January 2024 – Learning Aloud

New Project

I am trying something different with one of my longer writing projects.. My wife and I had a 15 year run with a commercial textbook for the “technology for teachers” undergraduate teacher preparation course. Fifteen years translates as 5 editions of the book. This course does not generate the review of a large lecture course (e.g., Introduction to Psychology), but there is less competition in the area of our book and we did well financially.

As we gained a lot of experience allowing us to analyze the textbook industry and the niche in which we published, we became very aware of the backlash against textbook costs (ours sold for $140 to students) and began to identify issues a traditional textbook for this niche could not address.

We came up with a plan to publish a much shorter version we called a Primer and wanted to match this with online resources. We proposed a $29 Primer and intended to serve the online content ourselves. I still think some of our arguments for this approach make sense. For example, those intending to teach high school and early elementary have very different interests in what to do with technology. Why not provide the basics in a Primer and then a larger variety of content for specific content areas and grade levels online? Technology is a field that moves quickly and keeping content current is a tremendous challenge. Not only did we publish once every three years, but 9-12 months were set aside to generate the next edition. You see the time lag that is created. Why not write online continually to keep a given textbook current?

Textbook companies think differently about their relationship with the authors they hire. A proposal such as paying someone to write continuously does not make sense to them even though they might appreciate the issue of keeping content current. They typically have a couple of books in a niche and their field reps encourage the adoption of the most recent book in a niche. This is more because of the used book market than the issue of currency and the issue of a general approach rather than what would be best for a given book is the perspective they take. At the time (this has changed since), combining online content with a physical product was also a foreign idea that did not translate as easily into income.

Anyway, we agreed to go our separate ways and were given our copyright back so we could pursue our interests with another company or with an outlet such as Kindle.

We continue to offer a version of this textbook through Amazon. I developed a second resource (Layering for learning) which was not really a full-length textbook, but concentrated on specific online services I proposed educators could use to make more effective use of web pages and online videos. It is this second “book” that I have decided to take in a different direction.

My professional writing activities have long been mostly a hobby. We made our money on our original textbook, but now my work is mostly about exploring topics in online publishing. Instead of $140, the online textbook sells for $9. Same basic book. I think it appropriate content that takes considerable time to create be treated as having value and I have always require some payment for my professional work even if mostly symbolic. So, what other outlet and approach can I explore as an alternative to Amazon?

Here is my new project. I am updating my layering book and serializing it on Medium. If you have not used Medium directly, you may have encountered work offered on Medium through a search engine. Sometimes you could read what the search engine found and sometimes you may have found that the content was behind a paywall. There are two competitors in this space – Substack and Medium. With Substack, if an author wants to be compensated for her work, she requires readers to subscribe to her work for a price. A reader makes a specific commitment (usually $5 a month or so) to specific authors. With Medium, you pay a subscription fee ($50 a year) and then read whatever you want from as many authors as you want. Medium takes a cut and then allocates the rest to the authors based on several variables they use to define value. Like other social outlets for the vast majority of writers, you receive little money (I hope to make enough to cover my own Medium subscription fee). I think of it as a way to keep score. Do people find what I write interesting and of value? What are the options for those who generate the kind of content I create and how do different options compare?

If you are not a Medium users, I think you are allowed three free reads a month and the Introduction to my serialized book is explained in greater detail.

Why not ask for help? Have the benefits of technology-augmented studying been demonstrated?

I have written posts for Medium for a few months now. It is clear that some of my most popular posts concern note-taking and personal knowledge management. I have a history with the topic of note-taking having conducted research with college students based in my more general background in the cognitive processing of learning. When I most it is often about evaluating specific digital note-taking practices or knowledge management concepts based on basic cognitive principles. What about how learning works justifies a specific practice the self-help authors advocating for smart/atomic notes or second brain recommends.

I asked Dall-E to help come up with an image depicting the type of learning I had in mind. My prompt asked for an image showing an adult using a computer and note-taking to learn a skill that was something they had not studied in school. I decided I needed something specific so I requested an image focused on learning to bake bread.

As I have explained in some of these posts, I think some claims made for digital note-taking lack empirical support in the context to which the self-help writers propose their tactics apply.

A couple of observations about the framework within which nearly all (maybe all) existing research was conceptualized. The research I am familiar with focuses on learning within a formal educational setting. Whether it be middle school or graduate students, note-taking is largely a practice to deal with information inputs that are determined by others with the goals for the learner being storing, understanding, and applying this information to examinations, projects, and papers assigned by others. The time frame with perhaps the exception of licensing exams or graduate preliminary examinations are weeks and at most a few weeks in length. Proposals such as Ahren’s Smart Notes or Forte’s Second Brain propose unique tactics and imagine the use of notes over an extended period. Implications of these differences do not seem to be tested or at least are not examined directly by existing research.

The vocabulary of multiple authors proposing new systems and tactics can be an issue by itself. I am trying to understand the difference between smart notes, atomic notes, and permanent notes. For example, Ahrens titles his book Smart Notes, but then describes fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes. There is a process here – fleeting notes can become permanent notes through a personalization process similar to what Forte in this book about the second brain called progressive summarization. I threw in personalization because that is what I call the process of rephrasing and emphasizing based on what the learner knows (again similar to certain properties of progressive summarization). I think I should be able to apply labels if I think my label communicates meaning more clearly.

What am I looking for? I am searching for research literature that examines tactics used with these digital services as applied to learner-determined goals. Starting from a long-standing and nuanced literature defining cognitive benefits associated with note-taking, note-reviewing, highlighting, basic memory, and application what can be understood about self-directed learning? What basic descriptive data are available on the common use of the various features of the affordances of digital services? What types of notes do users actually create? Do users make use of tags and links when they attempt to use the notes they have created or do they simply search? Are notes reviewed periodically and new connections found as recommended by the self-help gurus?

I have tried the various tools scholars use to explore the literature (Research Rabbit, Elicit, Google Scholar, Litmaps, etc.) with no luck. All I need is one or two quality studies of the type I have in mind and finding related work should be easy. Before I give up completely and decide advances in this area will proceed by logic and salespersonship, I decided maybe I should just ask for help. Maybe the wisdom of the crowd really exists. If you think you can provide a lead please do so. I am not putting down those who just imagine strategies for learning they think are unique and creative, but at some point I want to see the data. Am I missing something or is there just nothing there? If there is nothing there, why is this the case?

References

Ahrens, S. (2022). _How to take smart notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking_. Sönke Ahrens.

Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain: A proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Atria Books.

Sharing the exhaust of reading

I had the opportunity yesterday to do a product review of the online note-taking service Mem.ai with a company representative. I make regular use of Obsidian (with the addition of the Smart Connections plugin) and Mem.ai while reading to do the same things – take, organize, and connect notes and then interact with the notes using AI. I do this as a way to explore two popular services so I can write about their similarities and differences.

The rep had sent me set of questions and then we interacted for what turned out to be a substantial amount of time in reaction to these questions. The question that prompted this post was “What modifications would I like to see Mem.ai add in the future?”

Open.ai is a great service and worth the subscription price, but I would guess any user familiar with other products would be aware of some features they wished any one of the services would add. With Mem.ai. I would like to have access to a feature that would be a way to share portions of my note collection with others. Mem has a pricing level for teams and a way to share any given note within the team, but this is not a way to share with other audiences.

To create this post, I decided I would try to describe this interest and how other services approach this goal. I have previously described these services in detail and I have tried to embed links here that will take you to these descriptions. Here, what I have in mind is emphasizing a way for users of note-taking and organization tools to offer parts of their total collection to others and ideally others who have not invested in the same service. For example, a university history professor might have a massive collection of notes and she may find it valuable to share selected notes with students in different classes. Could this be done efficiently without the students having to purchase the same service?

Hypothes.is

I became personally familiar with the sharing of notes using the free service Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is allows the sharing of notes to designated groups and the sharing of public annotations to other users who happen on the same online source document. Users add a free extension to any one of several different browsers to create personal annotations for personal use or to participate in groups. This is a base-level product with fewer features than my interests require (e.g., linking, AI analysis), but this service is a great application for classroom use. I first wrote about Hypothes.is in 2017. Here is a more recent description (here is a video).

Diigo

Diigo has also been around for some time and I originally thought of Diigo as a social bookmarking site. I have written a lengthy description of Diigo so I will not describe in detail here. My public Diigo account is still active and available if you want to take a look. There is a limited free version of Diigo and a free version for educators (pricing chart). The version for educators has a few limitations (e.g., the number of pdfs that can be annotated), but should work well if what you want is to share annotations and links to source sites with students. Diigo is beginning to show its age and does not offer newer features found in Personal Knowledge Management systems such as links among notes or direct access to AI.

Obsidian

Technically, Obsidian stores its data on your machine. Great for security, but a challenge if you want to get at your content from a different machine. I make use of Apple’s iCloud which functions as online external storage to get at my content from multiple devices. I know others use DropBox in the same way. I also know that you can share a DropBox folder with others and this would allow others with access to work with your notes, but this is not the way Obsidian is intended to work and there certainly are security issues. I want to offer read-only access to a designated subset of my notes.

Obsidian does offer an approved way to allow others access. Obsidian Publish is an $8-a-month add-on that would do pretty much what I want to do. Given the infrastructure requirements of providing this approach, the price is certainly reasonable and I should just add publish to the list of my subscriptions. As I write this resistance seems futile, but I wonder if there would be much interest.

Mem.AI

Mem.AI is an online knowledge management system. The price for an individual user is $8.33 a month for the yearly subscription plan (pricing options). There is a team option for a higher price that is designed for collaborative work (see my initial comments). Mem.ai is a great product for personal use but does not offer the public sharing I would like to see. There is a way to share an individual mem (example), but this is not what I am focusing on here.

MEMEX Garden

For those who follow the personal knowledge management space, MEMEX Garden (Memex Go for portable devices) is a service they probably missed. I paid upfront with a promise of a couple of years fee forgiveness, but I think the monthly subscription price is $6 a month for the yearly plan. MEMEX is positioned within that workflow space before a tool such as Obsidian and can be set up to feed highlights and annotations into Obsidian and some other PKM tools. I mention MEMEX here because it has a sharing capability close to what I would like to see included in my perfect product.

When you take notes or highlight while reading with this tool, the resulting online entry consists of your notes, highlights, tags, and a link to the source. You can also add notes to a theme. A theme can be shared. The image below shows what a theme looks like and another user would experience when making use of a shared theme.

When someone accesses a shared theme, they can link to the original article, view notes/highlights (first image that follows), or get an AI-generated summary of the article (second image that follows).

The way I imagine this being useful to others is to first construct themes to share. Then, offer the link to these theme to others. Those individuals could scan the titles listed within a theme and then use the AI feature to identify sources they might find useful. Finally, they would access the selected source documents for their detailed reading.

I have generated an example of what this looks like based on several themes I follow. Note: the AI summaries use OpenAI and will hit a limit. The summarization gets shut off when the limit I have set is reached. If you do not see the AI tool and want to give it a try, try a different browser. For example, it shows up for me in Chrome, but not Brave.

Summary

I get to the end of this post and upon rereading I find that I have mixed two similar potential social services – social bookmarking and whatever Obsidian and Mem.ai are. Both allow the sharing of highlights and notes, but the ideas differentiated from the original content should be different. In Ahern’s book Smart Notes, he proposed that the notes saved in Obsidian or in Luhman’s Zettelkasten be sufficient to be a meaningful representation of an idea on their own. I interpreted this idea as having sufficient information it was not necessary to have the original context to communicate a useful idea. Highlights and margin notes do not meet this standard and are more likely what is produced when using a tool that both presents the original content and accepts the additions of a reader (e.g., Diigo, Hypothes.is, Memex).

The idea of sharing the ideas generated while reading appeals to me whatever the form the shared information takes. Here, I made an attempt to comment on several services/tools suited to this goal. I use several of these tools and have not found one that matches what I would like to see in a single tool. Perhaps you will find one that fits your interests.

Use EdPuzzle AI to generate study questions

This post allows me to integrate my interest in studying, layering, questions, and using AI as a tutor. I propose a specific use of EdPuzzle, a tool for adding (layering) questions and notes to videos, be used as a study tool. EdPuzzle has a new AI feature that allows for the generation and insertion of open-ended and multiple-choice questions. So an educator interested in preparing videos students might watch to prepare for class could prepare a 15 minute mini-lecture and then use EdPuzzle to layer questions on this video and assign the combination of video and questions to students to be viewed before class. Great idea.

The AI capability was added to make the development and inclusion of questions less effortful. Or, the capability could be used to add some questions that educators could embellish with questions of their own. I propose a related, but different approach I think has unique value.

How about instead of preparing questions for students, allow students to use the AI generation tool to add and answer themselves or with peers.

Here is where some of my other interests come into play. When you can interact with AI that can be focused on assigned content you are to learn, you are using AI as a tutor. Questions are a part of the tutoring process.

What about studying? Questions have multiple benefits in encouraging productive cognitive behaviors. There is such a thing as a prequestioning effect. Attempting to answer questions before you encounter related material is a way to activate existing knowledge. What do you already know? Maybe you cannot answer many of the questions, but just trying makes you think of what you already know and this activated knowledge improves understanding as you then process assigned material. Postquestions are a great check on understanding (improving metacognition and directing additional study) and attempting to answer questions involves retrieval practice sometimes called the testing effect. For most learners, searching your memory for information has been proven to improve memory and understanding beyond what just studying external information (e.g., your notes) accomplishes.

I have described EdPuzzle previously, here are some additional comments about the use of the generative question tool.

After you have uploaded a video to EdPuzzle. You should encounter the opportunity to edit. You use edit to crop the video and to add notes and questions. The spots to initiate editing and adding questions are shown in the following images. When using AI to add questions, you use Teacher Assist – Add Questions.

After selecting Add Questions, you will be given the option of adding Open ended or Multiple Choice questions. My experience has been that unless your video includes a good deal of narration, the AI will generate more Open Ended than Multiple Choice questions. If you want to emphasize MC questions, you always have the option of adding questions manually.

Responding to a question will look like what you see in the following image. Playing the video will take the student to the point in the video where a question has been inserted and then stop to wait for a response.

When an incorrect response is generated to a MC question, the error will be identified.

EdPuzzle allows layered videos to be assigned to classes/students.

Anyone can explore EdPuzzle and create a few video lessons at no cost. The pricing structure for other categories of use can be found at the EdPuzzle site.

One side note: I used a video I created fitting the potential scenario I described of an educator preparing content for student use. However, I had loaded this video to YouTube. I found it difficult to download this video and finally resorted to the use of ClipGrab. I am unclear why I had this problem and I understand that “taking” video from some sources can be regarded as a violation of copyright. I know this does not apply in this case, but I did not want to mention this issue.

References:

Pan, S. C., & Sana, F. (2021). Pretesting versus posttesting: Comparing the pedagogical benefits of errorful generation and retrieval practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27(2), 237–257.

Yang, C., Luo, L., Vadillo, M. A., Yu, R., & Shanks, D. R. (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. _Psychological Bulletin_, _147_(4), 399-435.