Digital notes – Learning Aloud

Weava

In the last few years, I have explored, used, and written about a large number of highlighting/annotation tools. At some point, one tool and service begins to seem very much like every other. Still, developers continue to create new, but similar products. I do not think most individuals need to explore each new product. I have settled on a small set of tools I use, but I continue to explore other tools mostly to make suggestions for others to consider.

I believe that most tools would work for most people, but small differences might allow some tools to match to varying degrees with different priorities. Among these priorities are the following activities:

Creation of a personal resource collection – A user wants to accumulate ideas, concepts, strategies, or examples from what has been read or watched. The tool used may have built-in capabilities to accumulate this information or be designed to export the content the tool has excerpted to another tool better suited to long-term organization, manipulation, and retrieval.
Social annotation – A user may want a tool suited to the implementation of a collaborative reading and annotation process. Value is found in the identification of useful content that has not been read or the comparison of significant elements several individuals have identified in the same source.
Scaffolded reading – An educator or expert adds elements to a document or video to assist learners or less knowledgeable individuals in processing a source of interest. In other posts, I have described this as layering in that an expert adds elements on top of topics of existing content (highlights, comments, links, questions) to encourage others to process the base content more effectively.

Weava is a Chrome extension for highlighting, annotating, and sharing comments made to web pages and PDFs. I was excited to discover it because Weava has made an effort to promote its capabilities to educators. There just seems to be more education-focused layering tools for video content and I can add Weava to the tools available for web pages. There is a free and a premium ($4 a month) version with a discount for educators. I have not used Weava with students so my experience is limited to personal web annotation.

To get started with Weava, you need to download and install the Weava extension into your Chrome browser and create an account. Weava is used in two ways. It is used while viewing a web page or PDF and it is used later to organize and work with your highlights and annotations in what is called the Dashboard. You have access to a sidebar while using Weava with a web page and you use the Dashboard when working with the content you accumulate. The Dashboard is available from https://weava.com/.

In the image below you can see the icon for Weava which has been selected while viewing the web page in the left-hand part of the image and the sidebar which displays highlights taken in the right-hand portion.

To highlight text, drag text from the document and a small palette opens showing color options. Some users use different colors to indicate different types of information. Select a color. To add a note, click the now highlighted content and another palette opens with an area for entering text.

This is the dashboard view available when you login to Weava. The dashboard allows access to the documents you have accumulated. In this case, the document described above (large window) and related highlights and annotations (middle window). The document to be displayed selected in the very left-hand window (in this case stored in the folder blog research).

Selecting a stored document to display provides one additional opportunity. The Cite button generates a citation for the source document and provides a way to copy (export) this citation. One recommended educational use of Weava is to collect of resources and to use this collection to generate some type of educational project. The citation associated with each source can be used to provide a list of resources that can accompany a completed project.

One final suggestion. Frequently, users return to their notes and highlights and find the selected information does not make as much sense as it probably did when it was selected. Clicking on the note will take a user to the location in the document associated with that note so that the full context can be reviewed.

Summary Comments

Import and export capabilities can be important to users. My personal workflow is focused on long-term storage, organization, and retrieval using Obsidian. Weava does not export to Obsidian so it is not the highlighting and annotation tool I rely on. It does export to other Personal Knowledge Management tools (e.g., Glasp). It makes the most sense to me to think of Weava as developed for specific projects a student or knowledge worker would focus on. The concept seems to be optimized for a targeted project and the search for documents (web pages and PDFs) is useful for that project. Students projects would be ideally suited to this focus as would knowledge workers who know what the goal of a specific task they have taken on would be. Second Brain or Personal Knowledge Management goals are broader and less specifically defined so other tools are probably more appropriate for those wanting a long-term less targeted accumulation of content.

Disciplinary Perspectives on Taking and Using Notes

I have found myself exploring and writing about the interrelated topics of personal knowledge management, second brains, and note-taking for the past several years. As I have spent time on these interests, it became obvious that there were multiple disciplinary perspectives on these topics. In addition, the different disciplines seem mostly oblivious to each other as indicated by the lack of cross-referencing evident in their written materials. There are sometimes references to historical connections which I will identify, but for anyone interested in these topics I would suggest there are benefits for exploring more than a single point of view.

The Perspectives

Here are the descriptive labels I have decided to use for what I claim to be different perspectives. Hopefully, the labels offer some insights into the categories I have in mind.

Academic studying – this perspective provided my personal background for this general topic. The focus of this perspective is learning in formal academic environments with the goals of the acquisition, understanding, and application of information to examinations and projects. While the general goal of education is focused on the long term and preparation for life, note-taking has a more immediate focus. I am of the opinion that the great majority of what I would describe as research is focused on topics within this category. Most of this research is based on a cognitive perspective on learning and application.
Organizational Knowledge Management – Organizations have a need to develop, preserve, and apply knowledge. For multiple practical reasons (e.g., changeover in personnel), this knowledge should be externalized for the benefit of the organization. The generation and use of this shared knowledge originate with individuals. Personal knowledge management (PKM) can be individualized or integrated with the more general needs of a given organization. Procedures for accomplishing these goals are the subject of scholarship and training in the formal programs preparing individuals for careers in organizations (e.g., business schools), but it is my impression that scholarship is less empirical than that applied by those with an academic studying perspective and more anecdotal and based in logical argumentation.
Knowledge Management Entrepreneurs – I struggled with a way to describe this perspective. It seems to me that there has been a recent and identifiable group of individuals offering self-help books and consulting expertise to those interested in Personal Knowledge Management. This category resembles the organizational knowledge management perspective but does not share the same group focus. The perspective emphasizes the collection, organization, exploration, and application of information over an extended period of time to accomplish personal goals. Of the three groups I have identified, those individuals promoting techniques and processes are the least likely engaged in what I would describe as formal scholarship.

Historical Antecedents

While not absolutely consistent, there are frequent references to similar individuals, practices, and models that can often be identified among these perspectives. Here is my own list of such sources.

Vannevar Bush’s article “As we may think” describing the manner in which individuals and organizations might use a yet-to-be-developed technology (the Memex) to take on information overload and how a knowledge worker might explore, retain, organize, and apply information.
Commonplace books are journals, diaries, or notebooks maintained by individuals. A famous historical example would be the Leonardo Di Vinci notebooks still available in different formats (Amazon source).
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. A zettelkasten is a card-based note-taking and note-linking system now often adapted to digitization and computer applications. It did not originate with Nikolas Luhmann, but I have connected the approach with his name because his prodigious use of the system as a scholar seems the example so many use.
The encoding and external model of note-taking (e.g., Rickards & Friedman, 1978) is the basis for much of the empirical research from the academic studying perspective. It proposes that learners could possibly benefit from both the thinking required in taking notes (the encoding process) and/or by having an external record available for review (external storage). This basic differentiation has been applied to such topics as whether taking notes by hand is more or less effective than taking notes using a keyboard (encoding), the best ways to work with the external notes (e.g., retrieval practice), and individual differences in both what is stored and how what is stored is used. For example, the Cornell note-taking method is an example of a system for both taking and using notes.

Examples from the different perspectives

I have written extensively about a couple of these perspectives in previous posts so rather than repeat myself and increase the length of this post I will link to some of these earlier posts.

Academic Studying – History of Note-Taking Research, Note-taking as a Generative Activity, Cornell Notes and Beyond
Organizational Knowledge Management – this perspective is a little more challenging as I have not written about it before. Here is a source you can explore without having journal access – Towards a Co-evolution of Organizational and Personal Knowledge Management Systems. Also see Pauleen (2009) – this is the introduction to a special issue on personal knowledge management.
Knowledge Management Entrepreneurs – Creating, Storing, and Using Smart Notes, Evaluating Tech Tools for Adults

Why consideration of the different perspectives might be useful?

Having asked you to recognize the multiple perspectives that I have identified, I owe you some explanation for why I think anyone interested in taking notes should expand their awareness of the background content available on this topic. I have found a couple of personal opportunities. First, the work from the perspective of academic studying has been far more carefully evaluated and useful in answering questions of why and if specific activities work. The knowledge management entrepreneurs offer specific “how to do it” suggestions and have strongly promoted the use of technology tools in PKM. The organizational knowledge management perspective extends the note-taking and PKM for life-long learning expanding core ideas beyond the academic classroom setting.

The links I provide here should open to many other resources on the perspectives I have identified.

References not linked

Pauleen, David (2009), “Personal knowledge management: putting the ‘person’ back into the knowledge equation”, Online Information Review, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 221–224, doi:10.1108/14684520910951177.

Rickards, J. P., & Friedman, F. (1978). The encoding versus the external storage hypothesis in note taking. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 3(2), 136-143.

Could AI Replace Many of the Recommended PKM Processes?

How much of the “building” part of building a second brain is necessary? With the opportunity to direct AI at accumulated resources, how much of the linking, tagging, reviewing, and re-expressing notes is productive? Some version of this question has long bothered me. I studied classroom note-taking as an academic and became familiar with the massive research base associated with different ways to take and use notes, the cognitive and metacognitive processes associated with activities in different note-taking approaches, and individual differences in the capacity and motivation to execute specific processes effectively. While there is a great deal of speculation, multiple books, and the sharing of numerous personal processes in online posts, where is the research on PKM and Second Brains? The research on learners taking and using notes in academic settings may offer a general structure, however there would seem important differences in the use of self-directed note-taking outside of an environment that involves processes that must accomplish goals set by others to produce products or perform tasks after short time intervals (the time between exams or writing assignments).

The terminology is different. You do not find classroom-oriented research considering fleeting versus permanent notes or the ideal types of tags and links to organize notes and prepare the user for future goals and tasks that often do not exist when the notes are taken. I try to translate the proposed strategies outlined in popular books for the audience that takes notes to benefit them under these circumstances (Ahrens, Doto, and Forte). Can the research on generative cognitive processes, metacognitive comprehension monitoring, and retrieval practice serve to determine if the recommendations made by these writers are reasonable? Perhaps the strategies for creating different types of notes (fleeting vs. permanent), strategies for linking and tagging, and reviewing to find new associations are just busy work.

Does AI provide an alternative?

MEM.AI was the first note-taking and storage tool I used that came with an embedded AI tool. The promotional material I read before investing time and money into MEM proposed that the availability of the embedded AI offered an alternative to the tags and links in a tool such as Obsidian. MEM.AI allows the manual assignment of something similar to tags and bi-directional links. The embedded AI did a couple of interesting things. As you built up a collection of notes, the AI offered suggestions based on the material you have accumulated. Similar notes were identified based on common elements of a new note and existing notes (see red box in the following image). You could link to suggested notes if you found the suggestions of value. Tags for a new note were proposed beyond any rags that were manually added (see red box in the following image) and any of these suggestions can be accepted. I have recently written about multiple ways note-taking systems can be augmented with AI, but MEM.AI is built with some of these processes assumed rather than potentially available through the creation of clever prompts. MEM.AI proposes that it creates a self-organizing workspace which seems a reasonable description.

MEM.AI has one more unique feature that seems a powerful use of the self-organizing workspace concept. There is a built-in word-processing capability called Smart Write. When you enter a forward slash / within any existing note or within an empty note, you can then enter a chat prompt. You can ask a question or make a request. With an existing note, the AI extends what already exists in what are often interesting and creative ways relying on what appears in the note you are working on and the corpus of notes you have saved. The output appears within that note and can be copied and pasted elsewhere or left as part of that note. It can be argued that this is a way to discover connections to other material more directly than what might have been manually indicated by creating a link to another specific note.

Here is an example.

The following (Permanentnotes) is a note I created with two tags. What you can no longer see is the / and prompt that was originally inserted after the second tag. The prompt entered after the / was “Does my idea that permanent notes move more of the thinking involved in transforming notes into a final written product earlier in that writing process make sense?” Smart Write added three paragraphs based on other stored notes.These paragraphs now appear in the original note (shown below). Not all of this content seems relevant, but connections were discovered and much of what was said could be used in writing about this concept. These additions were all based on previous content I added, but I did not have to manually find these connections.

Permanentnotes

This is a key insight. Permanent notes should be able to stand alone without reference to the original content for context. Perhaps it could be described as moving part of the writing process earlier in the transition from note-taking to a final written product.

#notetaking

#slipbox

Your thought about moving part of the writing process earlier in the transition from note-taking to a final writing product indeed makes sense and aligns with the ideas presented in the writing process model by Flower and Hayes (1981). The model emphasizes the importance of planning as a foundational step in effective writing, which involves setting goals, gathering information, and organizing ideas. By integrating permanent notes into this early stage, you essentially create a structured framework that facilitates the translation and reviewing phases of writing.

The approach of using permanent notes, akin to the slip-box system described by Ahrens, enhances this framework by allowing writers to develop a rich, interconnected repository of ideas and insights. This repository acts as an external structure that compensates for the cognitive limitations of the human brain, making it easier to retrieve and connect ideas when composing a draft. The slip-box method encourages a shift from merely capturing fleeting thoughts to actively engaging with and refining those ideas into coherent, stand-alone pieces of information.

Furthermore, this method aligns with the iterative nature of the writing process. As notes are continually reviewed and expanded, they can reveal gaps in understanding or suggest new lines of inquiry, prompting further research and reflection. This iterative engagement not only aids in the development of writing skills but also fosters deeper learning and insight generation, as noted by Ahrens. Thus, your suggestion to reposition part of the writing process earlier, in the context of note-taking and idea organization, is a strategic move that can significantly enhance both the efficiency and quality of writing.

Summary

I would argue that AI capabilities can substitute for or at least augment manual processes advocated by those arguing tags and links are an essential part of the Personal Knowledge Management process. To some extent, I have found the capabilities of the MEM self-organizing workspace to be more thorough in proposing connections than I would typically be on my own.

This brings me to an issue I consider in many applications of AI. This issue is whether the AI approach allows the user to avoid important activities that are important in and of themselves. Perhaps both the manual and AI approaches here allow a note-taker to produce comparable final written products if that was the goal. Whether the activities of exploring notes to make appropriate links and adding tags that identify key ideas encourage deeper thinking about the content seems a different issue. Again, this is difficult to know. One might make the opposite argument claiming that reviewing the text generated by the AI offers a different way to explore and find relationships within existing content and the process of considering what within this new material is relevant to the intended purpose of the prompt is a unique evaluative activity performed by the user. As I have already suggested, MEM.AI does not require that you take one approach or the other. So, explore. AI capabilities are being added to many note-taking tools and the potential is worth a look.

Desirable Difficulty

Despite a heavy focus on cognitive psychology in the way I researched and explained classroom study tactics, I had not encountered the phrase desirable difficulty until I became interested in the handwritten vs. keyboard notetaking research. I discovered the idea when reviewing studies by Luo and colleagues and Mueller and Oppenheimer. Several studies have claimed students are better off taking notes by hand in comparison to on a laptop despite being able to record information significantly faster when using a keyboard.

Since having a more complete set of notes would seem an advantage. The combination of more notes associated with poorer performance is counterintuitive. Researchers speculated that learners who understood they had to make decisions about what they had time to record selected information more carefully and possibly summarized rather than recorded verbatim what they heard. This focus on what could be described as deeper processing seemed like an example of desirable difficulty. The researchers also proposed that the faster keyboard recording involved shallow cognitive processing.

Note: I am still a fan of more complete notes and the methodology used when demonstrating better performance from recording notes by hand needs to be carefully considered. I will comment on my argument more at the end of this post.

Desirable difficulty an idea attributed to Robert Bjork has been used to explain a wider variety of retention phenomena. Bjork suggested that retrieval strength and storage strength are distinct phenomena and learners can be misled when an approach to learning is evaluated based on retrieval strength. I find these phrases to a bit confusing as applied, but I understand the logic. Students cramming for an exam make a reasonable example. Cramming results in what may seem to be successful learning (retrieval strength), but results in poorer retention over an extended period of time (storage storage strength). Students may understand and accept the disadvantages of cramming so it is not necessary that the distinction be unrecognized by learners. In a more recent book on learning for the general public, Daniel Willingham suggests that the brain is really designed to avoid rather than embrace thinking because thinking is effortful. The human tendency is to rely on memory rather than thinking. Desirable difficulty may be a way to explain why some situations that require thinking prevent something more rote.

Increasing difficulty to improve retention

There are multiple tactics for productively increasing difficulty that I tend to group under the heading of generative learning. I describe generative activities as external tasks intended to increase the probability of productive cognitive (mental) behaviors. I suppose desirable difficulty is even more specific differentiating external tasks along a difficulty dimension. So in the following list of tasks, it is useful to imagine more and less difficult tasks. Often the less difficult task is the option learners choose to apply. In connecting these tactics with personal experience, I would recommend you consider the use of flashcards to conceptualize what would be the easier and the more challenging application. Then, move beyond flashcards to other study tactics and consider if you can identify similar contrasts.

Retrieval Practice: Testing oneself on the material rather than passively reviewing notes is considered retrieval practice. The classic empirical demonstration of the retrieval practice or the testing effect compared reviewing content versus responding to questions. Even when controlling for study time, spending some time on questions was superior. With the flashcard applications I recommended you consider, answering multiple-choice questions would be less challenging than answering short-answer questions (recognition vs recall).

Spacing (Distributed Practice): Instead of cramming, spreading out study sessions over time is more productive. This method helps improve long-term retention and understanding. Spacing allows some retrieval challenges to develop and the learner must work harder to locate the desired information in memory. See my earlier description of Bjork’s distinction between retrieval strength and storage strength.

Interleaving: Mixing different types of problems or subjects in one study session. For example, alternating between math problems and reading passages rather than focusing on one at a time. A simple flashcard version of this recommendation might be shuffling the deck between cycles through the deck. Breaking up the pattern of the review task increases the difficulty and requires greater cognitive effort.

Other thoughts

First, the concept of committing to more challenging tasks is broader than the well researched examples I provide here. Writing and teaching could be considered examples in that both tasks require an externalization of knowledge that is both generative and evaluative. It is too easy to fake it and make assumptions when the actual creation of a product is not required.

Second, desirable difficulty seems to me to be a guiding principle that does not explain all of the actual cognitive mechanisms that are involved. The specific mechanisms may vary with activity – some might be motivational, some evaluative (metacomprehension), and some at the level of basic cognitive activities. For example, creating retrieval challenges probably creates an attempt to find alternate or new connections among stored elements of information. For example, in trying to put a name with a face one might attempt to remember the circumstances in which you may have met or worked with this person and this may activate a connection you do not typically use and is not automatic. For example, after being retired for 10 years and trying to remember the names of coworkers, I sometimes remember the arrangement of our offices working my way down the appropriate hallway and this sometimes helps me recall names.

I did say I was going to return to the use of desirable difficulty as a justification for the advantage of taking notes by hand. If keyboarding allows faster data entry than handwriting, in theory keyboarding would allow more time for thinking, paraphrasing, and whatever advantage one would have when the recording method requires more time. Awareness and commitment would seem to be the issues here. However, I would think complete notes would have greater long-term value than sparse notes. One always has the opportunity to think while studying and a more complete set of notes would seem to provide the opportunity to have more external content to work with.

References:

Bjork, R.A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185-205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Luo, L., Kiewra, K. A., Flanigan, A. E., & Peteranetz, M. S. (2018). Laptop versus longhand note taking: effects on lecture notes and achievement. Instructional Science, 46(6), 947-971.

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 25(6), 1159-1168.

Willingham, D. T. (2021). Why don’t students like school?: A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. John Wiley & Sons.

YouTube Annotation with Glasp

I take a lot of notes and have done so for years. I have tried many different tools over this time period. Social Annotation is a subcategory of these tools that allows users to share their highlights and notes. The idea is that the sharing of notes allows individuals to find resources they have not personally explored and offer their own discoveries to others. Glasp serves these purposes.

I have written about Glasp on several previous occasions. A unique capability allows built-in AI capabilities to “chat” not only with your own notes, but also the annotations stored by others.

Glasp is a combination of a Profile page that is the online location allowing access to the content you have collected (see above) and a browser extension that provides the means to highlight and annotate the content viewed within your browser. Kindle content is imported automatically. Glasp could provide the storage location for all of your notes, but I export notes to Obsidian to take advantage of more advanced features.

I don’t spend a lot of time collecting information from Youtube because most of writing is based on books and journal articles. There are exceptions when I review tutorials for software tools and want to keep track of specific tactics. I understand that others use YouTube extensively and I wanted to explore the capabilities of Glasp with this information source. The following video is my effort to describe how notes and highlights are generated from YouTube content.

Processing video for Personal Knowledge Management

John’s “The Science of Reading” explores the historical and scientific journey of reading as a science and a practice. Much of my professional life as a researcher focused on reading and reading skills and as a consequence, I was aware of some of the history of the research and theory. What I found my perspective lacked was the broader perspective on what was expected of reading as a determinant of culture and as the basis for citizenship and commercial and scientific advancement. The political perspective associated with assumptions about what specific skills were necessary for the general advancement of nations was an angle I had not considered.

The closest I can come to explaining some of the insights I encountered might be compared to present assumptions concerning political arguments over why “educated” citizens can believe the things they believe and even what should be excluded from classroom consideration to prevent what some see as undesirable outcomes. Those of us involved in the nitty-gritty of the learning and improvement of the skills of reading are often oblivious to broader questions of what the general population may expect the skill to accomplish or the problems the acquisition of a skill may create.

A historical perspective provides both a way to see transitions in a skill and how that skill is developed, but also how in this case to consider that a skill exists in a reciprocal relationship with that knowledge and culture. For example, political values, arguably a part of culture, have varied in demanding that a specific form of communication be prioritized and thus justifies support as a means for accomplishing prioritized goals. Who needs to develop a specific communication skill, what information should this skill target, and how will the use of this skill be controlled? More to the point of this post, are we in an era in which reading is coming to the end of its reign in this broader capacity and are we seeing the early stages of a transition to a different means for recording and transmitting knowledge and culture? Are we in the midst of this transition without acknowledging it and perhaps more importantly supporting and shaping the direction of this transition?

Perhaps asking whether we are moving on from reading seems radical, but these thoughts came to me as I have watched my grandchildren and truthfully most of my relatives spend hours exploring videos on their phones. The time children and adolescents spend on YouTube and other video content exceeds by a considerable margin the time they spend reading. It seems this reality has to be acknowledged. I tried to locate some specific data and found that the results of a recent Gallup poll indicate adolescents report spending an average of 1.9 hours daily on YouTube alone. Adults may be different, but I would wager when they encounter a skill they must execute they are far more likely to see if YouTube has something to offer rather than search for and read the manual that provides related information. I understand that what may seem a similar reaction has been associated with television viewing because everyone spent and spends so much time watching television, but how we make use of televised content seems different and less responsive to transitory personal interests than online video.

A modest proposal

OK. I have not abandoned reading and I rely on reading professionally. I must read journal articles and books to perform my occupational role. Scientific research demands the sharing and reading of text documents in a specific format and with a required approach to citing related sources so that any arguments made can be evaluated based on existing research findings and theory. At this point, I am bound by this approach. However, the process by which the findings of this formal research process reaches potential practitioners is not so rigid. Classroom educators can read articles and blog posts in which proposed instructional activities based on the findings of the research community are offered, but they can also listen to and watch podcasts and YouTube presentations. They can take courses (e.g., Coursera) and interactive classes (e.g., Zoom) that rely on video. We all have been taught to read (and write), but what about the development of skills that optimize learning from video.

For several years now, I have been interested in the role of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) in self-directed learning. Part of this interest has involved the exploration of specific digital tools that support the processing of information within the context of PKM. The PKM perspective can be applied to traditional educational settings, but it also encourages a long-term perspective which is the environment all of us face once no longer involved in courses that require us to learn to pass examinations and produce projects that demonstrate our learning. Our challenge is remembering specifics earlier exposure to information sources have provided when potentially useful and finding personally useful connections within this great volume of information.

PKM is about tools and tactics. What processes (tactics) allow us to store (internally and externally) a residue from our reflection on the information we have experienced? What external activities (tools) can facilitate storage and processing?

There are plenty of tools and plenty of related suggestions for tactics proposed by the PKM community. My focus here is on the less extensive focus on video and the even more limited focus on digital tools that are used during the initial video experience. How does a video viewer capture ideas for later use? How can skills unique to this approach be learned?

Why an integrated digital note-taking tool?

While watching an informative video, why not just take notes in a notebook next to your laptop or tablet? Why not just open a second window and simple word-processing app in a second window on your laptop? My answer would be you use an integrated digital tool to link the context between the original video and individual notes in ways that recognize future issues and uses. Note-taking is a far from perfect process and being able to recover a missing piece of information necessary to fix a confusing note requires being able to reexamine a specific segment of the original video. I first wrote about the importance of the preservation of context when describing apps that allowed the sound from lectures to be recorded within note-taking apps. These apps automatically establish a link between any note taken with a time-stamp connecting the note to a specific point in the audio recording. I even suggested that when a note-taker realizes she has missed something she knows she should have written down as a note, they simply enter something like ??? in their notes as a signal to later check the recorded audio for something not mentioned in the notes that may have been important.

I have a different reason for proposing the importance of digital notes. I use digital note-taking systems that allow me to quickly search and find notes I may have taken years ago. Students are not in this situation, but the delays say in a course with only a midterm and final exam involve delays that are long enough to be related to a sizable amount of content to review and a time frame likely to increase memory retrieval challenges. Digital notes make searching simple and allow integration and cross-referencing of content over time to be relatively easy. For those of us now functioning to manage large amounts of information outside of a formal and short-term academic setting, such challenges are now often described and addressed as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).

Reclipped

There are several tools available to annotate videos. My favorite is ReClipped. This tool is an extension that is added to the Chrome browser and is activated when a video source the tool can be used with appears in the browser. When the extension has been added, an icon will appear in the icon bar at the top of your browser and the appearance of this icon will change when it has been activated by the presence of video content within the browser. When active with YouTube, additional icons will appear in YouTube below and to the right of the window displaying the video (see the following image with ReClipped icons identified by a red box). (Note: the video used in this example was created by Dr. Dan Alosso and associated with an online book club he runs.)

I have written about ReClipped before in my series about layering tools. I define a layering tool as a tool that allows additions overlayed on existing online content without actually modifying that content as sent from the host server. I wrote previously about ReClipped as a way an instructor could add content (questions, comments) to a video so that the composite of the original video and the additions could be presented to students and supplement their learning. The difference here is that a learner is adding the additions for personal use.

To keep this as simple as possible, I will focus on one tool — the pencil. The pencil represents the note tool (see the icons with the pencil tool enclosed in a red box below the video window). Clicking on the pencil creates a time stamp in the panel to the right of the video window allowing the user to enter a note associated with that time stamp (see examples in the image). I tend to click the pencil, pause the video, and then enter my notes. Pausing the presentation is obviously an option not available when listening to a live lecture and solves all kinds of issues that learners face in the live lecture setting.

The save and export buttons are also important. ReClipped will archive your annotations for you when you save, but I am more interested in exporting my annotations so I can use them within my broader Personal Knowledge Management strategy. I use a tool called Obsidian to collect all of my notes and to work with this large collection in other ways (reworking, linking, tagging). I also make use of an AI tool ( Smart Connections) to “chat” with my collection of notes.

ReClipped allows the notes associated with a given video to be exported in several formats (e.g., pdf). I export notes in markdown because this is the format Obsidian likes for import. Markdown is a formatting style something like html if you are familiar with the formatting style used in creating web pages. Such additions allow the incorporation of other information with text (e.g., links). For example one of the entries included in the example I have displayed is exported as the text string that appears below.

– [08:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukJtbtb8Tb4&t=523s) levels of notes — fleeting, literature, permanent — literature vs permanent is a matter of connecting to what you already know vs summarization. Permanent note has been “filtered by our interest”

When stored in Obsidian it appears as the following image (this is an image and not active).

Within Obsidian, the link is active and will cause the browser to return to the video stored in YouTube at the location identified by the time stamp. So, if necessary, I can review the video I saw when first creating the note at the point associated with that note. This link will simulate that experience. One issue with time stamps — the creation of a time stamp follows the content the stamp references. You listen and then decide to create a note. To reestablish the context for a note it thus requires that you use the link to a time stamp to activate the video and then scrub backward a bit to view the relevant material.

ReClipped allows other content (e.g., screen captures) from a video to be collected while viewing. Taking and exporting notes is straightforward and easy for me to explain in a reasonable amount of time.

There is a free version of ReClipped and the paid unlimited version is $2 a month. Note that ReClipped is presently free to teachers and students.

Research

I try to ground my speculation concerning the application of digital tools and techniques in unique learning situations with links to relevant research. In this case, my preference would be for studies comparing traditional note-taking from video with taking notes using integrated digital note-taking tools similar to ReClipped. I have been unable to locate the type of studies I had hoped to find. I did locate some studies evaluating the effectiveness of scratch-built tools typically incorporating some type of guided study tactic (see Fang and colleagues reference as an example). Though important work, learner application of more flexible and accessible tools seems a different matter and need to be evaluated separately.

Putting this all together

If you agree with the argument that we will increasingly rely on video content for the skills and information we want to learn, my basic suggestion is that we think more carefully about how to optimize learning from such content and teach/learn skills appropriate to this content and context. Digital tools such as Reclipped allow notes to be taken while viewing videos. These notes can be exported and stored within a Personal Knowledge Management system for reflection and connection with information from other sources. This post suggests that experience with such tools under educator supervision would provide learners the skills needed to take a more active approach to learning from videos they encounter.

References:

Fang, J., Wang, Y., Yang, C. L., Liu, C., & Wang, H. C. (2022). Understanding the effects of structured note-taking systems for video-based learners in individual and social learning contexts. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(GROUP), 1–21.

Johns, A. (2023). The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. University of Chicago Press.

Update to AI-Supported Social Annotation with Glasp

Social annotation is a digital and collaborative practice in which multiple users interact with text or video through comments, highlights, and discussions directly linked to specific parts of the source. This practice extends the traditional act of reading and watching into a participatory activity, allowing individuals to engage with both the text and each other in educational ways.

For learners functioning within a formal educational setting or an informal setting, social annotation can benefit learners in multiple ways. It can transform reading from a solitary to a communal act, encouraging students to engage more deeply with texts. Students can pose questions, share interpretations, and challenge each other’s views directly on the digital document. This interaction not only enhances comprehension and critical thinking but also builds a sense of community among learners. Potentially, educators can also participate guiding discussions or reacting to student comments.

Beyond the classroom, social annotation is used in research and professional fields to streamline collaborations. Researchers and professionals use annotation tools to review literature, draft reports, and provide feedback. This collaborative approach can accelerate project timelines and improve the quality of work by incorporating multiple expertises and viewpoints efficiently.

I have written previously about social annotation as a subcategory of my interest in technology tools that allow layering and even earlier in the description of specific annotation tools such as Hypothesis. As now seems the case with many digital topics, social annotation eventually was expanded to incorporate AI. This post updates my description of the capabilities of the AI capabilities of Glasp. Glasp is a free tool used to annotate web pages, link comments to videos, and import annotations from Kindle books. It functions as a browser extension when layering comments and highlights on web pages and videos. The accumulated body of additions is available through a website which is where the AI capability is applied as a mechanism for interacting with the collected content and for connecting with other Glasp users.

The following content is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the AI capabilities applied to personally collected content and the content collected by others. The second section explains how to locate the content of others who have used Glasp to collect content designated as public. This second section describes capabilities I have personally found very useful. As a retired individual, I no longer have access to colleagues I might interact with frequently. Collaborative tools are only useful when collaborators are available and developing connections can be a challenge.

Interacting with stored annotations using AI

The following image displays the personal browser view from the Glasp site. The middle column consists of thumbnails representing multiple web pages that have been annotated and the right-hand column the highlighted material (no notes were added to the source I used for this example) from the selected source. The red box was added to this image to bring your attention to the “Ask digital clone” button. This image is what you would see when connecting to my site to interact with my content. The button would read “Ask your clone” if I was connecting to my own account to interact with my content. Here is a link you can use to interact with my content. After you have read just a bit further, return and use this link to duplicate my example and then try a few requests of your own.

The next image displays what happens when the “Ask digital clone” button is selected. You should see a familiar AI interface with a text box at the bottom (red box) for initiating an interaction. I know the type of content I have read so I have generated a prompt I know should be relevant to the content I have annotated.

The prompt will generate a response if relevant information is available. However, here is what I find most useful. The response will be associated with a way to identify sources (see red box). Typically, I am most interested in reviewing original material from which I can then write something myself.

The link to relevant highlights should produce something that looks like the following.

Locating content saved by others

Glasp offers a capability that addresses the issue I identified earlier. How do you locate others to follow?

The drop-down menu under your image in the upper right-hand corner of the browser display should contain an option “Find like-minded people”. This option will attempt to identify others with some overlap in interests based on the type of content you have annotated. So, you must start by building at least a preliminary collection of annotated sites yourself. If you have no content, there is nothing available to use as the basis for a match.

Glasp should then generate something like the following. You can click on someone from this display to query their existing public material. If you then want to follow that individual, their site should contain a “Follow” button.

Summary

I hope this is enough to get you started. You can use the link to my account to explore. It seems unlikely to me that Glasp will always be free. They must have development and infrastructure costs. For now, the company has offered an interesting approach that has grown in capability during the time I have used it.