- Feb 2024
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- Nov 2023
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thatsthenorm.com thatsthenorm.com
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Live-Roaming: Using Roam to teach students in college
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
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- Oct 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Zettelkasten courses and teachers
Having someone who is experienced, cares, and knows the entirety of their space can be invaluable to speed you on your way to having at least an idea of the space in general and then give you pointers on your particular practice and needs. There is tremendous amount of ink spilled on the idea of zettelkasten, some of it good, some of it remarkably bad, and most of it painfully generic and useless.
Most of those I know who have serious practices have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and refining to come to where they are. They, and I, would all probably think that a good teacher and class on the subject could have saved them hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time and in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. How much is your time worth in the balance? Can you read a cheap book or two on the topic? A few blog posts? Certainly, and many have, yet there are still lots of very basic questions which pop up here and elsewhere. Buying a book isn't the end-all either as you've still got to spend the time reading and distilling what's in it. A good instructor can boil down Ahrens' work into twenty minutes and get you up and working a lot more quickly, not to mention distilling down even a fraction of all the other potentially relevant sources.
Most of the questions in this sub-reddit are people asking for pointers either about where to start or examples of specific things they're having trouble with. Of course in the majority of the cases they could simply search this or one or two other sources to find almost exactly what they need, yet here they are posting one of the same 10 questions over and over. (I also generally get the impression that they're only thinking about the system in a theoretical fashion and aren't actually practicing it for themselves.) It's nice to have pointers like the one that u/WM2D2 provides, but how is someone new to the space supposed to find this or other specific sources without the prior knowledge? Simple search is unlikely to uncover the best sources. In my experience, a lot of the best material on zettelkasten practice doesn't even contain the word "zettelkasten" to allow one to find it via search. And what to do if or when it doesn't answer all their questions? Instructors are usually good at distilling down the particulars into a more coherent whole. This is what you're paying for.
Of those who are well-practiced, even fewer have expanded on their own individual practice to look at how others have practiced for a variety of very disparate use cases. Where is this experience to be found? Having looked at and read many sources over the years, it's definitely hard won knowledge. And what about taking the theory and turning it into actual practice? This is where a good teacher will come in handy to help you actually do the work to become better much more rapidly than any book ever could. The rules are easy, it's the practice to turn those rules into a practicable art that is the tougher road.
This being said, there is definitely a spectrum of experience and teaching ability. There are certainly only one or two people I can imagine recommending as a teacher in this specific area. Because this may be some of the most hard won knowledge to come across, I'll mention that u/taurusnoises is one of those I would recommend if you're looking to save your time and come to a useful practice for yourself without spending lots of time floundering around.
written in response to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1728f1n/why_are_people_paying_thousand_of_dollars_on/
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- Aug 2023
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Diesen organizistischen Überlegungen über das ge-schichtliche Werden, das einem »verborgenen Plan«(Menke-Glückert) folgt, ordnete Warburg einen weiterenZettel zu, auf dem er sich eine Stelle aus Ernst Bern-heims Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode notiert, inder auf Wilhelm Wundt verwiesen wird, der darlegt, soexzerpiert Warburg, »daß historische AllgemeinvorgängeAnwendungen allgemeiner psychologischer Prinzipiensind, wie z. B. die Reaktion eine Anwendung des Principsder Kontrastverstärkung« ist.362
Warburg definitely read Bernheim's Lehrbuch!!! He excerpted it! Though based on the footnote in the text, it may appear that his quotation was from the 1908 edition of Bernheim.
Machine translation of the German:
Warburg assigned another piece of paper to these organicistic considerations about historical development, which follows a »hidden plan« (Menke-Glückert), on which he noted a passage from Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der Historischen Method in which Wilhelm Wundt is referred to, who explains, as Warburg excerpts, »that historical general processes are applications of general psychological principles, such as e.g. B. the reaction is an application of the principle of "contrast enhancement".
362 Z. 0 02/0 0 0411. Warburg zitier t Wundt, Logik. Eine Untersuchung der Principien der Erkenntnis und der Methode wissenschaf tlicher Forschung, Stuttgar t 1895, Bd. II/2, S. 413, aus Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmit tel zum Studium der Geschichte, Leipzig 1908, S. 60 f.
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.
Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).
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Here’s a child node. It could be a comment on the thought -- an aside, a critique, whatever. It could be something which goes under the heading.
Lone child nodes cry out for siblings.
When I was in middle school a teacher told me only to put a sub-bullet point in an outline only if it wasn't an orphan (if you had one sub-point it should have at least one sibling, otherwise don't include it). This was miserable advice because it ended trains of thought which might otherwise grow into something.
On the other hand it could be better framed that if you have only one child, you should brainstorm to come up with others.
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I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.
Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.
Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.
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I mentioned that I knew I liked Zettelkasten within the first 30 minutes. I think it might be important that when I sat down to try it, I had an idea I was excited to work on. It wasn’t a nice solid mathematical idea -- it was a fuzzy idea, one which had been burning in the back of my brain for a week or so, waiting to be born. It filled the fractal branches of a zettelkasten nicely, expanding in every direction.
abramdemski suggests starting with an idea you're interested in working on and fleshing out when you start your zettelkasten. This harkens back to Montessori teaching philosophies.
Tags
- The Great Conversation
- red links
- outliners
- empty spaces
- dark constellations
- tree branching
- annotations
- tools for thought affordances
- child nodes
- Workflowy
- dark ideas
- Montessori philosophy
- outlining
- margins
- prompts
- zettelkasten pedagogy
- blank page
- negative space
- bullet points
- writing advice
- invisibility
- emu in the sky
Annotators
URL
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Using Magic: The Gathering boxes for younger children and teenagers might be a more palatable way to introduce the zettelkasten method of note taking to them, particularly when it's a game in which they have a pre-existing interest.
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- Jun 2023
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The command to schools—the invective about education—was, perhaps as ever, Janus-like: the injunction was to teach more and getbetter results, but to get kids to be imaginative and creative at the same time.They had to learn the facts of science, but they shouldn’t have original thinkingsqueezed from them in the process. It was the formal versus progressivecontroversy in a nutshell.
Can the zettelkasten method be a means of fixing/helping with this problem of facts versus creativity in a programmatic way?
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- May 2023
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www.nicksantalucia.com www.nicksantalucia.com
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Santalucia, Nick. “The Zettelkasten in the Secondary Classroom.” Blog, July 6, 2021. https://www.nicksantalucia.com/blog/the-zettelkasten-in-the-secondary-classroom-k12.
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Hyper-zettelkastenStudents stick all of their zettels on the walls with sticky tack or tape (be sure students initial or mark their zettels before doing this).Then, students walk around the room and search for connections and create original ideas using those connections.Students physically attach those zettels with string (like a conspiracy theorist would) and stick a zettel on the string explaining the connection.
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- Mar 2023
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Stroebe, Lilian L. “Die Stellung Des Mittelhochdeutschen Im College-Lehrplan.” Monatshefte Für Deutsche Sprache Und Pädagogik, 1924, 27–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44327729
The place of Middle High German in the college curriculum<br /> Lilian L. Stroebe<br /> Monthly magazines for German language and pedagogy (1924), pp. 27-36
... of course to the reading material. Especially in the field of etymology it is easy to stimulate the pupils' independence. For years I have had each of my students create an etymological card dictionary with good success, and I see that at the end of the course they have this card box ...
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- Feb 2023
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Local file Local file
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At once intended as a foundationfor a systematic history of the Jews, it was deeply unsystematic; meant to be a means ofproductivity, in the end Deutsch was essentially unproductive.
An example of a zettelkasten, meant for productivity in most settings, being called unproductive in Gotthard Deutsch's case.
Of course this calls to mind the definition of productivity and from who's perspective. From Deutsch's written output perspective it may have been exceptionally low in comparison to the outputs of others like Niklas Luhmann, S.D. Goitein, or Roland Barthes. But when viewed from the perspective of a teaching instrument and influence on his students, perhaps it was monumentally productive?
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cathieleblanc.com cathieleblanc.com
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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.
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- Jan 2023
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Around 1956: "My next task was to prepare my course. Since none of the textbooks known to me was satisfactory, I resorted to the maieutic method that Plato had attributed to Socrates. My lectures consisted essentially in questions that I distributed beforehand to the students, and an abstract of the research that they had prompted. I wrote each question on a 6 × 8 card. I had adopted this procedure a few years earlier for my own work, so I did not start from scratch. Eventually I filled several hundreds of such cards, classed them by subject, and placed them in boxes. When a box filled up, it was time to write an article or a book chapter. The boxes complemented my hanging-files cabinet, containing sketches of papers, some of them aborted, as well as some letters." (p. 129)
This sounds somewhat similar to Mark Robertson's method of "live Roaming" (using Roam Research during his history classes) as a teaching tool on top of other prior methods.
link to: Roland Barthes' card collection for teaching: https://hypothes.is/a/wELPGLhaEeywRnsyCfVmXQ
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- Nov 2022
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billyoppenheimer.com billyoppenheimer.com
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Throughout this piece Oppenheimer provides examples of notes he wrote which eventually made it into his written output in their entirety.
This has generally been uncommon in the literature, but is a great form of pedagogy. It's subtle, but it makes his examples and advice much stronger than others who write these sorts of essays.
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- Apr 2022
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One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.
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.
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- Mar 2022
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wvupressonline.com wvupressonline.com
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Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we? Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.
How much history is covered here?
Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?
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- Feb 2022
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Local file Local file
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Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storinginformation in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On thecontrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning
The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.
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- Sep 2021
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s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com
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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.
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Each class session on the syllabus in whichwe discussQ1 Hamlet(WEEKS 2-3), please cometo each class with two index cards withquotations of yourchoosing, andwith possible headings for such a quotation. On certain class sessions, I may give you more of a prompt, such as: to choose a line or phrase that is part of our everyday speech that youencounteredin Hamlet; orto cite a line from the major avengersof the scenes we discuss that day; etc. I will also be writing lines on index cards;we will share these in class, I will collect the cards, and returnthem the following class session.
An example of a teacher using index cards as a "low stakes" commonplace. The added benefit is that they can be passed around and shared as well.
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/
A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.
I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.
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- Oct 2020
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www.eastgate.com www.eastgate.com
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As I'm reading this page I can't help but think about how it potentially predates and underlies the idea of the wiki which came just a few years after this piece of software.
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