12 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. To [[contribute]] to the Agora, first you need to publish your [[digital garden]] or [[content]] elsewhere online. The Agora doesn't host your data, but rather pulls it from a location you control and renders it for you and other users; it interlinks it with that of other users.

      This is obviously required, because it's by design.

  2. May 2023
  3. Apr 2022
    1. Much of Barthes’ intellectual and pedagogical work was producedusing his cards, not just his published texts. For example, Barthes’Collège de France seminar on the topic of the Neutral, thepenultimate course he would take prior to his death, consisted offour bundles of about 800 cards on which was recorded everythingfrom ‘bibliographic indications, some summaries, notes, andprojects on abandoned figures’ (Clerc, 2005: xxi-xxii).

      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.

    1. Starting in the Renaissance notes weretreated less as temporary tools than as long-term ones, worthy of considerableinvestment of time and effort, of being saved for reuse and in some cases sharedwith others (collaborators in a project or one’s colleagues or heirs). Collections ofnotes were valued as treasuries or storehouses in which to accumulate informa-tion even if they did not serve an immediate purpose. This stockpiling approachto note-taking also required greater attention to organization and finding devicessince the precise uses to which the notes might be put were not clear from theoutset and the scale of accumulation hampered memorization.

      Summary tk


      Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

      The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

  4. Jan 2022
    1. To learn—A rather obvious one, but I wanted to challenge myself again.

      I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

      Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

      We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

      [[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

  5. Dec 2021
    1. Massive Wiki is a movement to create a wiki ecosystem (rather than just one engine) that provides classic wiki utility, with a plurality of tools and processes that enable decentralization and federation of the pages.

      This looks like a fascinating tool. Similar in function to what @Flancian is attempting to do?

      Perhaps I'll tinker with it soon...

  6. Aug 2021
    1. Sounds like Dave Winer is tinkering around getting Little Outliner to work with Roam or Roam like structures? He certainly might have some useful ideas for Flancian in terms of cobbling together all these note taking / wiki-like platforms.

  7. Jun 2021
  8. stoa.anagora.org stoa.anagora.org
    1. Some conventions may be emerging in a new batch of personal knowledge management tools, or amenable to them; for the duration of this document, we'll refer to these tools as [[personal knowledge management]] tools, [[roam like]] or (preferred as of the time of writing) [[wiki like]].

      It would be incredibly useful to have a list of these [[Roam Research like]] tools so that they can be documented as to what level of input they can/could take and remain compatible from text, to text+[[wiki links]], to the various flavors of markdown up to full HTML perhaps.

      I know a handful are documented at indieweb.org/commonplace_book

  9. May 2021
    1. Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in the future of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. But there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that. It's hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn't going to happen behind a Medium paywall.

      There are a few of us using Webmention for this. Similarly there are some running open wikis or experiments like Flancian's agora.