Perhaps you are familiar with the new jargon describing Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and second brain. These ideas may have not filtered down to educators yet, but the practices that are related to these terms certainly would apply to educators as knowledge workers. I have followed and explored these ideas as they relate to my long-term interest in developing and applying effective annotation practices (e.g.,note-taking). I will likely eventually write more about the tools and tactics of PKM as they might apply to secondary and students. For now, I want to offer a related proposal.
The core idea of a second brain is that learners can create and cultivate an external record of what they have learned to augment what they retain internally at some later point in time. These tactics can be implemented on paper, but for me make more sense when applied with technology.
As I have several books on the concepts and explored and used several different tech tools for applying proposed approaches, I have what I think is a useful insight. The guiding principles of an effective second brain seem remarkably similar to core ideas from cognitive psychology about what learning is and how a learner can improve the effectiveness of the time devoted to learning.
Here are what I consider overlapping themes. Both an effective second brain and effective learning encourage:
- The storage of big ideas / core concepts / personal concepts
- The linkage of personal concepts with other personal concepts and with stored examples
- The reexamination of stored concepts to activate these ideas and maybe connect them with newly stored information.
The proposal of the components and tactics of a second brain require that these themes be concrete and actionable. Having something to look at and explore can be useful in understanding similar ideas that are more abstract or even invisible.
A personal concept (my term) might be described as a personal summary of an important concept or an idea that can stand alone so that it can be understood in the future without additional context and could be understood by another individual with a good background.
In a digital second brain, linkages can be links among concepts or to examples, citations for context or support, or questions yet to be answered. Links are links that might be the familiar connections among web pages or tags that can be added to indicate a commonality with different elements of information.
The physical store of linked content is intended to be reexamined regularly. This process has some of the same goals as what cognitive psychologists call the testing effect (retrieval practice). Attempts to recall what has been learned strengthen future retrievability and the effort involved can identify new linkages as a by-product of the search for the desired information.
Exploring the techniques and components of an effective second brain makes concrete some of the same mechanisms important in learning and applying these techniques externally may provide practice for the related cognitive skills that are difficult to explain and develop.
Just a couple of examples that may help with the idea of a second brain. After exploring several options, I have settled on the use of a tool called Obsidian. The following images show a couple of features of this tool that illustrate the ideas mentioned here.
This image shows what is called a graph view. The image shows the linkages I have created among individual notes (personal concepts). Individual notes can be accessed by clicking on a node within the graph.
This is an example of an individual note. I have selected an example that shows a personal summary of key ideas, links, and tags.
You must be logged in to post a comment.