Digital notes – Page 3 – Learning Aloud

School and Professional Note-Taking

I have always been interested in note-taking. I explored options for taking notes as a college student and conducted research on note-taking as a professor. Despite the length of time note-taking has been an interest, the combination of the recent reframing of note-taking as Personal Knowledge Management and technology-based tools for making and using notes has brought a critical revelation. There are essential differences between student note-taking and out-of-school note-taking. Maybe that was obvious to everyone else. I don’t think so.

I have come to think about the distinction in this way. Do the tools, methods, and research of note-taking scale? By this I mean do the research, methods, and tools have been dominated by a way of thinking that imagines a learner listening to a lecture in preparation for a test or reading a book in preparation for writing a paper tell us much about taking notes outside of an educational setting. How does this perspective relate to Professional Note-taking?

I may have been aware of Common Place Books and had a file box full of note cards with citations and a few comments about the research articles I had read (later to be converted to digital tools such as EndNote), but I failed to make the connection that these were note-taking techniques and these were techniques that were very different from what students I was lecturing on note-taking and study skills were doing.

It took the book Smart Notes, learning about Nicholas Luhmann and his Zettelkasten, and my exploration of multiple digital note-taking tools (e.g., Obsidian, Mem.ai) for me to begin forming a broader perspective on note-taking. I was still a notetaker, but my activities were very different from what students do. I thought maybe the labels of school and adult notetakers might be an appropriate distinction, but I worked mainly with adults so that was not quite right. I decided maybe the distinction between school and professional notes made more sense. Again, my question – Do the tools, methods, and research of note-taking scale?

School and Professional Note Differences

Delay until use. An obvious difference is the expected time until use of stored information. With school notes, the likely use of recorded information is less than a semester. Maybe grad students would review notes before prelims or comprehensive examinations (the exams students take toward the end of their PhD training), but such exams are becoming more and more uncommon and Professional notes would still be used over a longer period of time. For Professional notes, the actual use of such notes could be delayed by years and perhaps decades.
Control of goals – The reality in student note-taking is that you most likely understand your purpose as preparation for a task that will be assigned by someone else. You might select the topic of a paper you are taking notes to write, but an instructor likely determined the parameters of the paper. Exams present an even more vague and externally defined objective. Not only do you not usually get to select the focus of the exam or whether an exam will be experienced, you are seldom informed specifically what in the notes or assigned readings are a priority for what will be covered by the assessment. Such lack of control matters because the uncertainty probably means more complete notes should be a goal. In a lecture situation, you can work through priorities and likely foci after a lecture, but the speed of presentation may mean that the best “live situation” strategy is to record as much as you can. It is true that the intended use for Professional Notes is often uncertain at the time you record information, but the difference is a matter of degree. Things that have no interest to you can be ignored without anxiety.

The differences I have outlined here are how I see reality. However, I do wonder when one should begin taking Professional Notes. I wish I had some of the notes from my 50 years ago college years. There is also learning that goes on outside of formal education at all ages and it seems recording insights related to such experiences would be of value. I suppose those who keep a diary have some goal like this in mind.

As my perspective on taking notes has become more expansive, I am starting to think that issues such as control and time frame have implications for tools, strategies, and research related to taking notes.

Tools

I have two general comments on the selection of tools. These comments can be differentiated as a) how important is digital technology in taking notes and b) when digital tools are the answer, which tools.

First, should notes be handwritten or recorded digitally using a keyboard. Yes, I know there are ways to transform handwritten notes (on paper or screen) into digital, but I see this approach as on the fringe. My answer here recognizes that the time frame / control of application issues must be part of the answer. For me, the answer is simple – go digital. If you are a fan of some of the research on student use of pen vs. keyboard and are convinced by the data from the studies showing pen and paper are superior – fine. This is not the place for me to argue and explain.

OK, I can’t help myself. If you favor pen/paper, read the methodology of those studies carefully. When was the exam in the research comparison given? More complete notes (what tends to result from keyboards) offer little advantage offer no advantage if exams are immediate and retention over time is less important. What experience do learners have taking notes on a laptop? An important limitation in both notetaking and reading comparisons of paper vs screen is the experience the participants in the studies have with extended use of technology as notetakers or readers.

I think there are obvious advantages of technology that should not be ignored. The comprehensiveness of the notes and the ability to record important information are great predictors of evaluations related to this information. For those who are supporters of the “too much typing limits thinking argument”, I would propose that students use a digital tool that records the audio of the input while the student takes notes. SoundNote makes a good example, but there are several tools of this type. Here is what happens. Notes taken are time-stamped to locations in the audio recording (you don’t see the time stamps). When something in the notes confuses you later, click within your notes and listen to the recording at that point. Very efficient. If you don’t understand, enter something like ???? in your notes and review the audio when you are out of the classroom and can take the time. You cannot do these things with paper.

Summary – for school notes, I would recommend digital notes as soon students can manage. Like any approach to taking notes, there are useful strategies that take advantage of what a tool offers.

Professional Notes and tools – I think Professional Notes benefit from more sophisticated tools and probably the utilization of different tools over time. This combination probably means that the pass-through of content from tool to tool is an issue to consider. A second and related issue is that Professional Notes benefit from some “slicing and dicing” over time. By this, I mean important ideas and concepts can be isolated and then combined and recombined (or at least linked in multiple ways) over time. Part of this process is based on efficient ways to find these ideas.

My personal approach at this time follows. At this time is meaningful in the context of Professional Notes as things change with the advancement of technology and the ability to efficiently migrate content from one tool to a different tool performing similar function or expanded functions is important. I use ReadWise (and its related tool Reader) for ebooks, Notion for web content, and Highlights for pdfs (mostly journal articles) to take notes. I migrate the notes and highlights to Obsidian directly. I also enter individual notes (Smart Notes) directly into Obsidian or code the notes and highlights migrated from the digital note-taking tools with tags and links. I am starting to get into strategies here so I will stop with this description. This sounds complicated, but a) much of this happens automatically or b) can be accomplished by copy and paste.

Strategies

In 1972, DiVesta and Gray proposed what might be described as the classic model of note-taking describing the stages of encoding and external storage. Encoding in this case implied more than a passive transcription of information and proposed generative activities as a benefit of taking notes. I write a lot about generative activities, but here generative might simply be accepted that learners benefit from the cognitive activities in taking notes. From a research perspective, this would be demonstrated by comparing the recall or other measure of understanding of a group taking notes and another group just listening with neither group reviewing notes before attempting the test of understanding.

Kiewra and colleagues recognized that encoding was too vague and proposed that the process of taking notes could result from qualitative or quantitative benefits. More notes would require paying attention more successfully which would be a quantitative benefit. If there was a benefit to taking notes that involved the thinking that was generated in doing so, this would be a qualitative benefit. Einstein and colleagues proposed there was some evidence of a qualitative benefit based on data comparing better and poorer students because better students recalled more of content defined as more important with little difference in the recall of less important information. Some thinking while listening had to be going on to differentiate the attention paid to the more important ideas.

In general, research does show that what happens while taking the original notes is not as important as what follows. This effect is one reason I am in favor of a system that provides a way to capture more rather than fewer notes. With more notes, you have more to work with and what a learner does with this content is where the more significant benefits are produced.

What makes sense to me is to conceptualize note use within a three-stage model. Rather than just understanding taking notes as recording and reviewing effective notetaking might benefit from an intermediate stage – revision. For example, Luo and colleagues investigated revision during pauses in a presentation or for the same amount of time immediately after the presentation and found benefits for more immediate activities working with notes. In thinking about taking notes in terms of activities during three phases that might be described as recording, revision, and review, what was done during revision and review without the time constraints of recording information in real-time during a lecture offers opportunities for cognitive activities that benefit retention and understanding.

Translating this notion of stages into a form that might be familiar to more folks who read my post. Consider the Cornell Note Method (see image below). The tools here are typically paper and pen with pages of paper divided into the three sections shown in the image (Notes, Other, and Summary).

With a blank page divided as I have illustrated, a learner takes notes within the area I have identified as notes. I would describe this as the recording phase. During the revision stage (not a label Pauk would use in explaining his Cornell Note system, but I will use to remain consistent), the learner follows up to react to these notes with questions, insights, issues, etc. that are recorded in the Other section of the page and generates a summary that is added in the section set aside for summary. These additions are generated in reaction to the notes and represent external actions that research has shown encourage useful cognitive activities. These are not activities that would be part of a cramming before an examination study session. Cramming has entirely the wrong connotation for any part of the study process, but I use it here because it is understood and to identify the final phase of preparation before an examination. The process following the initial recording of information assumes a series of returns to the original notes first to post-process the notes to layer on external elements such as questions, comments, and a summary and then to review this combination ideally multiple times.

The Cornell system is a structured tool to some extent because use of the system assumes specific activities will follow the taking of the notes and the tool provides a structure within which these activities record an artifact of these activities.

Tools for Professional Notes – The combination of tools I use in my own process do not structure a sequence of activities and products as concretely as the Cornell system I have described, but I do have a workflow that has some similarities, but also results in different experiences and different products. In response to the greater time delay before application and the uncertainty of how stored information will be applied result in some important differences in activity. The idea of a Second Brain is often used by those focused on Personal Knowledge Management.

A second brain is a system or tool that helps you to collect, organize, and retrieve information. The goal of a second brain is to help you access information more easily, understand the information you have accessed, and apply this information in creative ways. Often, the best approach is to separate ideas from their original context, store important ideas with a newly created context sufficient to make the concept understandable after a significant delay, create a system of metadata that will facilitate rediscovery of these ideas after a significant delay, and offer ways to flexibly connect ideas to creatively produce new insights and products. Tags, links, and powerful search options are important for exploration and rediscovery. Like the revision and review phases I identified in my discussion of School notes, tools for Professional Notes are intended both to be explored on a regular basis (to discover new relationships and revisit ideas looking for new connections) and to use when there is a specific task to complete.

Research

School and Professional Notes have very different research bases. School notetaking and notetaking strategies have been investigated with both laboratory and applied research techniques for years. This research has allowed the development of theoretical models explaining how learning from taking notes happens and what specific strategies seem to work best for which students. As is often the case with applied research in education, the research is probably best described as messy with inconsistent findings possibly related to many different sources of potential variability (learner characteristics, task characteristics, content differences).

The interest in Professional Notes has generated a rich literature on strategies with a very limited literature summarizing studies evaluating effectiveness. I wonder if this will change. The tools and strategies change quickly and data collection would be very difficult because the tools are used in circumstances that would make it difficult to collect data from controlled experiments. In this area, arguments are based more a battle of ideas than a battle of data.

Sources

Di Vesta, F. & Gray, S. G. (1972). Listening and note taking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 63(1), 8-14.

Einstein, G. O., Morris, J., & Smith, S. (1985). Note-taking, individual differences, and memory for lecture information. Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(5), 522-532.

Kiewra, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Christensen, M., Kim, S., & Risch, N. (1991). Effects of repetition on recall and note-taking: Strategies for learning from lectures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(1), 120-123.

Luo, L., Kiewra, K. A., & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1), 45-67.

Tags and stories in my first and second brains

First and second brain are terms used by those proposing strategies for learning, remembering, and applying that take advantage of external storage tools and techniques. In this descriptive system, your first brain consists of the biological organ in your body and the cognitive activities you can apply within this biological system. This combination of organ and cognitive activity accomplishes what we typically describe as remembering, thinking, and creativity. The concept of a second brain is a way of referencing external devices and activities generating some type of external representations that are intended to augment first brain functions. I purposively have made the generation of an external record a component in my description of a second brain recognizing that external activities that many might describe as study techniques exist that do not involve the generation of an external record. For example, responding to questions is proven as a way to improve retrieval and if done verbally does not involve the creation of anything permanent. Advocates of the second brain concept do emphasize the generation of a record of experiences.

I tend to equate references to the second brain with some system for taking notes. This is a simplification, but a way to quickly provide a reference for those not steeped in this topic. As I have tried to argue when referring to first brain topics, it is more than just the record that is important. It is also the variety of tactics in storage and retrieval and deciding when a given tactic should be applied that can be important.

Finally, first and second-brain proposals can and should include consideration of the interaction between these two systems. As potential users of both brains, we have some control of each system and access to a second brain implementation could change the way we make optimal use of our first brain in comparison to what might be optimal use if we had to rely on the first brain system only.

We all or at least most of us took notes in our high school and college classes. Taking this background as a starting point, you should have a context within which to think about this topic. Now add some additional expectations. What if the goal was not to use a second brain application to prepare for next week’s exam or the paper you had to write in a couple of weeks? What if the goal was to augment your first brain function over several years in order to address life tasks you might not be even able to describe at this time? Even this later question might be applied to formal education because very few were thinking in this way when studying for that next exam or preparing for that next paper. Most of us probably cannot even find or did not keep the second brain artifacts we created while engaged in our formal education.

Now this was a long introduction I hope was valuable in and of itself to some. Many of my previous posts concerned second-brain topics such as note-taking and second-brain technology tools. Please take a look if my introductory comments piqued your interest. I spent the time to generate this overview in order to provide a context for the content that now follows.

The application of tags in first and second brains

One of the interesting characteristics of the work of cognitive scientists and second-brain developers is how there seems to be a reciprocal impact of ideas that originate in one field on the other. While I am at it, I can see a similar reciprocity in the ideas of cognitive and AI researchers. To be clear, cognitive researchers rely on hypothetical concepts to represent yet-to-be-discovered biological functions. This is my way of thinking about the challenges of neuroscientists and cognitive researchers. Obviously, mental activity must be a function of biology, but our mastery of this field is far from being useful in addressing most human learning challenges. A hypothetical construct is a proposed mechanism for how something works that has yet to be explainable via a physical equivalent. So cognitive constructs such as short-term memory, metacognition, associative networks, links, etc. seem to be useful in understanding and even proposing effective learning strategies and this is possible without having to reference or consider the underlying biological mechanisms that must be involved. For example, we can measure short-term memory and we can propose ways to improve the effectiveness of short term without reference to actual biological structure or process. My focus in this post is on the role played by tags in both first and second brains.

Shank and his focus on stories

I have been rereading Roger Shank’s Tell Me a Story. I first read the book probably 30 years ago. How I now relate to this book on human cognition and AI has changed a great deal because of my recent exposure to personal knowledge management (PKM). As the full book title indicates, Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence is about stories serving a far different role than entertainment. Shank presents stories as playing a central role in how we think, learn, and communicate. Shank goes as far as suggesting that telling a useful story at the right time is a great sign of intelligence. He proposes that an expert is an individual who has a great number of stories relevant to a given area and has these stories indexed so that he/she can tell a useful story at the right time. He recommends that we recognize that our conversations with others often focus on stories with one individual telling a story and then the other person telling a related story to indicate he or she understands and to offer some additional element of information.

This proposal fits with my own way of thinking about human memory. In cognitive psychology, one way to describe the contents of long-term memory is to propose that meaning is retained in units of information connected by links. This web is different in each individual as differences exist in what units are stored and in how these units are linked. Explaining in detail what cognitive researchers mean by units of information can get pretty dense, but for the present purpose perhaps concepts and facts is close enough. This web is called semantic memory. In addition to the elements of meaning are episodic memories. These episodes are often described as the way we remember events and I always thought we could think of these events as stories. What I heard in class today is an episode with a progression of information. It might also be described as a story.

Some key ideas from Shank’s book:

Intelligence is an abstraction; different experts explain it and sometimes propose how it can be assessed differently. Shank argued that an individual’s use of stories could reveal a lot about how intelligent that person is. Two aspects were informative. The first is having stories worth telling and the second is being aware of which story would be effective when conveyed to a specific individual in a specific situation.

Reminding is using an input in a way that involves the prediction and generalization allowing the retrieval of relevant stored stories. Intelligence is reflected in that capacity to translate new experiences, perhaps stories told by someone else, into effective retrieval cues.

In the process of understanding, we compare experiences with what we have already experienced. This process of reminding is the basis for gaining new insights from differences between similar stories.

Thinking involves indexing. Shank proposed that a useful memory combines specific experiences and indices or labels. The more indices the better. Shank spent a great deal of effort identifying what indices people used proposing that locations, attitudes, challenges, decisions, conclusions, and other labels are used as indices.

We are not necessarily aware of the process of labeling. The application of labels can be assumed based on what individuals recall in response to an input (story/experience). A story that is recalled in response to a story told must share at least one common index.

Understanding is equivalent to the extraction of indices from an input that match the indices associated with stored stories. We learn when the identification of a match between new and old allows further analysis of differences in the stories.

Tags, links, and indices

Careful attention to Shank’s explanation of the value and role of stories is recognition that it is not the stories alone that are important, but the combination of indices and stories. The combination is important, but in addition, it is personalized through the imposition of an indexing approach that creates this productive system. Perhaps thinking about experiences searching for understanding translated as indexing.

So Shank’s importance relies on the combination of indices and stories. Cognitive researchers describe long-term memory in terms of units of information (semantic memory) and episodes linked to facilitate retrieval and understanding.

Those developing and implementing second-brain systems offer tools (e.g., Obsidian, Mem.ai, LoqSeq) offer a digital system for storing notes, for attaching tags to notes, and for linking notes to each other. Notes are not stored as extended documents as might be the case for the handwritten notes taken during a lecture, but as individual ideas or concepts and labeled with multiple tags and one or many connections to other notes. Users are encouraged to review their notes and their system of connections periodically and to add more connections that occur to them. The goal is value over the long term.

Idea for practice

Aside from reflecting on the commonalities across these systems and how the functioning of one system might encourage how another system might be understood, here is one observation that occurred to me while completing this analysis. I don’t think the second brain advocates take advantage of the power Shank sees in how our use of the first brain relies on stories. Perhaps there is some attention to identifying and connecting examples, but I see little attention paid to the storage, tagging, and linking of stories. I told stories as examples when I lectured. In the time I have spent developing my second brain, I don’t remember ever adding and linking one of the stories I tell and I have not documented in my notes the stories I have read as examples in the sources I might translate into notes. If Shank’s argument for the value of stories is valid, not including stories in a second brain would be an opportunity missed.

Reference

Shank, R. C. (1990). Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. _Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Process_.

Notetaking across the lifespan

I have spent considerable time in the past year reviewing the literature on personal note-taking and trying to identify what is substance and what is hype. My interest is based on personal experience as a 40-year academic attempting to track my reading of many books and journal articles recognizing that in my discipline anchoring arguments and methods to previous reports is essential in research and teaching, present initiatives that seem to be triggered by a couple of influential books (Ahrens and Forte), involvement with a reading group interested in knowledge management (Making History), and my largely unsuccessful search for research associated with PKM systems and applications.

I have a reasonable background for analyzing and commenting in this area. I can argue that I have deep knowledge of student note-taking which is certainly a reasonable background for expanding into related areas. I have read the literature on student note-taking for decades and have been actively involved in research and writing projects on related topics. While this background offers an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in successful note generation and note study processes, using this background to write about personal knowledge management (PKM) and the successful use of digital tools designed to implement PKM strategies has revealed limitations in generalizing from classroom note-taking to what I have come to describe as adult note-taking. All I mean by this distinction is that taking notes when not in the role of a student is different in some important ways.

My general summary of differences might be captured in the following statement based on the classic distinction used to identify and study the benefits of taking notes. Note-taking is typically described as having two stages – a recording stage and a study stage. Benefits are typically argued to result from generative activities and retrieval effectiveness. With lecture and content-related notes taken by students, the recording stage is mostly about getting as much down as possible (storage) in order to have an accurate and complete record available (retrieval) for processes to improve retention and understanding. Thinking is more of a generative process than is retention. Outside of formal educational settings, adults engage in note-taking with somewhat different goals. Within the model I have described, the generative component increases in value and is more involved in both the encoding and the review stages of note activity. I am not suggesting this suggestion is ideal, but I think it is accurate. Educators likely prefer that their students place greater emphasis on personal understanding which is what comes with greater generative processing, but only part of such underperformance can be blamed on students. I believe there is a maxim suggesting that “what is tested is what is learned”. Some additional thoughts may offer additional insights

I have identified unique distinctions between the knowledge base associated with student note use and some hypothetical knowledge base that would be ideal for my more present interests. What I mean by this is that properties associated with nonclassroom note-taking and note use lack a research base. There are certainly books and many YouTube or Substack proposals for strategies to improve knowledge-based productivity, but there is very little that evaluates these strategies – lots of hype, many products, and little data.

Understanding the basics of notetaking and note use is of some value, but distinctions that can be identified with present externalized personal knowledge management systems and some of the related goals for use point to some obvious voids in the research concerning the effectiveness of strategies of application. Here are some differences I believe are important. First, student notetaking must deal with the reality that what is to be known (or at least tested) is defined by someone else. Goals of the processes involved in taking notes must be subservient to this reality and this prioritizes certain unique goals. What are the priorities of the information presenter? What are my tasks as a learner following from my understanding of such goals?

One reality of student note-taking is that generating a useful record for later review depends on an imperfect understanding of what must be retained. In recognition of this challenge and understanding the limits of cognition especially in a real-time lecture setting, getting as much down on paper or screen as possible is a reasonable response. More thoughtful and time-demanding prioritization and even the determination of the accuracy of what was recorded may have to be put off until the study/review stage. Some students may recognize the need to take the subsequent step of comparing notes with others to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. Some may not realize that this remediation would be helpful or not bother with the extra effort required.

A second distinction concerns the time frame involved and the implications this time frame may have for initial processing. A student’s perceived time frame for priority payoffs (test scores, superior paper construction) tends to be relatively short. A student might vaguely understand that knowledge acquired from his or her high school or college classes is useful throughout life, but he or she is likely to be focused on the next graded activity. The artifacts created to facilitate study or project activities are typically discarded once a course has been completed. As an adult, my time perspective is more undefined and part of my motivation is to create a system of external storage intended to be valuable over a much longer time frame and that recognizes I will likely face limited recall of the context within which the stored information was acquired. As a consequence, the record I choose to create must include more of the context making delayed understanding requires.

There are likely many other significant differences, but my point here is simply to argue that the vast literature associated with student note-taking leaves significant gaps that would guide “adult” self-guided note-taking and note use. We seem to be at a stage in which the statement that phrase “more or at least some research is required” should be included in more commentary on PKM. I use this phrase as commonly included in research to indicate that researchers/authors understand what they have studied has important limitations when it comes to established validity.

Here is an example of a research question I would like answered. It relates to the strategy of taking Smart Notes a strategy proposed by Ahrens. I think of a smart note in my own way as writing earlier in the process of content creation. So, instead of reading, highlighting, and copying key ideas into a notebook and then waiting months or years before trying to make sense of the notebook entries, smart notes are written based on personal understanding to generate a note that contains enough context that it would stand alone as a representation of a useful idea after an extended period of time. It should be useful to self or to someone else with a reasonable background. Ahrens describes several types of notes including fleeting notes and smart notes. The difference in these two representations is the personalization of completeness of the idea represented as a smart note. A fleeting note might meet the demands of quick immediate storage and the smart note is more carefully constructed to be meaningful.
I think of fleeting notes as serving a similar purpose as highlighting – selection without personalization.

So, this idea seems reasonable and I can create such notes, store them within a knowledge management system such as Obsidian, tag and cross-link them, and review them periodically waiting for the day I might use the idea in something I write. Obsidian also automatically stores the highlights I have taken reading Kindle books or journal article pdfs (transferred to Obsidian using Readwise). Here is a question related to these two options – smart notes or highlights. Using search in Obsidian, I can locate either Smart Notes or highlights related to search terms I provide. The highlights are typically not interconnected, but I can use the links automatically stored with each highlight back to the place in the original document where I highlighted the original content. While smart notes sound useful are they really worth the extra time? Should I just spend my time searching for highlights that are related to what I want to write about and then quickly review the original documents should I need to refresh my understanding when a highlight seems to identify a useful idea I needed to refresh in my mind.

There are many similar questions I can generate related to the storage and thinking systems that have been proposed by PKM advocates. Do these strategies actually deliver improved content production?

Important research questions about any type of long-term benefits come with several challenges. Again, I cannot presently provide extensive analysis, but here are a couple of examples. The classic experimental/control group methodology is very difficult to implement. The development of second brain methods (external collections of notes implementing the various methods for tagging, linking, secondary reworking and other strategies) are developed and applied over years rather than weeks or months. Holding a research project together over such a period of time is difficult and costly. I have been unable to find such examples.

The time frame issue is compounded by the reality of technology. The pace of questions raised by ever-changing methods seems nearly incompatible with straightforward experimental/control methods. The tools and questions of interest change faster than the methods of answering these questions can provide results.

I keep looking for research I can use to shape my thinking and writing. My frustration was one of the motives for this post. I had hopes when I encountered a notice announcing a new book – Digital writing technologies in higher education. This was one of those resources including multiple authors who proposed individual chapters. In the editors’ forward, the expectations for each chapter are provided and each chapter is to include a section on the related research. There was not much there in the chapters I have read to this point, but the “more research is needed” statement appeared repeatedly. By the way, the book I mentioned allows the free download of chapters as pdfs and anyone interested in this general field should take a look.

More research is needed. I will summarize relevant studies when they appear.

Citations mentioned:

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. Simon and Schuster.

Kruse, O., Rapp, C., Anson, C. M., Benetos, K., Cotos, E., Devitt, A., & Shibani, A. (Eds.). (2023). Digital Writing Technologies in Higher Education: Theory, Research, and Practice. Springer Nature.

The Power of Collaboration: Enhancing Your Note-Taking Experience

This post is intended to be the final contribution in my series of posts describing generative activities and classroom applications. My previous contributions identified two hierarchical systems, SOI (selective, organizing, integrative) and ICAP (interactive, constructive, active, passive), proposing more and less powerful activities for influencing learning effectiveness. Both systems propose collaborative activities to be potentially most effective. Several of my posts have concerned how taking notes can improve achievement so I decided to conclude this series with a focus on collaborative notetaking.

Before I address the topic of collaboration, it may be helpful to provide a more general background on how educational psychologists and researchers such as me describe the process of taking notes. First, we differentiate the overall process into a storage and a retrieval phase. I assume this is obvious. A learner takes notes at one time to improve performance of some type at a later time. Second, we identify what might be accomplished during each stage. What is recorded during the storage phase determines what is available during the retrieval (study) phase. Learners may differ in how completely and how effectively they record key ideas so both completeness and quality of what is recorded could be important. The idea of a generative activity also proposes that the process of taking notes (whether available for review or not) might be helpful because of the cognitive activities that are involved. By extension, an instructor could prepare a quality set of notes and give them to students so they don’t have to take notes themselves. It matters if having personally taken notes is key to effectiveness. So attempts to determine if taking notes yourself has some unique value are useful.

Again, the importance of a retrieval and a study phase probably seems obvious. But again, there are important wrinkles that could be important. Does it matter if you review your own notes in comparison to expert notes? When in the time period between taking notes and the attempt to use knowledge should notes be reviewed? How many times and in what ways should this external record be used for review?

How might collaboration impact these processes? Some of the ways in which collaboration might modify notetaking are generative and some not. Collaboration could mean that others record notes you miss or record some things more accurately than you and access to their notes would allow you to achieve a more complete and a more accurate representation of the content. Maybe you just miss some things or misunderstand some things. When you have help, maybe you can record less and think more during the reception phase reducing the working memory demands of taking notes. These factors could be important if you don’t “slack off” knowing that you have some way to augment your own optimal efforts. These advantages are not generative. Collaboration could also involve actual interaction. Learners could discuss their understanding in reviewing their composite notes adding additional processing to what individuals might do on their own. This is what generative notetaking really proposes.

There are lots of other variations in notetaking that might be important and could be beneficial or harmful. There are postprocessing variations other than talking through notes with other students. Some systems (e.g., Cornell notes) propose a system of postprocessing?—?a secondary process of commenting on notes. Other ways of working with notes taken (Smart notes) also can be applied as part of the retrieval/study stage.

Another interesting proposal challenges the way we tend to think about taking in information during a live lecture. With asynchronous presentations that were increasingly common during the pandemic and also a way to think about the advantages of a flipped classroom, content is experienced in a recorded format. A learner or a small group of learners can control the pace of the presentation by simply stopping the playback of a video or even repeating segments of a recording reducing the working memory and note creation challenges of keeping up. With recorded content, a small group of students can even discuss as they record notes making the process more generative.

I have several motives in presenting notetaking in this way. First, I wanted those who think the processes are simple and fixed to think again. Second, I wanted to set you up for arguing that while determining if collaboration helps or not is pretty straightforward, understanding why what is observed in a dependent variable is not obvious. For example, if collaboration improves achievement, does this happen because the combination of notes is more complete and accurate or because the process of students working together led to some unique processing that would not have occurred without the interaction. Some have even observed that collaboration led to better quiz performance, but poorer implementation of the skills being taught (Fanguy, et al. 2021). These authors argued that the processing required of individual learners varied as a function of whether they had to depend entirely on their own notes. Deep understanding required for application might suffer when responsibility was shared.

I have concluded based on a review of most of the studies on collaborative notetaking that teasing apart the potential benefits does not presently allow clear conclusions. The core problem is that it is difficult to document how much actual interaction occurs and what are the characteristics of such interactions. Fanguy, et al. (2023) offer some interesting suggestions for how interaction might be operationalized, but few studies have included such data. So while studies do demonstrate the positive impact of collaborative notes (e.g. Baldwin, et al. 2019), the mechanisms responsible are unclear.

One additional factor is likely quite significant. Group comparisons between individual and collaborative notetaking ignore the individual nature of contributions within the collaborative groups (Fanguy, et al., 2023). No matter the nature of the inputs, we all learn as individuals and without a mechanism for identifying the type and extent of individual involvement, group comparisons will always be somewhat deficient. Even if group differences can be demonstrated, some within a group may benefit and some may not. The typical ending for many research articles?—?more research is needed?—?clearly applies to this topic.

One final point, I can and will suggest several digital collaborative tools for those of you who are interested, but I also caution that it is important to understand the purpose and hence perhaps the the strategies of notetaking that are to be recommended. As an academic, I studied student notetaking as would be applied to improve performance on future examinations. In my own work as an academic, I was and continue to be interested in the way I can take notes myself. There are several important differences in these circumstances. A student needs to understand the priorities of the course and instructor as would be relevant to an upcoming examination or writing project to take the most useful notes. Complete notes when requirements are unknown would seem a reasonable goal. My own goals are more self-imposed, but also are to record information that would potentially be useful over a much longer span of time. Capturing what seem to be important ideas in a form that will make sense to me several years in the future seems a different task.

Recommendations:

Google docs?—?collaborative notetaking may work with tools already familiar to educators. Multiple studies I have reviewed were conducted by assigning small groups of students (say 4–5) to a common Google doc file.

Hypothes.is?—?Hypothesis is a free tool that has been around for a while and is increasingly integrated into many LMSs used in higher ed. The tool is flexible allowing annotations and highlights to be publicly shared or shared with a designated group.

Glasp?—?Glasp is a recent entry to this category and is the tool I use for my own work. I like the tool because it is flexible in ways similar to Hypothesis and allows me to export the content I generate for long-term use in other Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) systems.

References:

Baldwin Matthew, P., Mik, F., & Costley Jamie, H. (2019). The effects of collaborative note-taking in flipped learning contexts. Journal of Language and Education, (4), 20.

Fanguy, M., Baldwin, M., Shmeleva, E., Lee, K., & Costley, J. (2021). How collaboration influences the effect of note-taking on writing performance and recall of contents. Interactive Learning Environments, 1–15.

Fanguy, M., Costley, J., Courtney, M., & Lee, K. (2023). Analyzing collaborative note-taking behaviors and their relationship with student learning through the collaborative encoding-storage paradigm. Interactive Learning Environments, 1–15.

Note-taking as a generative activity

When explaining it helps to have examples both for personal understanding and for communication. My more recent interest in long-term notes has provided a useful example that relates well to my long/term interest in generative activities. This specific collection of note collection activities is convenient because the activities are similar yet illustrate important differences. Notetaking is also an activity most have applied and comments on variations in how the activity can be applied are relatable contributing to my efforts to communicate. My more general goal is to help educators understand the purpose behind the assignments or study suggestions they make.

Generative activities are external tasks learners engage in that encourage productive cognitive behaviors. External tasks to influence thinking activities. Several researchers have identified hierarchies that attempt to explain the benefits of the external tasks and differentiate the less and more powerful activities.

Two examples of hierarchies include the proposals of Chi (2009) and Fiorella and Mayer (2016)

Chi (2009) proposed the SOI framework – selective, organizing, and interactive.

Fiorella and Mayer (2016) proposed a similar ICAP framework (reversed here to show the parallels with Chi) – passive, active, constructive, interactive.

Some further clarification may be necessary. Selective seems self-explanatory. When reading selective is the active process of identifying important material. Constructive, when applied to taking notes, has a specific meaning. It implies the integration of new information with what one already knows. For example, thinking of an example (something you already know) associated with a concept or principle just learned creates a new representation. The learner is putting things together or finding applications. Interactive as defined here is a social process. It could relate to processes such as might be involved in cooperative learning. Both parties or even a larger group combine their individual understandings to create a superior composite.

I am relating these hierarchies to note-taking activities as might be explained by Aherns (2022). This author described notetaking in a little different way than might be assumed to apply in a school or college setting. I like to think of it as taking notes for the long term. This might describe the purpose I have for taking notes. I am not taking notes for an exam in a couple of weeks or at the end of the semester. I am not taking notes to write a paper for my instructor. I am engaging in reading for purposes that might be realized in a few years. I want my notes to be useful when in the future I have a need for the information I understood when the note was created, but may not be remembered when that information would be valuable.

I am extending Aherns a bit here, but a sequence based on his writing might include the following:

Reading
Highlighting/ fleeting notes
Smart note
Collaborative note

Here are some clarifications of these terms. Reading (or listening) is the lowest stage and involves the exposure to information. Fleeting notes involve the recording of information with little elaboration. Students tend to take this type of notes while listening to a lecture possibly because they must get the information down while the lecturer continues to speak. Highlighting is similar in that it involves selection with little additional processing. Smart notes is Ahern’s term for notes that I remember him describing as providing sufficient context that a note would make sense to me in the future. In other words, this type of note must stand alone as a useful resource. Such notes would also be understandable by others with reasonable background knowledge.

It is important to recognize that learner engagement in generative activities involves potential rather than guaranteed benefits. Roscoe and Chi offer an interesting way of describing potential. They were writing about peer teaching as a generative activity, but the distinction they identify makes sense when applied to other activities. Their distinction is between knowledge telling and knowledge building. If learners are asked to explain a concept to a peer or summarize a concept as a note, they can repeat what they heard or read or they can interpret what they have heard or read in generating an output. Similarly, learners can merge their notes with a peer or they can compare and contrast their notes resulting in deeper processing of the content.

Because most generative activities involve the production of a product, educators can review these products from time to time to evaluate how active learners are being in thinking about what they are learning.

Insights

A few additional comments to consider as a summary. These ideas are interesting and quite concrete. In addition, the analyses are realistic in recognizing that positive results are not automatic.

First, what may seem to be a similar activity may have different consequences as a function of the kind of thinking applied

Second, it is what the student does in completing a generative task that results in learning not just the task assigned.

References

Ahrens, S. (2022). How to take smart notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking.

Chi, M. T. (2009). Active?constructive?interactive: A conceptual framework for differentiating learning activities. Topics in cognitive science, 1(1), 73-105.

Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717-741.

Roscoe, R. D., & Chi, M. T. H. (2007b). Understanding tutor learning: Knowledge-building and knowledge-telling in peer tutors’ explanations and questions. Review of Educational Research, 77, 534–574.

Digital for serious reading tasks

I keep encountering colleagues who disagree with me on the value of relying on digital content (e.g., Kindle books, pdfs of journal articles) rather than content they collect on paper. I agree that their large home and office libraries are visually attractive and their stuffed chair with reading lamp looks very inviting. They may even have a highlighter and note cards available to identify and collect important ideas they encounter. A cup of coffee, some quiet music in the background, and they seem to think they are set to be productive.

I have only one of my computers, a large monitor when working at my desk, and a cup of coffee. The advantages I want to promote here are related to my processing of content I access in a digital format. What you can’t see looking at my workspace whether it happens to be located in my home or at a coffee shop is the collection of hundreds of digital books and the hundreds of downloaded pdfs I have collected and can access from any locate when I have an Internet connection. I can work with digital content from my home office without a connection, but I prefer to have a connection to optimize the use of the tools that I apply.

For me, the difference between reading for pleasure and reading for productivity is meaningful. I listen to audiobooks for pleasure. I guess that is a digital approach as well and it functions whether in my home, on a walk, or in the car. For productivity, I read to take in information I think useful to understand my world and to inform my writing about topics mostly related to the educational uses of technology. I think of reading as a process that includes activities intended to make available the ideas that I encounter in what I read and in my reactions to this content in the future. Future uses frequently but not exclusively now involve writing something. At one point when I was a full-time educator I engaged in other additional forms of communication, but in retirement, I mostly write.

My area of professional expertise informs how I work. I studied learning and cognition with an emphasis on individual differences in learning and the topics of notetaking and study behavior. One way to explain my present preoccupations might be to suggest I am now interested in studying and notetaking to accomplish self-defined goals to be pursued over an extended period of time. Instead of preparing to demonstrate what I know about topics assigned to me and with priorities established by someone else with the time span of a week or at most a couple of months, I now pursue general interests of my own preparing to take on tasks I can only describe in vague terms now but tasks that may become quite specific in a year or more. How do I accumulate useful information that I can find and interpret when a specific production goal becomes immediate? The commitment I have made to consume and process digital content is based on these goals and insights.

What follows identifies the tools I presently use, the activities involved as I make use of each tool, and the interconnections among these tools and the artifacts I use each tool to produce.

Step 1 – reading.

In my professional work, I made a distinction between reading and studying. This was more for theoretical and explanatory reasons because most learners do not neatly divide the two activities. Some read a little, reread, and take notes continuously. Some read and then read again assuming I guess that a second reading accomplishes the goals of what I think of as studying. Some read and highlight and review their highlights at a later time. There are many other possibilities. I think of reading as the initial exposure to information much like listening to a lecture is an initial exposure to information. Anything that follows the initial exposure, even if interspersed with other periods of initial exposure, is studying.

My tools – Present tools/services related to this stage of processing – Kindle for books and Highlights (Mac app) for PDFs. Other tools are used for content I find online, but most of my actual productive activity focuses on books and journal articles

Step 2 – initial processing (initial studying)

While reading, I use highlighting to identify content I may later find useful and I take notes (annotation as these notes are connected to the book or pdf). Over time, I found it valuable to generate more notes. Unlike the highlights, the notes help me understand why content I found interesting at the time of reading might have future usefulness.

My tools – Present tools/services related to this stage of processing – Kindle for books and Highlights (Mac app) for PDFs. Yes, these are the same tools I identified in step 1. However, the integration of these dual roles is accurate as both functions are available within the same tools. One additional benefit of reading and annotating using the same tool and applied to the same content is the preservation of context. The digital tools I use can be integrated in ways that allow both forward and backward connections. If at a later stage in the approach I describe I want to reexamine the context in which I identified an idea, I can move between tools in an efficient way.

Step 3 – delayed processing (delayed studying)

Here I list tools I would use for accepting the highlights and notes output from Step 2 as isolated from the original text. I also include tools I would use for reworking notes to make them more interpretable when isolated from context, adding tags to stored material, adding links to establish connections among elements of information, and initial summaries written based on other stored information. I like a term I picked up from my reading of material related to what has become known as personal knowledge management (PKM). A smart note is a note written with enough information that it will be personally meaningful and would be meaningful to another individual with a reasonable background at a later point in time.

My tools – Readwise to isolate and review highlights and notes from Kindle. Obsidian to store highlights and notes, add annotations to notes, create links between notes, and generate some note-related summaries an comments. I use several AI extensions within Obsidian to “interact” with my stored content and draft some content. Presently, I use Smart Connections as my go-to AI tool. I write some more finished pieces in Google Docs.

Step 4 – sharing

As a retired academic, I no longer am involved in publishing to scientific journals or through textbook companies. My primary outlet for what I write are WordPress blogs I post through server space that I rent (LearningAloud). A cross-post a few of my blog entries to Substack and Medium.

My tools – I write in Google docs and then copy and paste to upload content to the outlets I use.

Obsidian as the hub

Here are a couple of images that may help explain the workflow I have described. The images show how Obsidian stores the input from the tools used to isolate highlights and notes from full-text sources.

As notes are added to Obsidian, I organize them into folders. An extension I have added to Obsidian creates an index of the content within each folder, but at some point the volume of content is best explored using search.

Here is what a “smart note” I have created in Obsidian looks like. The idea of a smart note is to capture an idea that would be meaningful at a later date without additional content. Included in this note is a citation for the idea, tags I have established that can be used to find related material and a link.

This is an example of a “note” Obsidian automatically generated based on book notes and highlights sent by Readwise. I can add tags and links to this corpus of material to create connections I think might be useful. The box identifies a link stored with the content that will take me back to Kindle and the location of the note or highlight. These links are useful for recovering the original context in which the note existed.

Here is a video explaining how my process works.

So, the argument I am making here is that digital tools provide significant advantages not considered in single-function comparisons between paper and screen. Digital is simply more efficient and efficacious for projects that develop over a period of time.

Applying AI to Discuss Your Own Content

I have moved past the initial stage of awe in connection with access to large language models such as ChatGPT and after considerable exploration have begun to focus on how I might find value in what these systems can provide. I presently use AI tools to support the research I do to inform my writing – blog posts such as this. I have found that I feel uncomfortable trusting a tool like ChatGPT when I simply prompt it to provide me information. There are simply too many situations in which it generates replies that sound good, but are fabrications when checked.

The one task most trustworthy requires that I focus the AI on a source of content I control and can use to check if something seems off. In this post, I will identify three such tools and explain a little of how you might also find these tools helpful.

ChatPDF

As the name implies, ChatPDF allows a user to interact with the content of a designated PDF. Much of the content I personally review consists of scientific journal articles available to me as PDFs from my university library. This has been the case now for many years and I have a collection of hundreds of such files I have read, highlighted, and annotated. The link I provide above explains how ChatPDF allows me to explore the content of content in such files. Because I read and annotate such files anyway, I actually don’t interact with journal articles in this way very often. The link I have provided describes the use of ChatPDF as a tutor applied to a textbook chapter. The intent of the description was to describe multiple ways in which ChatPDF could benefit a learner trying to understand and store important ideas from a document.

The other two examples here describe AI tools available to allow a user to interact with collections of notes. One tool works with notes saved in Obsidian and the second with notes in Mem.AI. These are digital tools for storing and organizing personal notes and digital content. The tools are designed for the organization and exploration of such notes, but as AI has become available new ways to make use of what can become large collections of information can also be applied.

Smart Chat Obsidian Plugin

I have prepared a video to offer some idea of how Smart Chat prompts can be applied to the content stored in Obsidian. If you are unfamiliar with Obsidian, the video also offers a glimpse of Obsidian itself. One point I think is important Obsidian and differentiates it from Mem.AI is the way it stores content. Obsidian stores content as individual text files which include content as text and what is called markdown. Markdown is a simple set of tags that allow a user to establish links, tags, and text embellishments such as bolding, size, etc. The benefit is the independence of the files from any specific tool. So, if Obsidian was to go away, you would still have a collection of documents with your information you could salvage. In contrast, Mem.AI stores content in what I think of a database in the cloud. There are ways to export your content, but I find value in knowing I have my content on my computer in a format I can access if necessary.

The Smart Chat plugin requires that you have an Open.Ai account and add some money to cover the cost of your AI activity. I don’t consider the investment that large and have been contributing $5 a month which has covered the cost of my activity.

Mem.AI

This image shows the home screen for Mem.AI. At the top of the screen, you can see the AI prompt window. I pay $10 a month for MEM.AI, but the AI feature is included. The following prompt (same as I used for the Smart Chat plugin in Obsidian) generated the following response. The content of my two note systems is similar, but not completely identical. You see some differences in the content that was generated.

Prompt

List my notes that involve a comparison of taking notes by hand and by using a keyboard. Write a 400 word summary of these notes.

Response

Based on your knowledge base, there are two notes that involve a comparison of taking notes by hand and using a keyboard:

Horbury2021: This study compared the performance of 10 and 11-year-olds taking notes by hand or using a computer. The study found that conceptual understanding was superior when taking notes by hand. The authors speculated that keyboarding may have produced greater cognitive load, especially for children who may have less experience in keyboarding.
Writing a paper step by step: This note mentions a study by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) that found no difference in terms of the number of facts students were able to remember whether they took notes by hand or by typing them into their laptops. However, in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand performed much better.

Here’s a 400-word summary of these notes:

The method of note-taking, whether by hand or keyboard, can significantly impact a student’s understanding and recall of the material. A study by Horbury (2021) compared the performance of 10 and 11-year-olds taking notes by hand or using a computer. The study found that students had a superior conceptual understanding when taking notes by hand. The authors speculated that keyboarding may have produced greater cognitive load, especially for children who may have less experience in keyboarding. This suggests that the physical act of writing might help students process and understand the information better.

On the other hand, a study by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) found no difference in terms of the number of facts students were able to remember whether they took notes by hand or by typing them into their laptops. However, in terms of understanding the content of the lecture, the students who took their notes by hand performed much better. This suggests that while the amount of content stored may not significantly differ between handwriting and keyboarding, the process of handwriting might lead to a deeper understanding of the content.

These findings have several implications for educational practices. Given that handwriting seems to lead to a deeper understanding of the content, educators might want to encourage students to take notes by hand, especially during complex lectures or discussions. However, it’s also important to remember that what works best might vary from student to student. Personalization of learning strategies, taking into account individual strengths and preferences, could also be a valuable approach.

In conclusion, while technology has its place in the classroom, these findings suggest it should not completely replace traditional methods. A balance between digital and analog methods could be the key to effective learning. Furthermore, students could benefit from explicit instruction on effective note-taking strategies, such as focusing on understanding over verbatim transcription. The cognitive load of keyboarding for younger students or those less familiar with typing should also be considered when deciding on note-taking methods.