Author: grabe

We are on a road trip so I have not really had the opportunity to generate a blog post. I was looking through my old posts and came across a connection to something I have been writing about recently. Recent comments on note taking to create a long-term, external record has involved a review of books written by Sonke Aherns (Smart Notes) and Tiago Forte (Second Brain) explained the origins of their work. Ahrens started with his study of the zettlekasten which was a box for keeping and linking notes taken on what might resemble traditional note cards. Forte started with the commonplace book which was a notebook writers would often use to copy comments from other books and record their own thoughts.

I found that I written about “commonplacing” in 2009 and decided to offer these comments again.

I have been reading Robert Darnton’s “The case for books” on Cindy’s Kindle (there is something quite ironic here, but now is not the time to explore). Tech types may immediately shy away, but Darnton has a very interesting history including working on the Google book digitization project and the commitment of Harvard to offer faculty publications in the public domain.

Anyway, The case for books is a wide ranging exploration of books, writing, authors, and reading. The historical perspective is cool. One concept I picked up is that of a Commonplace book. As I understand the concept, readers attempting to educate themselves would copy passages from various things they read into a notebook and would organize this material into categories and would include personal insights, comments and interpretations. These commonplace books sometimes ended up being published or a least saved as historical artifacts. The commonplace books of Milton, Bacon, etc. are historical treasures.

To me, this sounded very much like blogging –  a few personal insights, a few embellished posts focused on the works of others, etc., copied and rearranged (with tags). These activities representing a personal commitment to exploration and always the hope that the process will result in learning or a creative insight. I thought this association was likely new for educational bloggers and it may be, but the connection between blogging and commonplacing is far from original if one searches the web ( e.g, commonplacing on the WWW).

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Sönke Ahrens

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

I have been trying to decide how to bring together a couple of strands I have been exploring for several months. I tend to write for educators in the world of K12, but explore ideas and research from elsewhere. I have spent a lot of time lately examining the focus on professional or life-long learning involving personal knowledge management (PKM) / second brain uses of technology tools. You can review the posts by selecting the category for digital notes you should find in the margin of this post. Somewhat independently of this strand, I have been reviewing the content on the advantages and disadvantages of reading from paper compared with reading from a screen. Many of these posts appear within the category I have labeled digital literacy. Finally, there is the issue I have long been interested in which I might describe as who teaches what? Who teaches learners to study? Who teaches learners to highlight and annotate? Does anyone? At some point, I should make an effort to offer the K12 audience actionable recommendations. So, here is one idea.

This recommendation combines strategies recommended by Porter-O’Donnell (see reference at end) and the use of Scrible a digital note-taking and highlighting environment I described in a recent post. There are probably many options to Scrible, but it is free, useful in a group setting, and available for educators and learners. 

Let me begin with Porter-O’Donnell. She teaches what I think most would be described as literature. For those reading her article, her focus is important to keep in mind as I believe her strategies generalize, but the specifics of the strategies would vary with other content areas. For example, what one might be guided to highlight and annotate when reading a classic poem or story would be different from what one would annotate or highlight when reading a chapter in a biology or history textbook. The author beings by reflecting on her own experiences. She notes that in high school she was not allowed to highlight or annotate and then was lost when entering college without such restrictions. She claims she initially highlighted far too much and without much in the way of goals. She said it took her several years to develop strategic approaches. I can identify and would add from the personal perspective of teaching a couple of very book-based, large lecture, introductory courses (Introduction to Psychology and Developmental Psychology) that effective reading skills are most deficient at a time when there is limited support for application. Students begin college taking many courses in a large lecture setting and have limited interaction with the instructor.

Porter-O’Donnell accepted the responsibility for changing this typical set of learning experiences and developed strategies to embed as part of her traditional instructional goals. She began by asking students to work with her in identifying types of information they might expect to glean from a reading assignment projected using pages on an overhead (note the date of the author’s activities as I describe them). What would be highlighted and what notes might be written in the margins. For example, one might highlight characters, setting (where and when), vocabulary, and important information. One might write in the margins – predictions, questions, summarizations, connections, and literary techniques. She then proposed making copies of pages from a story and having students apply these categories (she used symbols to differentiate) making use of highlighters, margin annotations, and sticky notes. She also created a system for after-reading follow-ups. Reread annotations and review highlights. Were predictions verified? Was the title a good summary? What would be a good summary? These are just a few of her suggestions and what I am asking would be the equivalent categories during reading and post-reading in content areas you teach. Students were asked to compare notes (my effort at a pun) as a way to gain insight into how their interpretation and emphases contrasted with those of other students. 

I cannot help but think of reciprocal teaching when I review the Porter-O’Donnell approach – teacher modeling and think-aloud, group-guided effort and sharing, etc. 

Now, consider how a digital annotation and highlight environment would be applied in a similar way. Scrible does make a great example with its features for sharing. Demo, specify specific goals to identify and annotate, share and discuss, etc.

The basic transfer of strategies seems easy to grasp and once applied other strategies could also be explored. For example, how about progressive summarization. What about smart notes and the question what about this chapter do you think you might want to have at your disposal a year or decade from now. 

Porter-O’Donnell, C. (2004). Beyond the yellow highlighter: Teaching annotation skills to improve reading comprehension. English Journal, 82-89.

I promised I would explain Forte’s notion of progressive summarization which I mentioned in a recent post. The idea concerns how to transform typical annotations and highlights taken while reading into what Ahren’s would call Smart notes – stand-alone notes that capture the essence of what was read.

The process works like this. Read and annotate as usual using an app that allows the isolation of the highlights and annotations. My example is based on using Highlights while reading journal article pdfs on my iPad. In the following image you can see a little bit of the article pdf to the left of the image and the extracted highlights and annotations to the right. This extracted content can then be shared with another app. Ideally, the extracted content would allow linkages back to the original content and this works when moving content to Apple Notes. This works only when the content resides on the same device is not very practical long term. I simply cut and paste the content into a Google doc for the additional processing I describe next. The page references provide a way to connect to the original content.

Forte suggests the following sequence with the extracted content. First,, bold the most important ideas. Then, in a second pass, highlight the essential ideas from this bolded content (the reason I like Google files in drive is the opportunity to both bold, highlight, and add text). Finally, write a summary of the highlighted material. He suggests bullet points. I prefer the Ahren stand-alone notes as a way to record the key ideas I may want to use later.

If you are interested in an example of the finished product, I have embedded a pdf of progressive summarization I created in this format.

The goals of this approach are to find the most essential information to retain a context that maintains the context from which the key items extracted. Ideally these documents would be retained in a meaningful way. Making certain the full citation is included and searchable would be one way to do this. To tell the truth, I store the stand-alone notes and go back to the annotation original if necessary.