When I see many online references to something I am interested in, I sometimes wonder whether I have caught an early wave or my online interest has been noticed by some algorithm feeding me more of what I view.
ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) had a recent article on notetaking strategies for children. The strategies are not new, but fit with present interest which involves strategies for a “processing” stage between original exposure and use. Sketch noting would make a great example of when this is necessary. The extra time required would not be practical in real time during exposure to information
Here is a second example. A post to Hacker news which seems an unusual outlet for consideration of notetaking. The focus on digital apps makes some sense. Read the interaction in response to the original comment about notetaking apps. The issue of committing to a specific app and not being attracted by every shiny new thing is a legitimate concern.
I came across a study on notetaking behavior that I thought might be a missing link in the other notetaking ideas I have been reading lately. Kiewra is a name that comes up repeatedly in thois area of research. I am guessing one of his students (Luo), Kiewra and Samuelson published a study in 2017 proposing that storage and review may not be an adequate way to engage in product note use. Perhaps a three stage approach would be more productive. Rather than just recording and review, effective notetaking might benefit from an intermediate stage – revision.
Luo, et al. (2016) investigate revision during pauses in a presentation or for the same amount of time immediately after the presentation. They speculate about benefits mostly from the increase in content added as notes or a type of retrieval practice explanation for later achievement gains.
I admit that this seems different from what I would describe as a generative effect. A three stage model makes some sense. For example, the Cornell notetaking system was developed to encourage a revision process and this additional activity was about more than just adding content that had been missed. Aherns book on Smart Notes proposed several types of notes generated over time:
Make fleeting notes.
Make literature notes.
Make permanent notes
Perhaps the focus on preparing for an exam is different than the Smart Note notion for long-term storage and personalized understanding. Whether for more meaningful use at a later date or to improve personal understanding, revision might make the most sense if was more what Ahrens had in mind.
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.
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.
I have some interest in note-taking for K12 students. Learning to take notes has to start at some point. I doubt most students ever receive instruction in how to take notes and what type of notes might be best suited to different situations. This goes for longhand or keyboard notes. What follows is somewhat speculative, but I hope to offer at least one idea.
As I have become more interested in what I have taken to calling smart notes, I have begun thinking how this approach might be developed over time. My understanding of the basics of smart notes, suggests that such notes should:
Be personalized or at least a summary rather than a verbatim copy of important ideas or concepts
Be linkable in some way so that the learner could consider how individual notes could be built into something larger
Be shareable for the purpose of feedback or collaboration
Be saved in a format that would allow usefulness over a long period of time
Once students reach high school and perhaps a bit earlier, I would suggest use of the same tools I might use now. What about younger learners? Here is more of a concept that would take some effort to implement. One caveat – one limitation to consider is access to a recommended tool or service if a student is younger than 13. Some tools of this time can be created by the teacher and shared with students or in the use case I have in mind individual students. This makes the process somewhat cumbersome, but my point here is to propose an approach.
I hit on this idea while reading about tactics for introducing students to note-taking. The focus of these suggestions was on paper rather than digital strategies, but in exploring some of the suggestions I flashed on a category of digital multimedia tools I thought would offer both power and flexibility. It was easier than I expected to locate note-taking ideas for K12 by searching online. I have included a couple of resources at the end of this post.
I thought that what my wife and I described as embellished documents in our textbook might offer a way to explore note-taking with some (but not all) of the features of smart notes I listed above. My demonstration here makes use of Padlet and the Canvas templet, but Wakelet or Glogster might offer similar capabilities. The Canvas template is important with Padlet because it allows individual notes to be linked within the same embellished document.
If you are unfamiliar with this type of tool, think digital cork board with the opportunity to add notecards or photos and maybe explore different links among the different elements of content. The most important point about Smart Notes for younger students is probably to identify specific ideas or concepts from external sources and then write a personal summary of each idea. In traditional note-taking one might just record these ideas one after the other. Even thus would be an improvement over verbatim transcriptions and personalizing notes as summaries or interpretations based on personal experiences is what makes just the taking of notes a learning experience.
I have developed tutorials for both Padlet and Glogster previously so there is no real need to duplicate the basics of using these tools here.
The following are few images specific to the activity I am proposing. First, the Canvas template adds a capability to link different elements added to a padlet. Once individual idea notes have been created, they can be moved about on a padlet and then connected to show relationships. Doing this is a little tricky unless you understand that you have to use Shift/Right Click on one element to create a link to another element (see the images that follow).
I have created an example padlet with ideas suited to an adult audience to offer an example of how ideas might be generated and then linked.
As I said, it is valuable to be able to share padlets for the purposes of feedback or collaboration. You can view the actual padlet you see above using this link. It is very possible this link will stop working at some point. I don’t really have a use for a paid version of Padlet. The free account allows me to create and recreate up to 3 padlets. It is possible I will delete the one you see here some time in the future to stay within this limit.
Padlets can be shared and developed collaboratively. What I am suggesting here would require a teacher to create a padlet for each student and then share the padlet with that student. This would then technically be a collaborative arrangement under the ultimate control of the teacher. I understand this would be cumbersome, but Padlet accounts are not appropriately available to individual users under the age of 13. The cost for a classroom account allowing unlimited padlets is $8 a month. Padlet is a very versatile tool and what I describe here is just one of many possible classroom uses. Obviously, multiple students could collaboratively generate notes on a topic.
Notetaking and highlighting were topics of research interest when I began my academic career. Because these were common activities among college students and students really had no instruction in how these activities could be most productively applied I was attracted by potential benefits of research to determine how best to perform these common behaviors. At that time, K12 students could not mark in their textbooks and while I guess students may have taken some notes they did so largely without guidance.
Questions of how best to apply digital devices has brought some of these same topics back into focus. Are notes best taken in a notebook or on a digital device? What approach to taking notes is most productive? Perhaps I am just one of those old guys characterized as focused on the good old days, but it seems to me that the rich, pragmatic research on notetaking is largely ignored by the new, active crop of researches. Since I have been writing about the potential of digital notetaking recently, I thought a few comments about the research from the ’70s and ‘80s might be helpful.
For a nice review of the notetaking research, I would recommend Kiewra (1985). Kiewra argues that researchers investigated notetaking as a process and a product. As a product, the focus was on the qualities of notes that would best serve a learner in review – typically the preparation for an examination taken weeks or months later. This became known as the external storage function. It would not be possible to listen to presentations again and it would not be practical to reread assigned readings, so what type of notes could be prepared to allow delayed study.
The process function suggested that the activity of taking notes could benefit the learner. The term encoding was typically used to describe the cognitive activity involved. The assumption was that the notes taken would involve some type of processing and this processing was more beneficial than a basic transcription of the input. I have taken to using the term generative as a broad term for the potential benefits of activities applied to information to improve retention or understanding. Perhaps it occurs to you that notetaking for external storage and to encourage deeper cognitive processing may not be the same type of notes. This is part of the challenge.
The research questions of the day were very practical. Was information from a lecture recorded in notes better recalled than ideas not contained in the notes? Was notetaking superior to just listening if retention or understanding was tested immediately (a test of the generative function)? Does the density of critical idea notes to more general notes matter?
Eventually, a secondary level of research began to emerge. Are expert notes better than personal notes? The instructor could distribute notes or have a grad students take notes and allow students to just listen. If the generative function does not work well for all (students less familiar with the content or capable as learners), perhaps having a good set of notes provided by someone else would be better. When should notes first be reviewed and could they be improved if reviewed immediately? Proposals such as Cornell notes followed from this type of question.
Some of my own thinking on the potential of digital notes follow from these questions. For example, I recommend that learners use a digital notetaking tool that records audio at the same time students are taking notes. Such tools link notes to audio with some type of invisible time stamp. When reviewing notes that are puzzling or seem incomplete, the learner can use the connection between a note and the audio to review the original input to improve the notes when a student has more time to think.
I regard the question of generative processing to be unresolved, but of potentially the greatest value. We clearly have many ways to address external storage with the opportunity for instructors to share PowerPoints slides (an external storage function) or the audio recording capabilities I have just described. The real time, generative processing may be impractical for many learners because of working memory issues related to the speed of information input. However, again, immediate review with the aid of stored original content may be a way to address this challenge. Then, learning how to take notes that involve interpretation, summarization, and personalization will be key. When and how do we teach learners to involve themselves in productive generative activities?
Kiewra, K. A. (1985). Investigating notetaking and review: A depth of processing alternative. Educational psychologist, 20(1), 23-32.
Rickards, J. P., & Friedman, F. (1978). The encoding versus the external storage hypothesis in note taking. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 3(2), 136-143.
I have not written about layering in some time. I encountered something I was unfamiliar with when reading about how to help students to learn to read with technology. The content I was reading was discussing how to help students understand what the annotation of a digital text might look like and suggested that students be shown examples. One source for such examples was the annotated articles from the Washington Post.
I was unfamiliar with this service, but a search revealed information about the explorations they have conducted and are being conducted by the Post. My example (see below) is from a speech by President Obama because more recent examples (e.g., a piece about Fauci) were not available as I have exceeded my free views. If you have a subscription, search “washington post annotated articles” to find other material. If you explore the linked example, click on highlighted material to view associated comments.
The Washington Post annotates with Genius. The idea is to have a commentator familiar with the issues add these annotations.
This is the final post in the series describing my own writing process. I will admit that putting the ideas you have collected together for a public product can be very time-consuming, but less dependent on tools/services others have not encountered. I write mostly in Google docs. I write most blog posts in WordPress (the same tool that organizes and presents my posts to the public). I have experimented with other writing environments and for those wanting to try something different I will describe my favorite.
Scrivener is a tool for organizing resources and turning these resources into a final product. You can try the tool at no expense, but I did purchase my copy at the educational rate of $40.
I would describe Scrivener as a tool for larger projects that involve the organization of many resources, exploring what your final product might look like, and working on a product that will take some time to complete. I wrote this series of blog posts using Scrivener (the total of all the posts was a major project) and I wrote one edition of our textbook using this tool. Because of its system for storing and organizing resources, Scrivener could be used to explore the Smart Note writing process before fully investing in the multitool process I have described over the past several posts.
The three panel system shown below works this way. The binder (leftmost panel) provides access to content (background, original written products). The content selected appears in the middle panel (this happens to be the previous post in this series). The right-most panel provides access to metadata associated with the content in the middle panel (tags, notes, etc.).
Scrivener has other tools (views) for working with and organizing ideas. The following is the corkboard which allows the identification of ideas that can then be organized and expanded into text.
Scrivener is expandable and has an active community contributing templates for various types of products (blog posts, screenplays, scientific articles, etc.). Templates establish the organizational structure of the Binder. If you want, the content of a Scrivener project can be composed and output in formats for different purposes. For example, you can output the product you are working on in a format appropriate to upload to Kindle (.mobi). This is a very powerful tool I admit I use to introduce some variety into the time I spend writing. I have learned enough about the product that I can use it from time to time and move content back and forth to other tools without a lot of wasted time.
The impetus for writing this series of posts was a couple of insights I gained from Ahren’s book (How to take smart notes) which I have described in past posts (a link to the Amazon source for this book is included at the end of this post). I have tried to convey several of these insights in this series. Perhaps the most important insight was that writing is a process (not really that new) and what most think of as writing should begin earlier in this process. Smart notes are what we should be writing earlier.
It is not uncommon to engage in the highlighting and annotation processes I described in an earlier post and it is not uncommon to try to use the ideas selected by these processes in later writing. What is missing for most writers is the opportunity to identify, externalize (write), and organize individual ideas as an intermediate step that makes the transition from the input of reading to the output of writing much easier.
Ahren’s uses Luhman’s Zettelkasten to offer a model for a more productive model for shaping the ideas gleaned from original sources into various final products. The difference here is understanding that we often imagine a process in which we work backward from a final product. We start with a goal and then try to either generate from scratch or search within our collection of rather raw inputs for the content to meet this goal. Ahren proposes instead that we see our initial effort as resulting in carefully generated insights/ideas gleaned from the original sources and associated with other insights that can later be examined and played with to generate the outline for final products.
Referencing the Zettelkasten again, Ahrens describes what he means by a smart note. A Zettel, one note stored within a Zettelkasten, should contain one thought expressed in your own words. Zettel is “paper slip” in German. The Zettelkasten was a box within which the slips are kept and organized. A smart note is more an individual idea. Smart notes are linked via what might be described as hypertext in a digital Zettelkasten. The notion that the digital Zettelkasten is a tool to think with requires this combination of thoughts that can be associated with other thoughts in flexible and evolving ways.
As I rethink my “note-taking” over the years, I have decided I typically fail to get beyond highlighting. If I do, I might add a general summary in some type of reference collection system. When I had a goal of producing something specific, it took considerable effort to explore this collection of references and create a collection of ideas I would then shape into an original work. The idea of smart notes is to do the work of personalizing and externalizing individual ideas soon after the initial encounter while reading and exploring how new ideas can be associated with older ideas. Some in offering takes on the Zettelkasten differentiate literature or fleeting notes from permanent notes. Permanent notes are written so that an idea can stand alone. A smart note is linked with other permanent notes in a bi-directional way. Exploring this collection from time to time offers the opportunity to find new connections. Adding new contributions and finding new connections makes the Zettelkasten an external tool to think and learn with.
Zotero is a free tool, but provides a limited amount of online storage at the free level (300 MB). For 2 GB, you would pay $20 annually. Zotero allows the storage of a lot of different types of files including pdfs and web snapshots. If you store this type of information, 300MB will not be sufficient. I store all pdfs in other ways so I am waiting to see how fast the free storage capacity goes.
I am using Zotero to store my summary insights and references. I can store links to the other sources such as annotated files stored in Diigo (previous post). The right-hand panel in the image below shows what one of my notes looks like. The key to Zotero use are the additions stored in the area at the bottom (the red box). Here I can add tags and links to related notes in the system. A tag cloud also accumulates and can be seen at the bottom of the left-hand panel. So, this might be considered a version of a Zettelkasten and the idea would be to build this collection and periodically visit to explore ideas and add links among ideas.
Obsidian is another tool recommended as a Zettelkasten. It is a free tool and I can store the files it generates in a way that is local, but is also synched to the cloud (iCloud). This means I have cloud storage and that I can access my resources from other devices that access this same online storage.
The files used in Obsidian are written in markdown text. A system such as this should be familiar to any older tech folks who used tags to add links and text styles in the early days of HTML use or wiki tools. You can see some of these tags if you look closely at the bottom of the top image. The red square surrounds tags that can serve as the target of searches (#tagname) and the green box surrounds an internal link to another note [[file name]]. Other tags provide external links, text style, etc. You can get by just learning three or four tags so adding these additions is not difficult.
While a markup system may seem primitive, the great advantage is that the files that are stored (each entry ends up as a separate file) can be read by pretty much any tool (e.g., word processing program, text editor). The concern is about longevity. Should something happen to Obsidian, the files stored in a safe way (locally and in the cloud) and can always be salvaged.
Obsidian creates backlinks any time two files are linked. It is possible to visually see and explore the system of files that is created (see below) and these visual representations can be refined using a filtering system.
The longevity issue
The idea of a Zettelkasten is intended to create a manageable repository of content that will exist for maybe decades (see the comment about text markup in my description of Obsidian). This may sound grandiose, but for any of us at the tail end of a career that involved information problem solving for several decades the struggle to transition from one system to another is real. I had notes on paper note cards in a box and a file cabinet filled with highlighted copies of journal articles with other articles still in the decades of journals on my office shelves. A collection of pdfs was the next stage. Then various systems such as EndNote for trying to manage the collection of pdfs. Now, I am trying something new. With digital content, I think there are advantages and ways to build on what you have and not start over.
Getting started
It is possible to be attracted to new tools and spend too large a proportion of time learning the tools. I see some role in the latter stages of my own career to be exploring tools so that others do not have to do this on their own. So, how would I get started? I think I would start with a pdf tool and a tool for organizing and saving ideas/insights. You could use Mendeley Desktop (pdfs) and either of the tools I have described here at no cost.
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