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English 808: Technology & Literacy Unit 2—Managing Knowledge & Information

Unit 2 Required Materials

Due Sep. 9 Monday: Required Reading on Managing Knowledge & Information

Begin Class Part 1 @ 5:00 p.m.

Chapter 7 Class Activities

Part 1. Lecture (10 minutes)

Information Overload (Forte, pp. 17-18)

    • People consume 174 newspapers per day (New York Times)
    • According to a People spend 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, and files (based on research by Microsoft)
    • 26% of workers’ time is spent looking for and consolidating information(based on research by Microsoft)(based on research by Microsoft)
    • Workers are successful at doing this only 56% of the time (based on research by Microsoft)
    • Human brains aren’t built for storing and retrieving information, they are built for creativity!

The Superpowers of the Second Brain (Forte, p. 34)

    • Making our ideas concrete
    • Revealing new associations between ideas
    • Incubating our ideas over
    • Sharpening our unique perspectives

Personal Knowledge Management (Forte, p. 40)

    • Remembering
    • Connecting
    • Creating

CODE (Forte, p. 43)

    • Capture–Keep what resonates
    • Organize–Save for actionability
    • Distill–Find the essence
    • Express–Show your work

Capture What Resonates (Forte, pp. 68-69)

    • Criteria 1: Does it inspire me?
    • Criteria 2: Is it useful?
    • Criteria 3: Is it personal?
    • Criteria 4: Is it surprising?

Part 2: Capturing Ideas (15 minutes)

Part 3: Productivity Potential Quiz (10 minutes)

  • Forte has developed a productivity quiz
  • Who can pass up an Internet quiz?
  • And it only takes 7 minutes, so why not, right? (And we wonder why our productivity goes down so quickly?)
  • Productivity Potential Quiz

Part 4: Small Group Discussion–Teaching Students How to Manage Information (25 minutes)

  • Discuss your note taking (10 minutes)
  • Then discuss the following questions (15 minutes)
    • Discuss the general problem of information overload as it applies to students in the broad field of English studies
    • How can we prepare students to deal with information overload?
    • What skills do our students need to learn about managing information and how can we teach them these skills?
    • What do you think of the idea of teaching students to be Knowledge Managers?

Part 5: Large Group Discussion–Teaching Students How to Manage Information (30 minutes)

From “Death by Information Overload”

  • “…a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly one-third of the messages they receive to be unnecessary. Given that those same employees spend about two hours a day processing e-mail (employees surveyed received an average of 350 messages a week, executives up to 300 a day), a serious amount of time is clearly being wasted.”
  • “A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the e-mail habits of coworkers found that once their work had been interrupted by an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.”
    • “The scenario the researchers described was unsettlingly familiar. Dealing with the message that had prompted the alert represented only a portion of the time off task. People often used the interruption as an opportunity to read other unopened e-mail messages—or to engage in such unrelated activities as text-messaging a friend or surfing the web. Surprisingly, more than half the time was spent after people were ready to return to their work: cycling through open applications on their computers to determine what they’d been doing when interrupted; getting distracted by some other work in progress as they moved from one window to another; and reestablishing their state of mind once they finally arrived at the application they’d abandoned nearly a half hour earlier.”

Part 6. Break (10 minutes)

End Class Part 1 @ 7:00 p.m.

Begin Class Part 2 @ 7:00 p.m.

Part 7: Lecture (5 minutes)

  • PARA (Forte, p. 90)
    • Projects: Short-term efforts (in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind
    • Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time
    • Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future
    • Archive: Inactive items from the other 3 categories
    • Organize By Actionability
  • How to use PARA to organize
    • Move all existing files to a folder titled Archive with today’s date!
    • This gives you a clean slate
    • Place items in a holding area (like your Downloads folder)
    • File quickly once per week using the PARA system
    • How to organize

Part 8: Free Writing (15 minutes)

  • Create a list of your projects, areas, and resources

Part 9: Free Writing (10 minutes)

  • Create an Intermediate Packet/Building Block for your Dissertation

Part 10: Small Group Discussion (10 minutes)

  • Talk about your Intermediate Packet for your dissertation

Part 11: Full Class Discussion (10 minutes)

  • Final Thoughts on Forte

Part 12: Assignments Review & Class Wrap-up (5 minutes)

  • Review Assignments listed below

Assignments

Due Week 4 (Sep. 16): Required Readings and Materials on Managing Time, Stress, & Your Life