Of Children's TV and Personal Knowledge Management
Or "How Blue's Clues Taught Good Thinking Skills"
I first wrote about this idea about 8 years ago here. However, as I have been working to harness the power our computers put at our fingertips to manage knowledge, I find myself returning to this simple process that Steve from Blue’s Clues taught, relentlessly, episode after episode. That was the game, after all, find three clues, left by Blue (the dog). Write them in the “handy-dandy notebook.” Once you have all three clues, sit in your thinking chair with your handy-dandy notebook and think about the clues until you solve the puzzle of the day. Simple.
Deceptively so.
What was Steve teaching all of those preschoolers back in the late 90’s? The same skills they could use to do graduate level research.
What?
I am not kidding. Look at the current onslaught of personal knowledge management content on YouTube and everywhere else on the internet. Terms like Zettelkasten, mind-mapping, maps of content, and linking your thinking. Software programs like Notion, Evernote, OneNote, and (my current favorite) Obsidian.
It can get complicated fast. Dashboards and plug-ins and complex workflows. Linking, tagging, folders, classification, metadata….it’s enough to make your head spin. But, Blue can help.
These systems, conceptually, are just Blue’s Clues on a larger scale.
No, really.
We start by collecting some facts or ideas. Each one as an individual unit of thought. Three is a good number to start with. If you’ve never done this before, take three Post-Its, or three index cards, and write an idea on each one that you find interesting or that you are working with.
Got them? Good job.
Now, sit with these three ideas and ask yourself some questions about them.
How are they related?
How are they different?
Is one dissimilar to the other two?
Does one explain or call into question the other two?
What is a fourth idea you can construct from your three ideas and asking these questions?
Did you do it? Do you now have four ideas? Congratulations! You just created a new piece of knowledge for yourself!
Does it seem too simple to be useful? Well, watch this and see if Nick Milo isn’t just doing grown-up Blue’s Clues with Obsidian.
Obsidian is the handy-dandy notebook. But it’s handier-dandier because we can link notes to other notes, which becomes helpful as the number of notes increases. We can dive in at any point and follow those links around, just like clicking links on the internet, and see how we have linked various thoughts together. (That they are connections meaningful to you is what distinguishes this from following someone else’s links on the web).
Those connections are important. If you are familiar with the ICE Learning Hierarchy, you know that’s the second step of three. 1. Information 2. Connections 3. Extensions.
Seem a bit abstract? Go back to Steve and Blue.
Extensions are where we are really thinking. We have gathered Blues Clues (information), we have made connections (thinking chair), and now we’re going beyond the information we have to create new information. (We’ve figured out Blue’s Clues…because we’re very smart!)
It is my solid conviction that all this knowledge management stuff only works if it is conceptually simple. We need a system that is as absolutely simple as possible because the stuff we use that system to think about usually isn’t. If it was, we wouldn’t need a system, we would have figured it out already.
Using those same simple ideas, we can get to this:
And this is crucial; we can still understand what is happening. We are in control of it, because we created it. This is how real PhD students are doing work. Morgan Eua is one of my favorites because she gives a very simple system for going from research to writing, using Obsidian. No plugins. No integrating other applications.
I hope this simple conceptualization of Obsidian usage was helpful. It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but once I realized it was just an infinitely-scalable handy-dandy notebook, it clicked for me.
Oh, and if you’re wondering, Steve didn’t die. But you may have known that already.
You made it this far? Maybe buy me a coffee?
Grace & peace,
Chris