Our students, who will spend most of their working lives in the 21st century, will need to see the computer and related technologies as an extension of themselves, as a tool as important as the pencil or quill pen was for the last several hundred years. Fifteen years ago, few people knew what a personal computer was. Now personal computers are ubiquitous. With the proliferation of personal computers and linked computer networks, there has been an increase in the amount of information produced, as well as new avenues of finding the information. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) attempts to utilize the computer to help the individual manage the information explosion in a meaningful way.
What is personal knowledge management? It’s a system designed by individuals for their own personal use. Knowledge management has been described by Davenport and Prusak as a systematic attempt to create, gather, distribute, and use knowledge. (a) Lethbridge characterizes it as the process of acquiring, representing, storing and manipulating the categorizations, characterizations and definitions of both things and their relationship. (b) PKM, as conceived at the Anderson School, is a conceptual framework to organize and integrate information that we, as individuals, feel is important so that it becomes part of our personal knowledge base. It provides a strategy for transforming what might be random pieces of information into something that can be systematically applied and that expands our personal knowle