notetaking – Page 2 – Learning Aloud

Almost there – comment on the evolution of PKM systems

I have been exploring many digital note-taking and annotation systems for a couple of years now. My involvement might be stretched to a decade plus if you are willing to group tools such as EndNote with this category of tools. My way of thinking about using such tools has been shaped by a career as an educational psychologist with a cognitive perspective on learning applied to topics such as note-taking, highlighting, study behavior, and generative learning activities (e.g., writing to learn, summarization, questions). This background offers some insights into what features of technology-supported learning and thinking tools might be helpful. I have gleaned a few core ideas from more recent reading – progressive summarization, smart notes that I see relevant in combination with both my newer hands-on experiences and my more general cognitive background.

What follows is a personal evaluation of the capabilities of PKM tools based on what I have just described as my personal background and experiences. I have tried to identify a title for this post. “Close, but no cigar” came to mind, but seemed too negative. I decided to go with “almost there”. What I mean by this is that I can patch together a workflow that I think works pretty well, but the system is a bit cumbersome and inefficient. I hope to offer a perspective on what an ideal tool might look like. I have based this ideal tool based on how I think Glasp should work, but so far does not.

My reading activity involves web content, Kindle books, and pdfs of scientific journal articles. Ideally, all of these sources could be stored in an accessible place (I would be willing to live with a location I control – my computer or ideally personal storage online such as iCloud or DropBox). Online storage is important for both security and access from multiple devices. As I will demonstrate in my ideal approach, a common location seems to be important for the connections I see important in the system I imagine. For example, some systems do not store the pdf from which notes are taken. With the service I have in mind (Memex), I can reexamine links between the pdf and notes I have taken if I am on my own computer, but I can only see my notes if I am working on a different computer that only provides me online access. The pdf and the notes are stored in different places with the pdf on my computer and the notes in the cloud.

What follows is my fabricated visual description of a workflow using images from Grasp that I have merged to represent a superior fictitious system. I will be clear on what is not actually there as I proceed. The image (below) shows three panels – the leftmost panel shows original content that has been highlighted and annotated. The second panel shows isolated highlighted and notes. The third panel shows what I now label as a smart note (after Ahrens). The arrows indicate connections across panels that are bidirectional. In other words, you can get from an isolated note or highlight in the middle panel back to where in the original document this highlight exists or where the annotation/note was connected. You can get from my personally generated, standalone, summary note back to the immediate notes or highlights. These bidirectional connections are important for maintaining what might be described as context and attribution. Attribution is important in my writing to link what I write to what others have written. Context is important in establishing the broader set of information within which something I felt was important emerged. Maybe I want to seek other ideas from this same information. Maybe I just want to check on what I concluded because later my summary seems incomplete or maybe erroneous.

The system I describe allows for the generation of Smart Notes or Summary notes (I use such terms interchangeably) which capture an idea in a form that should make sense to me and someone else at a later point in time. The system allows progressive summarization in the sequence of forms getting to a smart note. Highlighting was not part of the progressive summarization process described by Forte, but I think it is fair to use it as a component in the physical transformation from the source to the personal summary I describe here.

What about these descriptions is not available? Glasp cannot be used to read pdfs. This is a serious limitation for an academic who must rely of pdfs of articles from research journals. The processing of Kindle books within Glasp allows the download of highlights and notes, but you cannot link back to the location of the selected content within the context of the original ebook. The personal summary notes (called atomic notes in Glasp) are not associated with a specific original source and you cannot get to that source through links to highlights and notes added to that source. These personal notes just accumulate as one reads different sources in this independent pane. At present, I copy and paste these notes into Obsidian and Mem X to take advantage of the organizational features of these other tools. I suppose it would be ideal if such summary notes could exist in Glasp in a way that would allow the long-term storage and manipulation of these ideas independent of source material.

To be fair to Grasp, it is still a beta service and free at this point. It is useful as is and I have found ways to integrate it with other tools to generate a reasonable workflow. Partly I wrote this post because I was contacted after writing an earlier post about Glasp and was contacted by a developer from the company. I thought I would share what I think a more complete system might look like. I hope my summary of a personal knowledge management workflow offers some insight for those unfamiliar with this expanding collection of digital tools offered to support the personal processing of source documents.

Annotating Newsela articles to develop deep reading skills

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.

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.

Specialized note taking

I think of specialized note-taking tactics as approaches that go beyond the learner-controlled recording of text and maybe some basic sketches. These approaches involve some attempt to scaffold what I would describe as elaboration. I like to describe elaboration as a type of personalization that goes beyond recording information in a verbatim way involving summarization and/or the addition of examples or cross-references to other existing knowledge. A challenge here is the possible, working memory overload required to personalize the information input, and whether the circumstances of the presentation and capabilities of the individual learner allow the capacity for elaboration. The application of note taking while reading and listening to a presentation can be quite different because of differences in the opportunity to control the rate of input.

Popular examples of specialized tactics proposed for the K12 environment include Cornell notes, sketchnoting, and concept mapping. All involve either an extension or a rerepresentation of ideas from the content to be mastered. I will admit a bias in not being a strong advocate of any of these tactics with perhaps the most enthusiasm for the Cornell system. My reaction is mostly based on the increased demands on working memory these systems impose and whether the product generated in the case of sketch notes and concept maps is more useful longterm as a summarization.

For those wanting to investigate sketchnoting and the Cornell system here are some resources.

Sketchnoting video, Kathy Schrock’s sketch noting guide, and an engineering setting argued to benefit from educators at Iowa State (see references below).

Cornell Notes

I use Evernote as an information archive. Evernote offers different templates and one is for Cornell Notes. The template offers a way to explain what I mean by a scaffold for personalization.

I have come to see note-taking as best understood as a three stage process (see references that follow). From this template, you can see how the middle stage – the after class or revision stage – would be applied. After taking notes and after class, you can generate a summary (bottom box) and generate questions (above the middle box). Developing a summary (something like Ahern’s Smart Notes) could involve elaboration. The questions could improve the effectiveness of review (study).

One final observation – I find it strange that there are so many carefully controlled research studies comparing taking notes by hand versus by a digital device and so few directly comparing these specialized note taking systems and traditional note taking.

References:

Chen, P. H. (2021). In-class and after-class lecture note-taking strategies. Active Learning in Higher Education, 22(3), 245-260.

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.

V. Paepcke-Hjeltness, M. Mina and A. Cyamani, “Sketchnoting: A new approach to developing visual communication ability, improving critical thinking and creative confidence for engineering and design students,” 2017 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2017, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/FIE.2017.8190659.

Annotation examples

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.

Social bookmarking

I have not written about social bookmarking for some time and like technology in general this category of apps continues to apps. Some of these advances have included the opportunity to store highlights and notes from digital books and to share this information with a specified group or with any interested party.

For the unfamiliar, here is how I see this evolution. When we started with web browsers, we were initially provided the opportunity to store links we wanted to revisit within the browser. Improvements included the opportunity to organize bookmarks into folders and to add tags and descriptions to allow a larger and larger collection to be searched. Eventually, it was possible to store such collections online providing the opportunity to work from different locations with different devices. Eventually, it became possible to share this information or at least designated subset with others. Why not share useful resources? Recent innovations include the addition of advanced note taking capabilities and automatic storage of digital book notes.

My long term favorite has been Diigo. You can explore the public potential of Diigo by examining my notes.

For those interested in sharing insights from books, my recommendation would be Goodreads. I have had a Goodreads account for several years, but I had not paid much attention. Recently, I learned that Goodreads allows for the storage and sharing of annotations. These annotations can be shared. I have not made the effort to download the highlights for all of my books – this is a security measure to allow individuals to decide what they want to offer as a social service. Try “How to take smart notes” to see what the sharing of notes looks like.

Applications for educators? Social bookmarking sites offer a great opportunity to share resources with others having similar interests (e.g., history teachers) or to offer a collection of resources to students.

Creating, storing, and using Smart Notes

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.

Digital Smart Note Tools

Zotero

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

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.

Ahren’s book

Zettelkasten for beginners – (See section Zettelkasten for beginners)

Zettelkasten Introduction