Category: Digital notes

Back to a time when our expectations of social media were more optimistic. This interview Howard Rheingold conducts with Andy Clark claims the internet does not have to make us stupid. This discussion focuses on what habits make the difference. The notion that unproductive uses of online services are a habit rather than say a change in brain structure or an unchangeable requirement of a medium suggests the potential for learning or scaffolding.

I have come to this perspective after considering what some see as a problem with keyboard notetaking. The capacity to enter text faster via a keyboard in comparison to what most do with a pen would somehow seem to be an opportunity and not a liability. Why would this opportunity have to be utilized to enter verbatim rather than elaborated notes? It would seem an approach closer to transcription when notetaking with a keyboarding is a choice we make.

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I have decided that it is time to diversify my posts as many who read what I write here may not be that interested in notes and notetaking. My personal interest will require that I post on this topic from time to time. I will leave this topic for the time being with a recommendation.

A history prof from Bemidji State (my area of the woods) has an interest in this same topic and has hosted a book study group that meets regularly. The group is presently considering Ahrens’ book Smart Notes. The group has great discussions I cannot participate in because of the time difference (I am wintering in Kauai), but the content is available on YouTube.

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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.

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An idea for developing Smart Note skills

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.

Note sources

Cult of Pedagogy – https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/

Illinois Literacy – http://www.illinoisliteracyinaction.org/uploads/4/0/7/1/40712613/summarizing_and_note_taking_handout_v2.pdf

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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.

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