Thinking outside the box

I've been feeling an itch lately, that I've been stuck in a box and need to get out of it. But what kind of box? I recently re-visited Harold Jarche's PKM model as I start looking for ways to shake things up a bit, and the PKM roles visual that he uses really started to resonate with me, specifically the "Expert" role with high sense-making but low sharing. I've been working on university courses for nine years since moving to Australia, and while it's been a great challenge for me to move continents and apply my knowledge and sense-making capability to an ever-interesting variety of subject areas in the university sector, I've been neglecting the serendipitous connections and knowledge sharing that helped to fuel a lot of my early growth in my online learning career. I've still got a network of extremely capable and trusted colleagues to share ideas with, and I've certainly done some external sharing through a number of journal articles and a couple of presentations, but it's been increasingly focused on Work Teams with a little foray into Communities of Practice; there hasn't been much interaction with the Social Networks part of the Network Learning Model. So what on earth should I do about this? I've gone back to where I started off on my social learning journey. One of my first ports of call was the platform formerly known as Twitter, something that I'd been avoiding after its fitful transition to X and the general enshitification that ensued. But then I remembered one of the smart tools I had to make sense of the endless firehose of information coming out, namely Lists, which helps to filter down to specific groups of people and areas of interest. I had one list just for the bloggers I followed, which prompted a thought that I hadn't posted in years. Without thinking too much about what to write I just opened up a new post and got to it, and it's like I've managed to unblock something. I felt a brief concern about whether to hit Publish in hurry, wondering if I should check things through, but that never bothered me before and it shouldn't - the biggest value in my blog was purely as a personal space to share with whatever network might be listening, so here goes. I'll hopefully be back with some deeper thoughts once my thinking clears up. For now, it's good to be back outside the box...