When I opened a presentation and started showing it to my young colleagues, I could see nothing but surprise in their eyes. Those eyes asked: “What the heck, why did she waste her time making that presentation for a video piece from Youtube, when she could simply watch the video and retell it to us in short here in the classroom?”

I think I looked pretty old-fashioned to them. Uh-huh, in a way, I am, but if I had to do that homework again, I would certainly do the same: watch the video at least two times and, while watching it for the second time, make notes and arrange them into a convenient, easy to understand and remember structure: a table, a model, a chart, or a presentation.

Today, I am so old that I can remember how people used to write books with the help of pens and edit them with the help of scissors and glue. Every piece of work like that took weeks of time, but once you had done it, you became the real owner of the information — I mean, you could remember it in detail and you could use it effectively in your further work. Every human mind needs time to accept, study, process, and ‘digest’ information, before it can use it for creating something new. But the new millennium has set a new challenge for all of us: we need to adapt our minds to processing of unprecedented inflows of information. The emerging knowledge domain called knowledge management (KM) is a logical and inevitable response of the human society to the challenges caused by entering into the informational technology world.

Within a couple of decades, working with paper and pencil has turned into a sign of intellectual eccentricity and is hardly practiced today by anyone younger than 40, but the need to “stop and take some time to think it over” remains as demanded as it used to be for the previous generations.

Whenever I enter a classroom of students today, I can’t help noticing that my most hardworking and talented boys and girls ALWAYS look tired. No, not sleepy like we were a generation ago, but simply tired and — dangerously frequently — unmotivated: a logical sequence of bad informational “intoxication”. I believe, that the problem lies in our lacking ability to structure the incoming information in some effective ways. The theory of knowledge management is an attempt to develop ways to protect our minds against that intoxication.

In the 21st century, a person cannot avoid letting the information in anymore. Our minds are challenged all the time by numerous screens and audio/video devices pouring information on us 24/7. The option of simply not going to school and thus avoiding informational overflow is not an option anymore: the ocean of information has spread far beyond the limits of educational establishments and flooded every piece o space in our world, so actually, going to school and learning how to organize information in your mind would be a better (read: safer) decision for everyone.

This is why I have decided to learn the technologies of KM. This is why I believe that everyone who cares about their health and well-being should do this, too.