One could easily get the idea that recent proposals for “a second brain” or “smart notetaking” and related implementation tools such as Obsidian or Roam represent radical innovations for using technology to extend human cognition. This is not the case and after thinking about the recent interest in such concepts and tools I am left wondering why there has been such a lull in the development and implementation of such ideas.
I trace my own interest in similar ideas to reading Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article As we may think and his proposal for a device for augmenting cognition he called a memex (if you search for memex you may find that others are not trying to implement some of his ideas). Steve Jobs proposed that the personal computer could serve as a “bicycle for the mind” noting that when using the technology of a bicycle a human could drastically increase their speed of movement.
I good source for some of these early ideas can be found in Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought (1985). Rheingold sat for a recent interview talking about Tools for thought and even noting links to more recent tools for augmented cognition. If you unfamiliar with this history and interested in the topic, I encourage your attention to Rheingold’s comments.
Many of my recent posts have focused on note-taking and annotation. These activities have long been a personal interest. New opportunities to use these strategies in a digital environment have rekindled my interest and I have been trying to find ways I can share recommendations that bring these skills into middle school and secondary school settings.
One important observation I have found in several of the sources I have read is that learners are seldom taught to take notes or annotate. There are now many researchers and educators writing about taking better notes for the implementation of a PKM (personal knowledge management) system or a second brain. The emphasis here is a little different than the emphasis that might apply in classrooms. With PKM, you are creating notes for your use that fit your personal goals. Perhaps you want to build up resources you can use in writing blog posts or perhaps you want to store specific methods for solving a coding challenge. With classroom applications of annotation, you are usually trying to process and store important ideas provided by someone else. Perhaps you are preparing for an examination or to complete some other assignment that will follow a reading task. Students may take notes from presentations, but often take few notes or add few annotations when reading. Whether experiences exist or not, the opportunities to learn to apply such learning strategies are few.
I have located several sources that propose how annotation and note-taking skills can be taught to younger learners. These primarily are focused on adding highlights and margin notes to content on paper and typically these approaches suggest that educators make copies of content from sources that students can mark up without concern for damaging resources not intended for annotation. I provide several of these sources at the conclusion of this post and encourage interested educators to take the time to read one or more of these sources. The sources provide step-by-step approaches to teach the skills of note taking and annotation.
My interest here is in proposing a digital source and opportunity for annotating and highlighting that is readily available and efficient to use. You don’t have the problem of marking up what are intended to be reusable commercial materials with digital content. Most teachers are probably familiar with Newsela. This service provides reading material for most content areas (e.g., science, current events) with the unique opportunity to assign a variation of a given article at different reading levels. This allows a teacher to individualize a reading task within a class and have all students read about the same topic. The content comes with comprehension questions and other learning activities.
The capability of the Newsela environment that I am promoting here allows the teacher and individual students to annotate (highlight, take notes). I have written about this capability some time ago and I remembered this capability when I was trying to think of something I could suggest for educators interested in teaching annotation skills in a digital environment. Newsela provides its own explanation of how to annotate text.
The annotation process in Newsela is very simple and I think that is what you want. When you drag content, you are provided an opportunity to select different colors for highlighting. When you highlight something, you are provided the opportunity to add a note to what has been selected.
Newsela also provides a way to share annotated content. Sharing is available for both educator to students and student to educator. The opportunity to assign an annotation task (e.g., highlight the main ideas in this article) and then submit the completed task for review works through sharing.
Highlighting and note-taking in Newsela are easy to figure out. I encourage educators to take a look and imagine how this capability might be applied. I provide several sources for instructional strategies below and I will try to summarize some of these ideas in a future post.
Sources:
Cohn, J. (2021). Skim, dive, surface: Teaching digital reading. West Virginia University Press.
Lloyd, Z. T., Kim, D., Cox, J. T., Doepker, G. M., & Downey, S. E. (2022). Using the annotating strategy to improve students’ academic achievement in social studies. Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning. (early version)
Zywica, J., & Gomez, K. (2008). Annotating to support learning in the content areas: Teaching and learning science. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(2), 155-165.
We are on a road trip so I have not really had the opportunity to generate a blog post. I was looking through my old posts and came across a connection to something I have been writing about recently. Recent comments on note taking to create a long-term, external record has involved a review of books written by Sonke Aherns (Smart Notes) and Tiago Forte (Second Brain) explained the origins of their work. Ahrens started with his study of the zettlekasten which was a box for keeping and linking notes taken on what might resemble traditional note cards. Forte started with the commonplace book which was a notebook writers would often use to copy comments from other books and record their own thoughts.
I found that I written about “commonplacing” in 2009 and decided to offer these comments again.
I have been reading Robert Darnton’s “The case for books” on Cindy’s Kindle (there is something quite ironic here, but now is not the time to explore). Tech types may immediately shy away, but Darnton has a very interesting history including working on the Google book digitization project and the commitment of Harvard to offer faculty publications in the public domain.
Anyway, The case for books is a wide ranging exploration of books, writing, authors, and reading. The historical perspective is cool. One concept I picked up is that of a Commonplace book. As I understand the concept, readers attempting to educate themselves would copy passages from various things they read into a notebook and would organize this material into categories and would include personal insights, comments and interpretations. These commonplace books sometimes ended up being published or a least saved as historical artifacts. The commonplace books of Milton, Bacon, etc. are historical treasures.
To me, this sounded very much like blogging – a few personal insights, a few embellished posts focused on the works of others, etc., copied and rearranged (with tags). These activities representing a personal commitment to exploration and always the hope that the process will result in learning or a creative insight. I thought this association was likely new for educational bloggers and it may be, but the connection between blogging and commonplacing is far from original if one searches the web ( e.g, commonplacing on the WWW).
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Sönke Ahrens
Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain: A proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Atria Books.
I have been trying to decide how to bring together a couple of strands I have been exploring for several months. I tend to write for educators in the world of K12, but explore ideas and research from elsewhere. I have spent a lot of time lately examining the focus on professional or life-long learning involving personal knowledge management (PKM) / second brain uses of technology tools. You can review the posts by selecting the category for digital notes you should find in the margin of this post. Somewhat independently of this strand, I have been reviewing the content on the advantages and disadvantages of reading from paper compared with reading from a screen. Many of these posts appear within the category I have labeled digital literacy. Finally, there is the issue I have long been interested in which I might describe as who teaches what? Who teaches learners to study? Who teaches learners to highlight and annotate? Does anyone? At some point, I should make an effort to offer the K12 audience actionable recommendations. So, here is one idea.
This recommendation combines strategies recommended by Porter-O’Donnell (see reference at end) and the use of Scrible a digital note-taking and highlighting environment I described in a recent post. There are probably many options to Scrible, but it is free, useful in a group setting, and available for educators and learners.
Let me begin with Porter-O’Donnell. She teaches what I think most would be described as literature. For those reading her article, her focus is important to keep in mind as I believe her strategies generalize, but the specifics of the strategies would vary with other content areas. For example, what one might be guided to highlight and annotate when reading a classic poem or story would be different from what one would annotate or highlight when reading a chapter in a biology or history textbook. The author beings by reflecting on her own experiences. She notes that in high school she was not allowed to highlight or annotate and then was lost when entering college without such restrictions. She claims she initially highlighted far too much and without much in the way of goals. She said it took her several years to develop strategic approaches. I can identify and would add from the personal perspective of teaching a couple of very book-based, large lecture, introductory courses (Introduction to Psychology and Developmental Psychology) that effective reading skills are most deficient at a time when there is limited support for application. Students begin college taking many courses in a large lecture setting and have limited interaction with the instructor.
Porter-O’Donnell accepted the responsibility for changing this typical set of learning experiences and developed strategies to embed as part of her traditional instructional goals. She began by asking students to work with her in identifying types of information they might expect to glean from a reading assignment projected using pages on an overhead (note the date of the author’s activities as I describe them). What would be highlighted and what notes might be written in the margins. For example, one might highlight characters, setting (where and when), vocabulary, and important information. One might write in the margins – predictions, questions, summarizations, connections, and literary techniques. She then proposed making copies of pages from a story and having students apply these categories (she used symbols to differentiate) making use of highlighters, margin annotations, and sticky notes. She also created a system for after-reading follow-ups. Reread annotations and review highlights. Were predictions verified? Was the title a good summary? What would be a good summary? These are just a few of her suggestions and what I am asking would be the equivalent categories during reading and post-reading in content areas you teach. Students were asked to compare notes (my effort at a pun) as a way to gain insight into how their interpretation and emphases contrasted with those of other students.
I cannot help but think of reciprocal teaching when I review the Porter-O’Donnell approach – teacher modeling and think-aloud, group-guided effort and sharing, etc.
Now, consider how a digital annotation and highlight environment would be applied in a similar way. Scrible does make a great example with its features for sharing. Demo, specify specific goals to identify and annotate, share and discuss, etc.
The basic transfer of strategies seems easy to grasp and once applied other strategies could also be explored. For example, how about progressive summarization. What about smart notes and the question what about this chapter do you think you might want to have at your disposal a year or decade from now.
Porter-O’Donnell, C. (2004). Beyond the yellow highlighter: Teaching annotation skills to improve reading comprehension. English Journal, 82-89.
I promised I would explain Forte’s notion of progressive summarization which I mentioned in a recent post. The idea concerns how to transform typical annotations and highlights taken while reading into what Ahren’s would call Smart notes – stand-alone notes that capture the essence of what was read.
The process works like this. Read and annotate as usual using an app that allows the isolation of the highlights and annotations. My example is based on using Highlights while reading journal article pdfs on my iPad. In the following image you can see a little bit of the article pdf to the left of the image and the extracted highlights and annotations to the right. This extracted content can then be shared with another app. Ideally, the extracted content would allow linkages back to the original content and this works when moving content to Apple Notes. This works only when the content resides on the same device is not very practical long term. I simply cut and paste the content into a Google doc for the additional processing I describe next. The page references provide a way to connect to the original content.
Forte suggests the following sequence with the extracted content. First,, bold the most important ideas. Then, in a second pass, highlight the essential ideas from this bolded content (the reason I like Google files in drive is the opportunity to both bold, highlight, and add text). Finally, write a summary of the highlighted material. He suggests bullet points. I prefer the Ahren stand-alone notes as a way to record the key ideas I may want to use later.
If you are interested in an example of the finished product, I have embedded a pdf of progressive summarization I created in this format.
The goals of this approach are to find the most essential information to retain a context that maintains the context from which the key items extracted. Ideally these documents would be retained in a meaningful way. Making certain the full citation is included and searchable would be one way to do this. To tell the truth, I store the stand-alone notes and go back to the annotation original if necessary.
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.
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:
The storage of big ideas / core concepts / personal concepts
The linkage of personal concepts with other personal concepts and with stored examples
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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