Commonplace book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smart notes and useful highlighting in K12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Progressive summarization

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

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

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

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

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

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Taking Notes to Learn

I have read the following books which all focus on the processes of using notes to collect, organize, and apply information. From this collection, I would recommend Cohn for educators and Ahrens for the tech aware wanting to use technology to improve their learning and reading to application.

Cohn, J. (2021). Skim, dive, surface: Teaching digital reading. West Virginia University Press.

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

Kadavy, D. ( 2020). Digital zettelkasten: Principles, methods, and examples. Amazon ebook.

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking-for students, academics and nonfiction book writers. Amazon books.

Over maybe 35 years, I have used technology and whatever digital tools were available at the time to keep track of the content I was exposed to and thought I might find valuable at some future time. So, I have tried many different times tools and tactics. This more recent set of resources has identified two new tactics I thought were helpful. I described multiple tools in a series of posts I did a few months ago. In the left column of this blog, you should see a drop down menu identified as Categories. One of these categories is labeled Digital Notes and this link will identify the past posts.

New to me strategies:

Write earlier (Ahrens) – rather than read and highlight journal articles and books and then searching these same sources at a point in time that could be ten years later, I discovered the value of taking stand alone notes shortly after or while reading. The idea is to generate a note that can stand alone to explain something to me or others. Saving and linking these notes to the original source and to other notes allows a much more efficient approach for using the residue of previous reading at a later point in time.

Progressive summarization (Forte) – Forte describes a process by which the highlights and annotations created in an initial reading are digitally exported. This collection is reread and important ideas are initially bolded to identify and differentiate them. This bolded content is then reviewed and the most essential ideas are highlighted. Finally, a summary is generated from these highlights for this document. He proposes a summary consisting of bullet points. My preference would be for the smart note format I have attributed to Ahrens.

The advantage of this system is that context is maintained. If certain types of technology tools are used, you can trace a summary note back to the highlighted material, the bolded material, and then the content from the original source. Keeping these transitions connected seems a good idea.

I have not found a collection of tools that allow me to do this for the different original formats I explore (digital books, PDFs, web pages, videos), but I have patched together some combination of tools that work. I admit that I have not explored some tools that involve a subscription fee and might reduce the number of steps I presently employ. I will follow this post with at least one related post taking you through my processes.

One more thing. Notes for long term personal learning and notes for academic learning are likely different. The same digital tools apply, but there is a significant difference understanding your are taking notes in preparation for an exam and recognizing what you and your professor thinks are important may be different and notes you take to support your own self-directed learning. Yes, I understand that what I may find valuable a year from now is not necessarily what interests me today. We have all had that experience of knowing you have read something relevant to a present need and not being able to recall the details or the source. Notes, highlights, and another components that can be added to digital content by educators and learners have long been an interest of mine and I would direct you to a Kindle book I have written on the topic for greater detail.

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First and second brain interaction

Perhaps you are familiar with the new jargon describing Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and second brain. These ideas may have not filtered down to educators yet, but the practices that are related to these terms certainly would apply to educators as knowledge workers. I have followed and explored these ideas as they relate to my long-term interest in developing and applying effective annotation practices (e.g.,note-taking). I will likely eventually write more about the tools and tactics of PKM as they might apply to secondary and students. For now, I want to offer a related proposal.

The core idea of a second brain is that learners can create and cultivate an external record of what they have learned to augment what they retain internally at some later point in time. These tactics can be implemented on paper, but for me make more sense when applied with technology. 

As I have several books on the concepts and explored and used several different tech tools for applying proposed approaches, I have what I think is a useful insight. The guiding principles of an effective second brain seem remarkably similar to core ideas from cognitive psychology about what learning is and how a learner can improve the effectiveness of the time devoted to learning.

Here are what I consider overlapping themes. Both an effective second brain and effective learning encourage:

  1. The storage of big ideas / core concepts / personal concepts
  2. The linkage of personal concepts with other personal concepts and with stored examples
  3. The reexamination of stored concepts to activate these ideas and maybe connect them with newly stored information.

The proposal of the components and tactics of a second brain require that these themes be concrete and actionable. Having something to look at and explore can be useful in understanding similar ideas that are more abstract or even invisible.

A personal concept (my term) might be described as a personal summary of an important concept or an idea that can stand alone so that it can be understood in the future without additional context and could be understood by another individual with a good background. 

In a digital second brain, linkages can be links among concepts or to examples, citations for context or support, or questions yet to be answered. Links are links that might be the familiar connections among web pages or tags that can be added to indicate a commonality with different elements of information. 

The physical store of linked content is intended to be reexamined regularly. This process has some of the same goals as what cognitive psychologists call the testing effect (retrieval practice). Attempts to recall what has been learned strengthen future retrievability and the effort involved can identify new linkages as a by-product of the search for the desired information.

Exploring the techniques and components of an effective second brain makes concrete some of the same mechanisms important in learning and applying these techniques externally may provide practice for the related cognitive skills that are difficult to explain and develop.

Just a couple of examples that may help with the idea of a second brain. After exploring several options, I have settled on the use of a tool called Obsidian. The following images show a couple of features of this tool that illustrate the ideas mentioned here.

This image shows what is called a graph view. The image shows the linkages I have created among individual notes (personal concepts). Individual notes can be accessed by clicking on a node within the graph.

This is an example of an individual note. I have selected an example that shows a personal summary of key ideas, links, and tags.  

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Information worker skill development

Sometimes I can’t tell if a trend in an area I follow is emerging or a small shift in my interests reveals a new area that has long existed but now has entered my awareness. Such is the case with digital note-taking. There is some overlap with the note-taking of students, but my focus here is on note-taking for purposes other than getting through the next test. What is different about these activities is the focus on a longer term process that may feed into something other than exam performance. Such long-term goals may involve the easy rediscovery of specifics that were available at an earlier point in time and may now be a challenge to locate and perhaps the integration of such archived insights into a combination to be expressed as a written product or the solution to some information-based problem. Unlike or perhaps more accurately building on the benefits of hand-written notes, there are digital advantages that aid rediscovery (e.g. tags, searching). 

As an information worker, I have had a natural tendency to explore systems and tools purported to make the processing of information easier or more productive. As digital tools became available I have taken the time to explore. There is a risk in this tendency. You can spend so much time exploring new tools and translating artifacts created with an older system to a new system you risk using time that could have been used to get work done. It is kind of a “grass is greener” problem. I legitimate my time investment as partly a function of my professional interest in learning tools. I have come to personal decision about such activity. I have decided it is important to differentiate the capabilities of a tool and the activities that these capabilities enable (or not). When you study the work flows those who develop such tools imagine, you can identify a tactic you had not considered that could potentially be implemented with a tool you already use. If you get focused the combination of tool and tactic, you limit the flexibility that might be available.

If you are interested in this topic, you can explore by searching “note-taking” within the Apple or Google stores. Or, just try a general search for something like “best note-taking tools”. 

Here is one final observation. Note-taking and note collection have become a personal productivity theme and productivity experts have recognized the opportunity. I have no idea if this is an example of following the money or promoting the details of a unique insight that most do not recognize. I will give two examples. The first is Sonke Ahrens promotion of digital applications of the Zettelkasten. My recent posts have offered several comments on both the process Ahrens promotes and the tools that might be applied. Ahrens work and the benefits he has received as a consequence come from his writing and insights rather than the promoting of any specific tools which he describes. My second example is the Forte Lab’s (Tiago Forte) promotion of the “Second Brain”. Forte offers seminars/courses (very expensive and beyond the budget of most academics) and a book (not released yet). The concept of a second brain taps into some of the ideas as the Zettlekasten and the core ideas can be implemented with multiple apps

To this point, my personal insight has resulted in a change in my own behavior derived from investigating these ideas and tools. This insight can be described as write earlier in my information processing work flow. This idea comes from Ahrens (Smart Notes) and I would translate the tactic as take notes that capture an idea in enough detail (context) that the note still offers useful information when reviewed after a significant delay. Increase the rediscovery of these notes with tags and links to notes offering related concepts/ideas.

I think it time to move on focusing so much of my time on this topic. Unlike the research that informs learner classroom note-taking, there does not seem to be a research literature to consider when it comes to personal productivity. It is worth an investment of attention for anyone reading and applying (writing), but once basic issues have been understood exploring logical application to personal tasks is where effort should be focused.

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Linking notes to recorded audio

One advantage I see in using a technology device instead of a paper notebook is the opportunity comes from added capabilities of technology. When it comes to taking notes, I would propose that the simultaneous recording of audio linked to personal notes is a great advantage over taking notes on paper. The addition of the linked audio allows the note taker to revisit the audio in a precise way when notes are confusing or incomplete. A more complete and personalized representation of key information can then be generated after the presentation.

There are several different applications for doing this. The demonstration that follows makes use of Notability on a tablet.

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