I think I prefer to assimilate rather than to accommodate (Piagetian terms so ignore if my way of thinking makes no sense). I like to find ways to fit new experiences into my existing ways of doing things. I have always done my academic work by taking notes and highlighting. The articles in the journals on my shelves are highlighted. I guess I am not sure why I think the highlighting in the books and journals and the notes I have accumulated in digital form for the past 30 years (some I had to enter when I started working on computers) really save me much time. When working on a project, I typically have to reread the original works anyway.
The move to online resources has caused me some frustration. While I can download nearly any article to my desktop as a pdf from my university library, I have been struggling with what to do next. I have settled on a system for storing, tagging, and searching pdfs (see comment on Yep), but there is still the matter of “processing” the material I collect. For me reading is not enough.
I have found a new tool that looks promising. It is called Skim. I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee for the tools I use, but this one is free. Skim allows annotation, highlighting, and some other methods for marking up pdfs (see below).
When saved, these additions are available to Skim, but apparently not to other pdf readers (or at least the ones I tried). At least other pdf viewers can open the files modified by Skim. I would hate to invest a lot of work in a system that relies on a proprietary file format and then find one day that the company decides not to upgrade their product.
What is kind of interesting is that the marked text content can be exported in various forms including RTF. The material marked in the image above resulted in a file with the following content:
• Highlight, page 1
External storage provides a way to deal with the typical delay between listening to a lecture and studying lecture content.
• Circle, page 1
Mark Grabe *, Kimberly Christopherson ent of Psychology, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND USA 58202,
• Text Note, page 1
Students who are more likely to skip class use online notes differently.
The combination of a system for marking up pdfs (without eliminating the opportunity to read the pdf using another tool) and the ability to export notes and highlighted material for the development of personal resources looks promising.
This is a Mac only product – don’t have to say that very often. 😉
