https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1avz21q/what_to_teach_in_an_obsidian_workshop_at/

I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.

Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.

Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3

Santalucia, Nick. “The Zettelkasten in the Secondary Classroom.” Blog, July 6, 2021. https://www.nicksantalucia.com/blog/the-zettelkasten-in-the-secondary-classroom-k12.

Werberger, Raleigh. “Using Old Tech (Not Edtech) to Teach Thinking Skills.” Edutopia (blog), January 28, 2015. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/old-tech-teach-thinking-skills-raleigh-werberger.

link to: https://boffosocko.com/2022/11/05/55811174/ for related suggestion using index cards rather than Post-it Notes.

This process is also a good physical visualization of how Hypothes.is works.

https://cathieleblanc.com/2023/02/05/choosing-learning-materials/

Cathie notices that students skip materials about the theoretical "why" of assignments to get to the simpler assignments.

This seems to be an issue with some in the personal knowledge management space who want to jump into the technology, the terminology, and moving things about without always understanding what they're doing or why. Many end up giving up as a result. Few books provide reasoning behind the terminologies or building blocks they describe to provide the theoretical why. As a result some may figure it out from long, fraught practice, but it's likely that more are not seeing the results they expect and thus giving up.

https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.

I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvxbl7Iwep4

Lots of levels here to pull apart, but this should be particularly interesting to novices.

Modes of note taking: * note taking for raw information * note taking (or writing) for understanding * note taking for relationships of and between knowledge * note taking for creating proficiency * note taking for productivity

Sung takes the viewpoint that linear note taking isn't as effective as mind mapping and drawing out relationships; in part this is why handwriting is more effective means of note taking compared to typing, particularly as most note taking apps force one into a linear pathway that doesn't mirror the affordances available within handwriting.

This video is definitely more about note taking than note making.

Film making is like note taking

Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

https://www.hastac.org/blogs/allisonhitt/2014/02/04/01-collaborative-note-taking

see also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaborative_interrogation

Jeremy Dean indicates that marginal notes are often "the basis for [...] points made in a final paper", but I wonder how frequently this is the case in the computer era? I rarely see or hear of educators encouraging the reuse of marginalia or even notes in academic settings, even within the framing of Hypothes.is which is an ideal tool for such a practice.

It's been my experience that while notes are in margins, they tend to sit there lonely and unused. Few are actually creating content based on them. When this is the case, memory of the idea or issue at hand is necessary so that it may be looked up and transcribed back into a bigger piece. When it does happen it's also far more likely to be academic writers or researchers who are concertedly building up particular areas. It's much less likely to be high school or undergraduate college students who should have picked up the practice earlier in junior high school or even elementary school so that their school research years are easier.

A potential resurgence of this broader practice may be coming back into vogue with the slew of new note taking apps that have been popping up and the idea of the zettelkasten coming back into a broader consciousness.

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

• E- excited
• W- worrisome
• N - need to know
• S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

Teachers can model their own reading and annotating practices for students, but this can be expanded when using social annotation. This will allow students to show each other a wider variety of potential note taking and annotation strategies which help to reinforce the teacher's own modeling. This can be useful modelling of a practice in public which has historically been done privately.

By featuring notes which might be reused for papers or developing later research, teachers can also feature the portions of the note taking process which can be reused for developing new ideas. How might annotations within a text be linked to each other outside of the particular flow of the paper? Might there have been different orderings for the arguments that may have been clearer?

What ideas in the broader class might the ideas within a particular text be linked to? What ideas outside of the class can be linked to those found within the text?

In less experienced groups, teachers might occasionally call out individual annotations in discussion to ask the group for what purposes a student might have annotated specific portions to highlight the various methods and reasons.

What are the list of particular note types here? - Paraphrasing segments to self-test for understanding - Creation of spaced repetition type notes for memorizing definitions and facts - Conversations with the text/original author and expansion of the ideas - Questioning the original text, do we agree/disagree? - Linking ideas from the text into one's broader knowledge base - Highlighting quotes for later reuse - others??

Link to - double-entry journaling in Bruce Ballenger<br /> - types of questions one might ask within a text, Ballenger again

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Annotations or notes are definitely the first step towards having a collection of excerpts from one's reading. Where to put them can be a useful question though. Should they be in the margins for ease of creation or should they go into a notebook. Both of these methods may require later rewriting/revision or even moving into a more convenient permanent place. The idea "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) in programming can be useful to keep in mind, but the repetition of the ideas in writing and revision can help to quicken the memory as well as potentially surface additional ideas that hadn't occurred upon the notes' original capture.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Blogs

Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

While students apparently have ignored the instructions in the past resulting in breaches of academic integrity, teachers can prompt active learning even during exams by prompting students to write answers to questions on open book/open notes in their own words.

I love this graphic organiser created by FOSIL (Framework Of Skills for Inquiry Learning) which encourages students to write down what they have found and explain the relevance. Lots of free resources like this can be found on the FOSIL group website here https://t.co/3uhWQNOr14 pic.twitter.com/ijH98bcc5U

— Elizabeth Hutchinson FCLIP BEM (@Elizabethutch) October 27, 2021

https://fosil.org.uk/resources/

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/

Verbal cues can be a useful method of scaffolding for students when note taking. Examples of this behavior are statements like "this is important" or "be sure to capture this in your notes".

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

Given the benefits of gesturing, teachers can improve their pedagogy simply by encouraging their students to move their hands while explaining things or working on problems.

Studies with elementary school children have shown that if they gesture while solving math problems led them to discover and understand new concepts and problem solving strategies.

link this with prior idea of handwriting out annotations/notes as well as drawing and sketchnoting ideas from lectures

Students reviewing over Cornell notes also be encouraged to use their hands while answering their written review questions.

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2022/01/30/smart-notes-in-padlet/

https://eleanorkonik.com/the-difficulties-of-teaching-notetaking/

A fascinating take on why we don't teach study skills and note taking the way they had traditionally been done in the past. What we're teaching and teaching toward has changed dramatically.

How can we dramatically increase the complexity of our teaching both knowledge and skills so that students need solid note taking skills earlier in their education.

Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.

On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127

What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?

This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.

What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?

Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon

The first manuals of advice about how to take notes began in the early modern period during the fifteenth century.

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/

What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?

What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?

• Inventional geometry does

Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?

This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.

How can we better reframe mathematics education?

I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

The distinctions between being informed and enlightened.

Learning might be defined as the pathway from being informed as a preliminary base on the way to full enlightenment. Pedagogy is the teacher's plan for how to take this path.

How would these definitions and distinctions fit into Bloom's taxonomy?

Note that properly annotating and taking notes into a commonplace book can be a serious (necessary?) step one might take on the way towards enlightenment.