe. While my connections there are still small in number, they are strong with competence, care, and creativity.

I'm glad that I can now pronounce cynefin without first locating an audio clip of someone else saying it. I'm useless at phonetic spelling, so that stuff doesn't often help me in the slightest. I do still have to look up how to spell it each time. My brain feels slower with the learning when a word is pronounced differently than it is spelled. I still have to occasionally slow myself way down when spelling my own last name, so I won't let myself feel too bad about still not being able to spell cynefin without help.

Q. Where do I hope to be with my PKM practice one year from now?

A. I would like to be in a more regular practice of blogging a year from now. I tend to save up blog post ideas that are super laborious for me (at least the way I approach the task, in those cases). I like doing posts for Jane Hart's Top Tools 4 Learning votes (like my top ten votes from 2025). But given how extensively I write and link in those posts, they take many hours to complete. I also have enjoyed doing top podcast posts, drawing inspiration from Bryan Alexander's wonderful posts, like this one about the podcasts he was listening to in late 2024.

My post from late 2024 about what Overcast told me I had listened to the most that year was less time consuming to write, than ones I had done in the past. But I felt weird only going from the total minutes listened as my barometer, when I think that other podcasts are far more worthy of acknowledgement than some of the ones I wound up having listened to the most that year. This 2021 Podcast Favorites post took forever to write and curate, but is more emblematic of the ways I would most like to celebrate all the incredible podcasts that are out there (or at least were publishing, at the time I wrote it).

If I put some creative constraints on myself, in terms of the time I would allow myself to commit to any individual post, I suspect I would have a lot more success with this aspect of PKM. I so appreciate the way that Alan Levine, Maha Bali, and Kate Bowles write in more reflective, informal ways. I've been pushing myself throughout this workshop to just get the ideas I'm having in the moment out there, to tell stories that are snapshots of my sensemaking processes, and to be human and allow myself to show up in the messiness that is indicative of the learning process.

Gratitude

My deepest gratitude goes to Harold Jarche for such a well-designed, impactful learning experience through his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop. I had been telling myself that I would do it at some point for years, now, and finally realized that there wasn't really ever going to be a “good time” for there to be six weeks without something big happening (conferences, speaking gigs, etc.). So Harold has been able to travel with me on airplanes, sat with me in airports, and is currently in my hotel room in San Diego at the POD 2025 conference. This is only metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know, he is in Canada right now. Though I am not surveilling him and he does seem to travel a lot, at least as it compares to me.

I'm also feeling thanks for those people who allow themselves to learn out loud and take the risks of being openly curious and worrying less about being “right” or “perfect” all the time.

This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

I've been thinking a lot about the elements that prevent us from most deeply practicing Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) in our lives. A big piece involves fear, the worries that we couldn't possibly know enough, or being talented enough, to contribute anything to the discourse. I'm at the POD Conference this week in San Diego and have been thinking about my own, long-term desire to get better at sketchnotes, while realizing that the only way you do something like that is to start out not-so-good, and establish a regular practice that could contribute to you getting better.

People often use the metaphor of a gap existing between where we are and where we want to be… We forget the value we might possess along the way. Daniel Sax starts out his video called THE GAP by Ira Glass with text that appears on the screen, in the form of a dedication of sorts. The words initially say:

For everyone in doubt

After a few seconds, an additional line of text appears:

Especially for myself

How many of us can relate to those feelings of doubt?

How often do we ponder what they prevent us from achieving?

After that compelling two-line introduction, Sax shows what I think is a printing press in action, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, during the first part of the video. Ironically, I wrote in my last post about how Bryan Alexander embodied PKM at a dinner, recently, but I didn't write much about the other people who were there. However, I realize now that one of the people is working on her doctoral research and it is on Black women who were printmakers in the 1930s, I believe it was. My mind flashed, as I revisited watching Sax's video, thinking that this doctoral researcher would surely know if what I think I'm seeing here is actually that.

Before now, I hadn't really paid much attention to Sax's video description on Vimeo. However, my curiosity was rewarded, by getting to discover that Sax made this video, because he was inspired by another one and wanted to experiment with his own creation. He writes:

I made it for myself and for anybody who is in doubt about his/her creative career. I also think that Ira Glass' message isn't only limited to the creative industry. It can be applied to everyone who starts out in a new environment and is willing to improve.

I encourage you to stop and watch Sax's video: THE GAP by Ira Glass and reflect on the different ways he conveys his messages and ideas, throughout. I wonder how long it took him to do the spoon full of noodle letters, spelling out his thoughts for that 2-3 second part.

Back to Sax's video description, he ends with a series of expressions of gratitude, to all of those who got him to the point of creating his piece. He thanks David Shiyang Liu, who has a graphical, text-based depiction of Ira's words about storytelling (which really could be about any new pursuit). Sax continues to thank the people who made his video possible (I suggest going to the video description and witness a wonderful example of giving credit where credit is due).

As Jarche begins to wind down the PKMastery Workshop and invites us to start our PKM practice (if we haven't, already), he quotes Tim Kastelle:

The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.

Jarche uses his book reviews and Friday’s Finds as examples of his PKM practice lived out. He's been at that for such a long time now, I look forward to each post, as they get released and show up in my RSS feeds. Despite having learned so much over the 10+ years I've been following his work, taking this PKM workshop has accelerated my learning exponentially. There's nothing like doing all the sensemaking and sharing that I set myself up to do when I committed to blogging publicly throughout the six weeks of the workshop.

My PKM

While I've got a ways to go and it is still quite early in my practice, I'm enjoying revisiting books from authors I have interviewed for Teaching in Higher Ed via a new video series I'm calling Between the Lines. This series is helping me experiment more with video as a medium, as well as supporting my ongoing learning about teaching and learning. I also have a playlist of me practicing Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework for fact checking. I'm realizing I probably need to do some more thinking about the playlists as categories of different types of videos, but I also have this playlist of technology for teaching and learning.

Of course producing and hosting the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is a huge part of PKM for me. Here are some unpolished thoughts about how seek-sense-share shows up through this 11-year adventure.

Seek

I get new guest ideas from past podcast guests, conferences I attend, books I read, PR people I now know from book publishers, and from things that show up on my RSS feeds. The point I'm at in my seeking process is actually more so that I need to find ways to filter out the vast number of ideas for possible interviews that come my way and be more disciplined and discerning about saying no (either to myself, or to others).

Sense

In preparing for interviews, I do a ton of sensemaking, thinking through the themes that are narrow enough to not be all over the place, but also not overly prescriptive, lest I miss what is emerging in the moment. I read digitally and typically highlight way too much of the book. Sometimes I mindmap my ideas, or just type up themes and reorder ideas. Creating the show notes for each episode also helps me extend the learning opportunities from each conversation.

Share

The podcast gets shared on all the major podcast directories and services. YouTube recently revised their policies to now allow for RSS feeds from audio-only shows to come through on their site (Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on YouTube). Spotify represents a growing Teaching in Higher Ed audience and has some nice features for more engagement than on other platforms, such as being able to ask listeners a question about what they took away from listening.

Hope

My hope is that I'll forever continue to live in the gap and experience the positive benefits of being willing to be fueled by the vulnerability required to learn out loud.