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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Little that I write comes originally from my own thoughts. Ideas mostly start with things I have read and occasionally heard. Giving credit when possible is a value I learned early.
My comments in this series are based on an analysis of my own writing process with an eye toward improvements I might make. This is not a new goal as I have experimented with aspects of this process and how I might support it with technology for years. I have explained the more immediate impetus in a previous post.
This post concerns the various tools I use to collect and process ideas from various inputs. The goal of what I am working on in my most recent process upgrade is to try to move aspects of writing earlier in this process. My intention is to use the note-taking capabilities of many of the tools that follow more aggressively and to feed these notes forward to the newest stage I will explain in the post that follows. The following material is organized by input source. You may have more of an interest in some of these inputs than others depending on how you contact information in your life,
Listening
I have included listening more based on past experiences than on present practices. I used to take notes during presentations I would attend. Often these presentations would occur at conferences I attended. If you are younger, you may be attending classes and taking notes as part of that type of formal learning environment.
The two tools I list here have an interesting capability I think most could benefit from applying. The tools record audio and link locations in the timeline of this audio to any notes that are taken. The benefit here is that should the notes be vague at later consideration, the original audio can easily be reviewed for clarification. I also suggest that when the note taker realizes that something is slipping past them they simply enter some marker in their notes – “I am confused here”.
I am a retired academic so much of what I read and still write about is originally encountered in journal articles. For years now, university libraries offer online access to these journals allowing the download of the pdfs of articles. I used to joke that I would use my computer to download what I wanted to read before I would walk across my office to find the same article in a journal I had on my shelves. I used to use EndNote to read and highlight articles. I had issues synching the annotated content between my textbook computer which is the machine I prefer for writing and my iPad which is the machine I prefer for reading. After some experimentation, I settled on BookEnds and Highlights for these purposes. I use them together as each has advantages. The unique value of Highlights is that highlights and notes are easy to export as a separate document should you want to use this content separate from the original pdf (the image below is from Highlights). I believe these are primarily Apple tools and both require a subscription fee.
The following is the display when highlighting and annotating in Highlights. The highlighted content and notes generated appear in a separate panel on the right and can be exported.
Other pdfs
I do read other content as pdfs. My tool for this is Mendeley based in a more organized setting called the Mendeley Desktop. If you are trying to avoid paying for a service that both organizes and allows the annotation of pdfs, this would be my recommendation.
Diigo is considered a social bookmarking tool. It is social because stored bookmarks (and contents) can be made available to others. A user can set the default to private and then uncheck a box that would add the annotations/highlights for a given site to make the content public. The bookmark itself stores the web address of the original content, Highlights and annotations are stored as part of the bookmark. Bookmarks can be tagged (see terms within the red box) and these tags can be used to search for other bookmarks within the collection. This is a powerful tool I have used for years mostly when was focused on sharing resources with others. Lately, I have become more serious about the other opportunities (e.g., an outline tool that allows the organization of content from multiple bookmark content as an intermediary stage before writing). I offer access to my public notes in one of the links I provide here. I pay an annual fee for the Pro version of this tool. I could get by with the free version (e.g., I could delete each outline I construct to stay within the number of outlines allowed at the free level), but I am pushing myself to use more of the capabilities of this service.
I don’t think I have purchased more than one or two physical books in the past decade and in most cases, this is because I happened to be attending a book signing. I average purchasing about a book and a half a month in digital form. I use Amazon exclusively and while I understand other similar services are available I stick to one environment as a matter of convenience.
The Kindle (on one of several devices I use) allows highlighting and note-taking. What some may not realize is that Amazon stores all of your highlights and notes online and there are several ways to access this content.
Highlights and notes generated while reading a Kindle book can be exported. This content can be found online – https://read.amazon.com/ – and can be edited further (add a note, delete the highlight) online. Kindle and Diigo have a unique relationship in that those who pay for the Diigo service can send their highlights and notes from Kindle to Diigo with the click of a button (see the blue button – Import to Diigo) in the image that appears below.
One final comment – I think it is important to give some thought to sustainability. Services come and go and the process I am attending to describe in total assumes that value comes over an extended period of time. Some issues to consider. First, are resources stored in a format that is independent of the service using the resources. Pdfs seem to meet this goal. Another format, I will discuss in the next issue is markdown text. This is essentially a text file containing common symbols to trigger things like links and tags (e.g., [[]] and #). If the worst happens and a service goes away, pdfs and markdown files can be opened using several other tools. Second, store in multiple places and backup. I try to use services that generate content I can find on a local machine and also exists with reputable services “in the cloud”. I use DropBox and iCloud for online storage. I trust these services and at worst assume I would have some warning if I would have to find a different online storage service.
I have tried many methods for taking notes over the years. I probably started like many academics by reading scholarly journal articles in the journals I received through subscriptions, highlighting the articles as I read, and then maybe taking a few notes on a 3×5 card that I kept in a “recipe box” under one topic heading or another. With the arrival of technology, my approach shifted to storing a version of the note cards in one system or another and shifting from reading journal articles in journals to reading journal articles I could download from my library site as pdfs. When the Internet offered more content directly I added some bookmarking application to my approach to save the links to websites I wanted to remember.
The big idea I gleaned from reading Ahren’s (2017) book (see previous post) was that it is important to record notes in my own words as I read. Too often, I highlight while I read and then lost the context that is important in capturing big ideas. Any writing task required that I recapture the ideas by starting from the original source before integrating ideas in what was to become the final product. What Ahrens recommends might be described as starting a writing process earlier in the transition from primary sources to the final product. He described first generating fleeting or literature notes while reading and then permanent notes once the reading of a source was completed. As I rethink my “note-taking” over the years, I have decided I typically failed to make the transition from literature notes to permanent notes. Worse yet, too often my reading of a source only resulted in highlighting of the ideas that were not my own.
What Ahrens describes as a permanent note is clearly a form of writing. The idea is to create a personal summary or interpretation of a key idea that can stand alone and store such summaries in a certain way. What I mean by stand alone is that the permanent notes are not necessarily intended to end up becoming part of a final product that one already has in mind. The concept of smart notes (the title of his book) was that the ideas would be formulated and captured immediately and stored in such a way that they could be easily found and then organized with other such ideas to more efficiently create final products. I would describe this as moving part of the writing process earlier in the reading to written product workflow.
Knowledge transforming and knowledge telling
Ahrens argues that creating permanent notes as you encounter ideas you think are interesting is more than a precursor to writing. He suggests that this notion of generating a written note that reflects personal understanding and relating this note to other notes is a way to facilitate the learning process. You end up with both external and internal storage. I would suggest that cognitive psychologists call this form of writing a generative process. The permanent note versus the “literature” note reminds me of the distinction some scholars studying writing make between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming. The distinction may be relevant to what makes a good smart note. Knowledge telling is the output of part of what was the input. Your write a close approximation to what was heard or read. Highlighting would be a crude form of knowledge telling. Knowledge transforming involves interpretation on the part of the content producer. I liked to explain the difference to educators by asking them to reflect on student answers to essay questions they have asked. Some students write everything they remember about a topic whether or not it specifically answers the question. It is like they want to argue that the answer must be in there somewhere. Knowledge transforming starts with what the question asks and crafts a response that shapes what the respondent knows to address the challenge posed by the question. Knowledge transforming is a far better indication of understanding.
Luhman’s Zettelkasten
Ahren’s book and ideas are not his original creation, but based on the method of Niklas Luhman referred to as the Zettelkasten. I see various references to Luhman’s ideas lately and predict this will become “a thing” in education. As I understand the translation, a Zettelkasten is a box in which notes are stored and organized. Lehman called this a slip box. It is the form these notes take and how they are related to other notes in the box that is the key to what is described as a more productive workflow. I have included a video of Lehman working in his office using his slip box and a reference to a source describing the Zettelkasten for Beginners at the end of this post.
Where is this all going?
If you read my original post, you can anticipate that I will originally explain efforts to translate this method and the physical slip box into a workflow and applications that run on a computer. I will identify some of the tools/services I have used and some I have recently discovered that are suggested as ways to implement the Smart Note and Zettelkasten approach to writing and learning.
Sources
Ahrens, S. (2017). _How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking–for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.
Knowledge telling and knowledge transforming – Bereiter.C. & Scardaamalia, M. (1987). Two models of composing processes (pp. 1-30). In C. Bereiter & M. Scardamalia (Eds) The psychology of written Composition. Erbalaum.
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