The most important thing to do to prevent Highlight Dementia is creating context around your highlights. For every highlight that you make, try to also note down a couple of words on why you are highlighting the sentence.
I’ve read this advice in several articles now. It’s time I put this into practice. This means, no more highlights in Hypothes.is, only annotations from now on.
Even when reading a book,the goal-oriented nature and intention of reading is paramount.6
61 Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Rev. and updated ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 45.
I see some of the sense of this footnote, which helps to establish some ethos by calling to mind Adler/Van Doren's classic, but this particular page in their text is really about paying enough attention not to fall asleep and thus doesn't underline Scheper's point as well as references to other portions of their book about goals and active reading.
Whenever I read about the various ideas, I feel like I do not necessarily belong. Thinking about my practice, I never quite feel that it is deliberate enough.
https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/
Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.
Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?
Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.
I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.
It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.
What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.
How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?
We find favorwith Mortimer J. Adler’s stance, from 1940,that “marking up a book is not an act ofmutilation but of love.”18
also:
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.
We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class. — Griswold, McDonnell and Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology (2005) They see two options for readers in society: Gaining “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” Becoming culturally irrelevant and backwards with “an increasingly arcane hobby”
Reading is suggested to be potentially waning, maybe becoming more elite or even obsolete. It seems to disregard its counterpart: writing. For every thing that can be read, writing has preceded it. Writing, other than direct transcription, is not just creating text it is a practice, that also creates effects/affordances for the writer. Also thinking of Rheingold's definition of literacy as a skill plus community in which that skill is widely present. Writing/reading started out as bookkeeping, and I assume professional classes will remain text focused (although AR is an 'oral' path here too)
social historian G. M. Trevelyan (1978) put theissue some time ago, ‘Education...has produced a vast population able to readbut unable to distinguish what is worth reading.’
And this is the art-the skill or craftthat we are talking about here.
We don't talk about the art of reading or the art of note making often enough as a goal to which students might aspire. It's too often framed as a set of rules and an mechanical process rather than a road to producing interesting, inspiring, or insightful content that can change humanity.
That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors,even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will becomeclear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.
during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truthand significance of the book. The notes you make at this levelof reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual.
Conceptual notes are made during the analytical reading of a book and "give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book."
The point to recognize is that these notes primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance-at leastnot in detail. We therefore call this kind of note-making structural.
Adler and Van Doren define structural note making as the sorts of questions one might ask at the level of inspectional reading including: - what kind of book is it? - what is it about? - what is the overall structure with respect to the argument the author intends to make?
the front endpapers are oftenthe most important. Some people reserve them for a fancybookplate.
Adler and Van Doren indicate that outlining the arguments and structure of a book on its endpapers is a better and higher measurement of one's ownership of a text compared to a bookplate which only indicates the lower level of "financial" ownership.
The endpapers at the back ofthe book can be used to make a personal index of the author'spoints in the order of their appearance.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually doesnot know what he thinks.
Active reading is thinking, and thinking requires expression which can come in many forms including both spoken and written ones.
I like that he acknowledges that expression (and thus thinking) can be done in both oral or written forms.
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First,it keeps you awake-not merely conscious, but wide awake.Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually doesnot know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions downhelps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
. Full ownership of a bookonly comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and thebest way to make yourself a part of it-which comes to thesame thing-is by writing in it.
The pencil then becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.
Knowing what the four questions are is not enough. Youmust remember to ask them as you read.
4. WHAT OF IT?
This reminds me of the purpose of reading at CAA. If you tell no one about it, then it wasn't worth the effort. What new did you learn and how did you pass that on to improve your friends, colleagues, and society?
3. Is THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART?
2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL, AND HOW?
There are four main questions youmust ask about any book.
inspectional reading is always active.
To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.
Superficialreading is the first necessary step in the interpretation of abook's contents.
Systematic skimming, in other words,anticipates the comprehension of a book's structure.
also includes opening oneself up to open questions one might either ask themselves or those which the author proposes.
A better formula is this : Every book should be readno more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than youcan read it with satisfaction and comprehension.
the primarytask-recognized as such by all speed reading courses-is tocorrect the fixations and regressions that slow so many readersdown
The tremendous pleasure that can come from readingShakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of highschool students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar,As You Like It, or Hamlet, scene by scene, looking up all thestrange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read a Shakespearean play.
The answer lies in an important and helpful rule of reading that is generally overlooked.That rule is simply this: In tackling a difficult book for the firsttime, read it through without ever stopping to look up orponder the things you do not understand right away.
You will be surprised to find out howmuch time you will save, pleased to see how much more youwill grasp, and relieved to discover how much easier it all canbe than you supposed.
The authors don't cover it, but the skimming portion of inspectional reading helps one to build some of the context which the author is attempting to relay. Preloading some of this context will decrease one's mental burden when more deeply and actively attempting to consume a text.
Skimming or pre-reading is thefirst sublevel of inspectional reading.
there are two types ofinspectional readin
https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history
Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History<br /> Exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard's libraries.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>3/ Champion your competition’s work<br><br>With his reading list email, on podcasts, in his bookstore, Ryan promotes other books more than his own.<br><br>When asked, he’ll say:<br><br>“Authors think they’re competing with other authors. They’re not. They’re competing with people not reading.”
— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) August 24, 2022
David Brooks talks about what he calls the “theory of maximum taste.” It’s similar to what Murphy is saying. “Exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness,” Brooks writes. “If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you [don’t].”
Teachers’ Use of Technology in Elementary Reading Lessons
-I will download this full article through EBSCO
-This article will provide me with teaching strategies that use technology in elementary reading lessons.
-rating 8/10
McDermott, P., & Gormley, K. A. (2016). Teachers’ use of technology in elementary reading lessons. Reading Psychology, 37(1), 121-146.
the author must not merely articulate his sources; he mustdigest them. A long passage quoted or closely followed "remainsan undigested bit of foreign matter." "Over quotation may meanunder thought."
relatable to: https://hypothes.is/a/wIyvtm0oEeyNypNtc--Clw
Conversely, even before the mainstream began leeching off alternative cultures, the underground satirically appropriated from the mainstream.
The mainstream is seen as the standard while the underground is seen as a copy or replica.
Invariably, early expressions of sub- or alternative cultures are the most fertile sampling grounds
Sometimes art and ideas can be considered as less than what already is accepted, as a result of things becoming more simplified and easier, resulting these neglected or irrelevant ideas one day becoming crucial to the future.
Commercial culture depends on the theft of intellectual property for its livelihood.
This was a great statement because it sparks curiosity in how the world around us is greatly influenced by the past and this which can result in what can be considered "Theft" and copyright infringement when considering how simple it has become to succeed commercially.
It wasn’t zealous in that we were told exactly what to read and what to think about the books, but it was conveyed to us that certain books really did matter and that you were involved in some rearguard action for the profound human values in these books. This was conveyed very powerfully—that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature—and it worked for me. I was taught close, attentive reading, and to ironize the ambitions of grand theory. I was educated to believe that A.E. Housman was more interesting than Hegel, and I do.
For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)
I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)
These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/help/read
via
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Inspired by @cicatriz's Fractal Inquiry and SuperMemo's Incremental Reading, I imported into @RoamResearch a paper I was very impressed (but also overwhelmed) by a few years ago: The Knowledge‐Learning‐Instruction Framework by @koedinger et al. pic.twitter.com/oeJzyjPGbk
— Stian Håklev (@houshuang) December 16, 2020
typographic experimentation.
Experimentation was something that became increasingly important even though it wasn't supported much at times.
To this day, most institutions of higher learning either do not know how to instructstudents in reading beyond the elementary level, or lack thefacilities and personnel to do so.
This was revised in 1972, but this statement is sadly still broadly true today in 2022.
What other advanced reading teaching is broadly available outside of this particular text?
Intellectual readiness involves a minimumlevel of visual perception such that the child can take in andremember an entire word and the letters that combine to formit. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly andto use several sentences in correct order.
Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?
How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?
method," and the method known variously as the "see-say,""look-say," "look-and-say," or "word method." Doubtless experiments are now being undertaken in methods and approaches that differ from all of these. It is perhaps too earlyto tell whether any of these is the long-sought panacea forall reading ills.
Hence, researchers are very active at the present time, and their work has resulted in numerous new approaches to reading instruction. Among the more important new programs are the so-called eclectic approach, the individualized reading approach, the language-experience approach, the various approaches based on linguistic principles, and others based more or less closely on some kind of programmed instruction. In addition, new mediums such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet ( i.t.a. ) have been employed, and sometimes these involve new methods as well. Still other devices and programs are the "total immersion method," the "foreign-language-school
Have we ultimately come to the conclusion that neurodiversity means there is no one-size-fits all solution? Should we also be placing some focus on orality and memory methods to allow those to flourish as well? Where is the literature on "orality pedagogy"? Is it a thing? It should be...
A youngman or woman who cannot read very well is hindered in hispursuit of the American dream
This would seem to indicate that reading's primary importance was to fuel capitalism and production. It certainly says a lot about American culture, particularly in a book that wants to focus on syntopical reading.
analytical rather than synthetic, originated in Germany and was advocated by HoraceMann and other educators after about 1840. This involvedteaching the visual recognition of whole words before givingany attention to letter-names or letter-sounds.
Did this approach have a categorical name?
This method wasespecially popular during the 1920's and 30's, which period wasalso characterized by the shift in emphasis from oral readingto silent reading. It was found that ability to read orally didnot necessarily mean ability to read silently and that instruction in oral reading was not always adequate if silent readingwas the goal.
Thus, syllablessuch as ab, ac, ad, ib, ic were practiced for the sake of masteryof the language. When a child could name all of a determinednumber of combinations, he was said to know his ABC's.
When did phonics start as a practice historically? Presumably after Mortimer J. Adler's note here?
The great vowel shift and the variety of admixtures of languages comprising English make it significantly harder to learn to read compared to other languages whose orthography and sound systems (example: Japanese hiragana) are far simpler and more straightforward.
The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.
Francis Bacon once remarked that "some booksare to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to bechewed and digested."
The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.
note that they're incorrectly capitalizing these types of reading to indicate their importance.
The second level of reading we will call InspectionalReading.
The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading.
. The goal a reader seeks-be itentertainment, information or understanding-determines theway he reads.
There are three goals of most reading: education, information, and understanding.
Are there others we're missing here?
I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic of the Mexican American People by Rodolfo Gonzales (1972)
Here is a dramatic reading of the whole poem, it is very compelling. https://youtu.be/qDsTELEAL3A
Sincecopying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller thebetter, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from thevery beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s ownmind, so to speak.
Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".
In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.
This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.
When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.
Link to modality shift research.
Lamenting that ‘I have only two eyes, and, unfortunately cannot use themso as to read two books at the same time’,
This list is a great framework for showing students what they don't know, so they can actively work and practice at becoming better at their craft.
I feel like actively annotating and "reading with a pen in hand" has been a great way to practice many of these points. Questioning texts, marking open problems, etc. goes a long way toward practicing these methods.
level 1tristanjuricek · 4 hr. agoI’m not sure I see these products as anything more than a way for middle management to put some structure behind meetings, presentations, etc in a novel format. I’m not really sure this is what I’d consider a zettlecasten because there’s really no “net” here; no linking of information between cards. Just some different exercises.If you actually look at some of the cards, they read more like little cues to drive various processes forward: https://pipdecks.com/products/workshop-tactics?variant=39770920321113I’m pretty sure if you had 10 other people read those books and analyze them, they’d come up with 10 different observations on these topics of team management, presentation building, etc.
Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.
The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.
I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.
My notes seem to be of two sorts. In reading certainvery important books 1 try to grasp the structure of thewriter's thought, and take notes accordingly. But morefrequently, in the last ten years, I do not read whole books,but rather parts of many books, from the point of view ofsome particular theme in which I am interested, and con-cerning which I usually have plans in my file. Therefore, Itake notes which do not fairly represent the books 1 read. Iam using this particular passage, this particular experi-ence, for the realization o f my own projects. Notes takenin this way form the contents o f memory upon which Imay have to call.
Merely to name an item of experience often invitesus to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book isoften a prod to reflection.
E veryone seriously concerned with teaching complainsthat most students do not know how to do indepen-dent work. They do not know how to read, they do notknow how to take notes, they do not know how to set up aproblem nor how to research it. In short, they do not knowhow to work intellectually.
One of the first consequences of the so-called attention economy is the loss of high-quality information.
In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.
Above all, a fresh and original intellectual approach is needed, avoid-ing all standard solutions.
This relates to the increasing difficulty of being originial with the rapid advances in productivity today.
A striving for order can, and must, also be expressed inasymmetrical form.
This relates to sticking to past foundations that are somewhat indispensable.
Thetypographer must take the greatest care to study how his work is read andought to be read.
Today, this is foundational since there are constantly advances in works of typography making documentation and research important to giving future credit.
Evenin good central-axis composition the contents are subordinated to “beautifulline arrangement.”
Clarity becomes less important due the focus on the composition being centralized as it relates to improving the visual appeal of the artistic, "arrangement."
the rigidity of central-axis setting hardly allows work tobe carried out with the degree of logic we now demand.
The central axis in art relates to a somewhat balanced distribution of space on an art piece.
“ARTTALK Chapter 10 Balance - Ppt Google Img.” SlidePlayer, https://slideplayer.com/slide/10709291/.
This utmost clarity is necessarytoday because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraor-dinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.
This emphasizes that having clear communication is made crucially important due to the difficulty of communicating to those who are surrounded by countless other "prints."
• Daily writing prevents writer’s block.• Daily writing demystifies the writing process.• Daily writing keeps your research always at the top of your mind.• Daily writing generates new ideas.• Daily writing stimulates creativity• Daily writing adds up incrementally.• Daily writing helps you figure out what you want to say.
What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?
One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.
When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.
I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?
One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.
As I write this book, for instance, I am sitting in a small room, beforea laptop computer, surrounded by books, papers, and magazines—all ofwhich I am, in some metaphorical sense, “in conversation with” (in muchthe same way I am also in conversation with you, my imagined reader).But what I am actually doing is working with a set of materials—lookingfor books on my shelves and flipping through them, folding pages over ormarking them with Post-its, retyping passages, filing and retrieving print-outs and photocopies, making notes in margins and on index cards, and,of course, composing, cutting, pasting, formatting, revising, and printingblocks of prose. I am, that is, for the most part, moving bits of text and paperaround.
Joseph Harris uses a mélange of materials to make his writing including books, papers, magazines, from which he is copying sections out, writing in margins, making notes on index cards and then moving those pieces of text and pieces of paper (the index cards, and possibly Post-it notes) around to create his output.
He doesn't delineate a specific process for his excerpting or note taking practice. How does he organize his notes? Is he just pulling them from piles around him? Is there a sense of organization at all?
Courtney, Jennifer Pooler. “A Review of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1 (2007): 74–77.
Review of: Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248.
Levenger though is its tendency to turn any human endeavor into a sham--a mere exercise in conspicuous consumption. Consider its new product line: Bookography™, an array of reading-journals and accessories.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050525173720/http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/PRDPREVIEW.ASP?Params=category=17-722|level=2-3|pageid=4209|CatID=17-722|Lvl=2-3|Special=featured
https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/05/tools-for-serious-readers.html
Interesting (now discontinued) reading list product from Levenger that in previous generations may have been covered by a commonplace book but was quickly replaced by digital social products (bookmark applications or things like Goodreads.com or LibraryThing.com).
Presently I keep a lot of this sort of data digitally myself using either/both: Calibre or Zotero.
Bjorn, Genevive A., Laura Quaynor, and Adam J. Burgasser. “Reading Research for Writing: Co-Constructing Core Skills Using Primary Literature.” Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice 7, no. 1 (January 14, 2022): 47–58. https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2022.237
Found via:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>#AcademicTwitter I survived crushing reading loads in grad school by creating a straightforward method for analyzing primary literature, called #CERIC. Saved my sanity and improved my focus. @PhDVoice. Here’s the free paper - https://t.co/YehbLQNEqJ
— Genevive Bjorn (@GeneviveBjorn) September 11, 2022
I'm curious how this is similar to the traditions of commonplace books and zettelkasten from a historical perspective.
categorical reading method
Not well defined. What do they mean specifically by categorical reading methods? CERIC may be one, but what are others? Are they standardized?
In combination with SCA, CERICoffers freedom from the transmission model of learning, where theprofessor lectures and the students regurgitate. SCA can help buildlearning communities that increase students’ agency and power inconstructing knowledge, realizing something closer to a constructivistlearning ideal. Thus, SCA generates a unique opportunity to makeclassrooms more equitable by subverting the historicallymarginalizing higher education practices centered on the professor.
Here's some justification for the prior statement on equity, but it comes after instead of before. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/SHEFJjM6Ee2Gru-y0d_1lg)
While there is some foundation to the claim given, it would need more support. The sage on the stage may be becoming outmoded with other potential models, but removing it altogether does remove some pieces which may help to support neurodiverse learners who work better via oral transmission rather than using literate modes (eg. dyslexia).
Who is to say that it's "just" sage on the stage lecturing and regurgitation? Why couldn't these same analytical practices be aimed at lectures, interviews, or other oral modes of presentation which will occur during thesis research? (Think anthropology and sociology research which may have much more significant oral aspects.)
Certainly some of these methods can create new levels of agency on the part of the learner/researcher. Has anyone designed experiments to measure this sort of agency growth?
Critical reading methods, such asCERIC, make hidden expectations of doctoral programs explicit.
Are some of the critical reading methods they're framing here similar to or some of the type found at Project Zero (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines)?
The primary motivation behind categorical reading methods isto dissect each paper's structure and central argument using theabove conceptual model (Figure 1).
This appears to be the closed definition in the paper for the idea of categorical reading methods. They only provide one example without any comparison or contrast for better contextualization.
What is a more concrete idea for this particular term?
throughout an individual's schooling, the activity of readinglacks a coherent or explicit relationship to work that is assessed,unlike writing (Du Boulay 1999; Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008)
Du Boulay, 1999; Saltmarsh & Saltmarsh, 2008<br /> Noticing that they've left these references off of the end of the paper.
If we measure what we care about, why don't we do more grading and assessment of students' evidence of reading in addition to their writing? If we looked more closely at note taking and understanding first and foremost, would the ultimate analysis sort itself out? Instead we look only at the end products instead of the process. Focus more on the process and first class work here and the results will take care of themselves.
cross reference:
take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves (see: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/take_care_of_the_pennies_and_the_pounds_will_take_care_of_themselves)
the Toulmin model isprominent for teaching evidence-based argumentation in manydisciplines (Osborne et al., 2004). The Toulmin model centers on thefactual basis for an argument, resulting claims, and counter-claims.
The Tolumin model is an evidence based method of teaching argumentation.
Another strategy improves criticalthinking skills using “think like a scientist” methods, such as theCREATE method that focuses on a learning sequence, Consider,Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of thenext Experiment (Gottesman & Hoskins, 2013; Hoskins et al., 2007;Kararo & McCartney, 2019)
CREATE - Consider - Read - Elucidate hypotheses - Analyze and interpret data - Think of the next - Experiment
One strategy researched inundergraduate education focuses on teaching undergraduatestudents how to navigate and understand primary literature: theEvaluating Scientific Research Literature (ESRL) method (Letchfordet al., 2017; Lie et al., 2016)
Evaluating Scientific Research Literature (ESRL) is a method for teaching students how to navigate and understand primary literature. (typically undergraduates)
More effective structured note-taking systems,such as Cornell Notes or REAP, increase students' critical readingskills, including synthesis, analysis, and evaluation (Ahmad, 2019)
More effective than what? Just highlighting? What does Ahmad show? Is there a hierarchy of strategies that have been cross tested with larger groups? What effect does a depth and breadth of neurodiverse subjects show, for example?
This is the my first encounter with REAP.
REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate, Ponder.
Has anyone done direct research on commonplacing or zettelkasten techniques to show concrete data to compare them with other currently more popular techniques like Cornell notes or REAP?
Read for potential methods and set up for a potential meta study: Ahmad, S. Z. (2019). Impact of Cornell Notes vs. REAP on EFL secondary school students’ critical reading skills. International Education Studies, 12(10), 60-74
Even with interactive features,highlighting does not require active engagement with the text, suchas paraphrasing or summarizing, which help to consolidate learning(Brown et al., 2014)
What results do Brown et al show exactly? How do they dovetail with the citations and material in Ahrens2017 on these topics?
Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=3301452
Ahrens, doesn't provide a full citation of Brown, but does quote it for the same broad purpose (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8ewTno3pEeydaHscXVaIzw) specifically with respect to the idea that highlighting doesn't help in the learning process, yet students still actively do it.
Hypothes.is “Are Your Students Doing the Reading? Seven Strategies for Motivating Students to Complete the Course Reading.” Hypothes.is, August 22, 2022. https://docdrop.org/pdf/Are-Your-Students-Doing-the-Rea---Hypothes.is-gaulj.pdf/
Minzetanu, Andrei. “Reading to Quote or Ars Legendi as Ars Excerpendi.” Litterature, December 1, 2012, 31. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290606505_Reading_to_Quote_or_Ars_Legendi_as_Ars_Excerpendi
Must You Read Books?
What a fantastic question.
I think that’s the biggest thing that I take from this: any text should at least hint at the rich tapestry of things it is resulting from, if not directly discuss it or link to it. A tapestry not just made from other texts, but other actions taken (things created, data collected, tools made or adapted), and people (whose thoughts you build on, whose behaviour you observe and adopt, who you interact with outside of the given text). Whether it’s been GPT-3 generated or not, that holds.
Useful and likely human written texts show the richness of the context it results from, by showing and linking. Not just to/with 1) other texts, but also 2) other actions (things created, data gathering, experiments, tools adapted) and 3) people (that provided input, you look at, interact with outside the text). Even if such things were generated following up those leads should show its inauthenticity.
No proof of work (to borrow a term) other than that the words have been written is conveyed by the text. No world behind the text, of which the text is a resulting expression. No examples that suggest or proof the author tried things out, looked things up. Compare that to the actual posting
A text is a result of work, next to itself being work to write it. A text that does not show any of the work that led to writing a text is suspect. Does a text reflect an exploration that it annotates? Does it show social connections, include data points, external examples, artefacts created alongside the text (e.g. lists), references to the wider context/system of what the text discusses, experimental actions.
No links! No links, other than sporadic internal links, is the default in the media, I know. Yet hyperlinks are the strands the Web is made of. It allows pointing to side paths of relevance, to the history and context of which the posting itself is a result, the conversation it is intended to be part of and situated in. Its absence, the pretense that the artefact is a stand alone and self contained thing, is a tell. It’s also a weakness in other online texts, or any text, as books and journals can be filled with links in the shape of footnotes, references and mentions in the text itself)
Relevant links in a text are a sign of the context the text emerged from, and the conversation it is situated in. Lack of such links or references is a potential sign of inauthentic texts (generated or not)
But the real goal of a Great Books reading program is to experience the minds of these authors (something the Schoolmen called connatural knowledge) and imprint whatever value we find there on our souls (i.e. will and intellect). This can only be done through a process of intentional re-reading.
The narrator considers this as vandalism and finds it hard to believe how anyone "educated enough to have access to a university library should do this to a book." To him "the treatment of books is a test of civilized behaviour."
Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)
Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.
Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.
Looking for books with wider margins for annotations and notes
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/wue2ex/looking_for_books_with_wider_margins_for/
Not long after I posted this it had about 3 upvotes, including my automatic 1. It's now at 0, and there are several responses about not writing in books at all. It seems like this particular book community is morally opposed to writing in one's books! 🤣
Why though? There's a tremendously long tradition of writing in books, and probably more so when they were far more expensive! Now they're incredibly inexpensive commodities, so why should we be less inclined to write in them, particularly when there's reasonable evidence of the value of doing so?
I might understand not writing in library books as part of their value within the commons, but https://booktraces.org/ indicates that almost 12% or more of the books they've tracked prior to 1924 have some sort of mark, writing, or evidence that it was actively read.
Given what I know of the second hand markets, it's highly unlikely that my books (marked up or not) will ever be read by another person.
There's so much more to say here, but I just haven't the time today...
111. RESEARC
Dutcher suggest that there are three "purposes in reading": information, thought, and style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EExZkzMM
Quick outline of how Holiday reads, annotates, and then processes the ideas from books into his index card-based commonplace book.
Every book I read is also broken up and digested on these cards, which are all loosely by themed.
Holiday analogizes his reading and note taking practice as a means of digesting books into his note card collection.
Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/OZ2r9rOfEeu9oFPzd3bMlw - Reader's Digest as a popular example
How do the ideas of "digesting books" and "ruminant machines" relate to the psychology phenomenon of diffuse thinking over time?
annotations
Interesting piece of material culture hearkening back to an older analog era, but compatible with new digital technology (note the cut out for a power cord with use of a tablet or other digital reading/display device.)
Not saying I agree or disagree with this, but the existence of a class system in tech jobs is the OP’s central point.
I'm continually surprised when someone posts and HN fails to understand even very basic points in a piece of writing, even when they're very clearly made like they were here. PragmaticPulp's top comment (and the fact that is the top comment) is completely mystifying, for example.
A good reading exercise directs the learners’ attention to features ofthe text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies fordealing with any text, with the aim “to develop in the languagelearner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to com-prehension of a text”
28.
I should look carefully at the intensive reading exercise of Inside Reading to make sure whether the focus on each questions are applicable to other exercises or not.
First, the features given attention to may be anuncontrolled mixture of useful and not very useful items. That is, highfrequency and low frequency vocabulary, frequent grammatical items andvery infrequent or irregular grammatical items may get equal attention.Second, the topic of the text determines the salience of the items and theteaching gets directed towards this text rather than what will be useful in arange of texts.
26.
Teachers should always prioritize high frequency language items.
The first one is Synchronous Active Reading, where you have your index cards, notebook or Roam database open alongside the text and immediately write down the quotes and thoughts you have. The opposite is Asynchronous Active Reading, where you only have your book/paper and a pen or highlighter. If you do Asynchronous Active Reading, you'll need to return later to copy over the notes you took in the margins and the parts you copied over to your final storage medium.
Ryan Holiday recommends annotating/highlighting/marking up your book, and not processing it/making notes until you've been away from the book for at least a week. It sounds nice on paper, but I find that I ignore my highlights and notes the second I'm done with the book, and don't revisit them unless I read the book again.
stock rotation
Using dates
i read that book 00:11:08 in the translation by garfield and it was a shock for me it's an incredible it's a it's just a fantastic book so it really blew away my mind and i 00:11:21 spent a while as a a summer uh immersed in that book trying to read everything i could get nakatuna and thinking about that and i ended up with two ideas um which i just would put on the table and to to 00:11:35 discuss one smaller one larger one smaller is that in nagarjuna there are some basic ideas which are helpful uh to make sense of about quantum mechanics not not because the cartridge 00:11:48 knew anything about quantum physics of course it didn't uh but i think that to do science we need we need ideas and philosophy is very useful and uh we get from philosophy uh 00:12:01 conceptual structure way of thinking uh that as usual to make sense of of of better ways of understanding about the world and and and what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea 00:12:14 of uh what you do for quantum physics is the idea that uh it's it's better to think of the world not as entities or substance or or things of god or 00:12:27 whatever matter uh that has its own properties but only um through the interdependence of of things so you don't understand anything by itself if not connected to the others 00:12:39 that's uh in fact it's even more i think what nagarjuna shows that uh if you think that their relations with you think that things affect one another that's the only way of thinking so the idea of 00:12:52 of a thing by itself of things existing uh independently of anything else of a fundamental reality it's uh it's not useful and it's 00:13:08 i think the guardian argues contradictory that's a that's a specific idea this is the bigger idea which i i found uh wonderful and that completely captured me 00:13:20 is that uh this is a for me fascinating philosophical perspective because it starts from the day of separating uh sort of a conventional reality and 00:13:31 and an ultimate ultimate reality uh which is very common uh in in a very common perspective also in science and western philosophy um 00:13:44 you can also read some of the evolution of science or western philosophy trying to search for this ultimate life is that matter is that god is that spirit is that the mind is that language is that there are many other circles is that phenomenology or 00:13:58 the whosoever whatever you want and nagarjuna the book of nagarjuna is not a positive construction it's a negative destruction every chapter takes away something look this by itself doesn't stay together 00:14:12 this there's a state together it takes away it takes somebody takes something and so the suggestion here is that maybe the question is wrong um we should look for the ultimate value the ultimate value doesn't exist in a 00:14:24 sense it's the same thing as a as a conventional reality that i found fantastic it's a it's a dissolving um it's dissolving a fake problem in a 00:14:36 sense and opening up a sudden uh uh coherence as i read it and with all my superficiality it's not denying reality right it is here i mean this pen is his pen 00:14:48 it it denies the fact that this is ultimate reality in this pen or in something on which this pen is based including the mind which is uh there's a superficial buddhism a view of 00:15:01 beauties in the west uh which is just everything is the mind the mind is it's everything is is uh if you think it's a self and everything you know um where you were born in hollywood so 00:15:12 the illusory aspect of the walls i wonder if you got it from buddhism from hollywood i don't know but this is this idea that you know the the world is a big cinema and everything is is in the mind of berkeley 00:15:25 and this is a there's a chapter in in in nagarjuna which denies that completely because the mind itself is not um it's not uh doesn't have an ultimate reality so you cannot found anything on the mind nor on the dharma or the 00:15:39 on anything up to the point and then i conclude so my reason of my fascination throwing my fascination from the guardian on the table in this passage about the view this uh 00:15:51 this comments the emptiness of emptiness which was the real moment in which the guardian captured uh captured me so it's a point in which uh you know translated the way i read it or probably superficially is that all 00:16:04 right so everything is empty in the sense of doesn't not having an intrinsic reality so therefore this emptiness is the foundation of everything and regardless of the words no no no wait this is this 00:16:16 is a this is the view uh which you which is itself empty in the sense that it depends on else this is suddenly extremely liberating i think uh and i found it it hadn't 00:16:31 impacted me intellectually suddenly i have a i have a way to take take away from my intellectual search and anguish finding the foundations uh which i find liberating and even 00:16:43 personally i mean it's thinking about myself not as an entity but as a combination of other things uh has definitely an effect on me on a on a on a human being 00:16:55 and uh so i guess what what finally fascinated me in a gardener is this anti-foundational aspect it's taking away the starting point um it's absolute radicality 00:17:08 uh when he says that nirvana and samsara themselves are sort of illusioned in some sense empty in his own sense devoid of intrinsic reality
Rovelli explains what is so profound about Nagarjuna's teaching, that EVERYTHING, including all the statements Nagarjuna's himself makes, is empty.
Reading Strategies for CopingWith Information Overloadca. 1550-1700
Interesting take from way back.
“The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production…. Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.”
Reading encourages us to put outside reality on hold, to construct a parallel world in our minds, and retreat into it.
Those who read with pen in hand form a species nearly extinct. Those who read the marginal notes of readers past form a group even smaller. Yet when we write in antiphonal chorus to what we’re reading, we engage in that conversation time and distance otherwise make impossible.
The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ by Ferris Jabr Scientific American 2013-04-11 A good overview of reading practices, reading user interfaces, and research literature relevant to it. Lots of abstracts from research which I ought to look at more closely, and thus didn't make note of as much as I'd rather delve into the primary sources.
Most of the research cited here is preliminary to early e-reading devices and has small sample sizes. Better would be to see how subsequent studies have fared with larger and more diverse groups.
Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
"The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."
How might we design better digital reading interfaces that take advantage of a wider range of modes of thinking and reading?
Certainly adding audio to the text helps to bring in benefits of orality, but what other axes are there besides the obvious spatial benefits?
In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension.
If digital user interfaces and navigational difficulties inhibited reading comprehension in the modern age, what did similar interfaces do to early reading practices?
What methods do we have to tease out data of these sorts of early practices?
What about changes in modes of reading (reading out loud vs. reading quietly)?
I'm reminded of this as a hyperbolic answer, but still the root question may be an apt one:
I very much appreciate your commitment to growth and learning. I also think it's nice to have colorful posts here vs. a ghost town. My feedback would be to gear your posts towards how to use an Antinet to produce written output. Specifically what main note you created, with pictures of the main note, and then elaborate on what they actually mean, and share a written post about the idea. You've done several of these posts, and I'd say lean even more towards sharing the most powerful thought/the most powerful maincard you've developed all week. For frequency, I'd say one post a week on this would be great.My main point is this: the primary use of Luhmann's Antinet was written output. The thoughts he shared were deep and developed because of the Antinet process. We're not in the PKM space, we're in the AKD space. Analog Knowledge Development, focusing on written output. The paradox is, when changing your mindset to written output, you actually become more of a learning machine.
One of the toughest parts about these systems is that while they're relatively easy to outline (evidence: the thousands of 500-1000 word blog posts about zettelkasten in the last 3 years), they're tougher to practice and many people have slight variations on the idea (from Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" to Luhmann's (still incomplete) digital collection). Far fewer people are sticking with it beyond a few weeks or doing it for crazy reasons (I call it #ProductivityPorn, while Scott has the colorful phrase "bubble graph boys").
For those who visit here, seeing discrete cards and ideas, videos, or examples of how others have done this practice can be immensely helpful. While it can be boring to watch a video of someone reading and taking notes by hand, it can also be incredibly useful to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it (though God bless you for speeding them up 😅).
This is also part of why I share examples of how others have practiced these techniques too. Seeing discrete examples to imitate is far easier than trying to innovate your way into these methods, particularly when it's difficult to see the acceleration effects of serendipity that comes several months or years into the process. Plus it's fun to see how Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Roland Barthes, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, John Locke, and Eminem all did variations of this for themselves. (This last sentence has so much entropy in it, I'm certain that it's never been written before in the history of humanity.)
And isn't everyone tired to death of Luhmann, Luhmann, Luhmann? You'd think that no one had ever thought to take note of anything before?!
While my own approach is a hybrid of online and offline techniques, I've gotten long emails from people following my Hypothes.is feed of notes and annotations saying what a useful extended example it is. Of course they don't see the follow up that entails revision of the notes or additional linking, tagging, and indexing that may go on, but it's at least enough of an idea that they understand the start of the practice.
(Incidentally, I wrote most of this using a few cards from my own system. 🗃️✂️🖋️)
very meta activity of having people annotate about right reading online
They're annotating this article in Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHw-WdiNbw
Example of someone's explicit note taking practice. While there's some missing context hiding without pre-knowledge of what a zettelkasten is, it's an n interesting example for modeling purposes for beginners.
Chrome extension that adds to your browsing experience by showing you relevant discussions about your current web page from Hacker News and Reddit.
Similar to the browser extension / "bug" that shows other Hypothes.is conversations and annotations.
This would be cool if it could be expanded to personal search to show you blog conversations or Twitter conversations of people you follow.
Link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/18/wikilinks-and-hashtags-as-a-portal-to-cross-site-search/ - https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/
But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.
Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.
There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.
Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.
Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.
Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)
My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?
there is clear evidence that explicitly teaching reading strategies to students improves their overall academic performance, such instruction is often limited to developmental reading or study skills courses (Saxby 2017, 37-38).
Teaching reading strategies to students improves their overall academic performance, but this instruction is often limited to developmental reading or study skills courses.
ref: Saxby, Lori Eggers. “Efficacy of a College Reading Strategy Course: Comparative Study.” Journal of Developmental Education 40, no. 3 (2017): 36-38.
Using Hypothes.is as a tool in a variety of courses can help to teach reading strategies and thereby improve students' overall academic performance.
Archaeology of Reading project
https://archaeologyofreading.org/
The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.
Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)
Alessio Antonini (Open University)
Dr Alessio Antonini is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University, and a member of KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science group. Before joining KMi, he was a post-doc researcher in Urban Computing at the University of Turin, Italy. His research is on Human-Data Interaction (HDI) in applicative context of Civic Technologies, Smart City and Digital Humanities (DH) applications, in which contributed with more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. Transdisciplinary problems emerging from real-life scenarios are the focus of his research, approached through interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from urban planning, philosophy, law, humanities, history and geography. He has extensive experience in EU and national projects, leading activities and work-packages in 14 projects. With more than ten years of professional practice, he as broad experience in leading R&D projects.
Select bibliography:
How to stop forgetting stuff you read.
When summarizing you can put general thoughts and other stuff, like how you discovered it, favorite quotes, etc.
The whole point is to engage with the material.
Zettelkasten method is recommended.
Literature notes are quick notes that should get converted to evergreen or permanent notes.
Around 1941, Barzun took on a larger classroom, becoming the moderator of the CBS radio program “Invitation to Learning,” which aired on Sunday mornings and featured four or five intellectual lights discussing books. From commenting on books, it was, apparently, a short step to selling them. In 1951, Barzun, Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books that they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” to Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition,” and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.
Traditionally, Lectio Divina has four separate steps: read; meditate; pray; contemplate. First a passage of scripture is read, then its meaning is reflected upon. This is followed by prayer and contemplation on the Word of God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3dbH2c3l0M
Templater scripts: - My Clippings: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/296 - Extract highlights to create mini-summary draft: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/294
This could be interesting to attempt on a book.
This is reminiscent of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) reading method which became popular for a while a few years back, got squashed by patent claims, and then has slowly been coming back as the method was reported in the early 1970s.
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” ― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson
An active reader finishes an author's book by writing in its margins.
Active reading to the extreme!
What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!
Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.
How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?
The highlights you made in FreeTime are preserved in My Clippings.txt, but you can’t see them on the Kindle unless you are in FreeTime mode. Progress between FreeTime and regular mode are tracked separately, too. I now pretty much only use my Kindle in FreeTime mode so that my reading statistics are tracked. If you are a data nerd and want to crunch the data on your own, it is stored in a SQLite file on your device under system > freetime > freetime.db.
FreeTime mode on the Amazon Kindle will provide you with reading statistics. You can find the raw data as an SQLite file under system > freetime > freetime.db.
The student doesn’t have a strong preference for any of these archetypes. Their notes serve a clear purpose that’s often based on a short-term priority (e.g, writing a paper or passing a test), with the goal to “get it done” as simply as possible.
The typical student note taking method of transcribing, using (or often not using at all), and keeping notes is doomed to failure.
Many students make the mistake of not making their own actual notes. By this I don't mean they're not writing information down. In fact many are writing information down, but we can't really call these notes. Notes by definition ought to transform something seen or heard into one's own words. Without the transformation, these students think that they're taking notes, but in reality they're focusing their efforts on being transcriptionists. They're attempting to capture something for later consumption. This is a deadly trap! By only transcribing, they're not taking advantage of transforming information by putting ideas down in their own words to test their understanding. Often worse, even if they do transcribe notes, they don't revisit them. If they do revisit them, they're simply re-reading them and not actively working with them. Only re-reading them will lead to the illusion that they're learning something when in fact they're falling into the mere-exposure effect.
Students who are acting as transcriptionists would be better off simply reading a textbook and taking notes directly from that.
A note that isn't revisited or revised, may as well be a note not taken. If we were to consider a spectrum of useful, valuable, and worthwhile notes, these notes would be at the lowest end of the spectrum.
A 20-year age difference (for example, from 20 to 40, or from 30 to 50 years old) will, on average, correspond to reading 30 WPM slower, meaning that a 50-year old user will need about 11% more time than a 30-year old user to read the same text.
Users’ age had a strong impact on their reading speed, which dropped by 1.5 WPM for each year of age.
We have to endlessly scroll and parse a ton of images and headlines before we can find something interesting to read.
The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.
This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.
How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?
Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.
…and they are typically sorted: chronologically: newest items are displayed firstthrough data: most popular, trending, votesalgorithmically: the system determines what you see through your consumption patterns and what it wants you to seeby curation: humans determine what you seeby taxonomy: content is displayed within buckets of categories, like Wikipedia Most media entities employ a combination of the above.
For reading richer, denser texts what is the best way of ordering and sorting it?
Algorithmically sorting with a pseudo-chronological sort is the best method for social media content, but what is the most efficient method for journal articles? for books?
https://winnielim.org/journal/growing-old-with-books/
Books can save and enrich your life.
Instead read this gems brief source code completely before use OR copy the code straight into your codebase.
TL;DR: Incremental Reading is about spacing your reading materials so you don’t necessarily have to finish reading in one setting.
It reduces the cost of context switching, and in fact lets you reap the benefits of context switching. It encourages it.
For students, historical habits of mind constitute majorintellectual hurdles. Students see their professors' thoughts asfinished products, tidied up and packaged for publicpresentation in books, articles, and lectures
This is where social annotation can be powerful, by making the habits of a reading mind visible, and open for discussion.
solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.
People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.
This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.
I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).
In case you’re interested in understanding how to safely implement a future combinator function using stack pinning yourself, take a look at the relatively short source of the map combinator method of the futures crate and the section about projections and structural pinning of the pin documentation.
References
The Jesuit Francesco Sac-chini, in contrast, commended the interruption in reading that resulted fromstopping to copy a passage into one’s notebook: it slowed down reading and aidedretention.44
The first manual solely devoted to excerpting, or note-taking fromreading, was composed for students in the advanced or rhetoric class at Jesuitcolleges by Francesco Sacchini (1570–1625), professor of rhetoric at the CollegioRomano. De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus (A Little Book on Howto Read with Profit) was published in 1614 and in a further six editions, followedby a translation into French in 1786 (for the use of Calvinists, judging from thededication to a pastor in Geneva) and into German in 1832.34
Footnote:
Sacchini (1614)—further references to “Sacchini” will be to this edition; warm thanks to Helmut Zedelmaier for sharing with me his photocopy of this edition. Further editions include: Sammieli (Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine), 1615; Ingolstadt 1616; Bordeaux 1617; Dillingen 1621; Leipzig 1711 and 1738; and Venetiis Britonum (Vannes, Brittany), 1866. It was translated into French (Sacchini [1786]) and German, Über die Lektüre, ihren Nutzen und die Vortheile sie gehörig anzuwenden, nach dem Lateini- Notes to Pages 70–72 283 schen des Sacchini teutsch bearbeitet und mit einem Anhange begleitet von Herrmann Walchner (Karlsruhe, 1832). I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for the information about the German edition, which I have not seen. Sacchini’s De ratione . . . legendi was a source for Rainierio Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi (Rome, 1709), as discussed in Haskell (2003), 260. For the full range of Jesuit practices of note-taking (including notes taken under dictation) see Nelles (2007)—I am grateful to Paul Nelles for helpful conversations over the years. On Sacchini, see also Dainville (1978), 224–27.
James Boswell (1740–95) defended the state of learning in his day: “It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferiour value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books, than from having read the best works of antiquity. But it must be con-sidered that we now have more knowledge generally diffuse; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension.”
Link to earlier note about Caleb Deschanel
A study of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) has identified four different kinds of reading in which Johnson described himself engaging: “hard study” for learned books read with pen in hand, “perusal” for purposeful consultation in search of information, “curious reading” for engrossment in a novel, and “mere reading” for browsing and scanning “without the fatigue of close attention.”216
"Mere reading" today consists of a lot of scrolling through never-ending social media posts on mobile phones....
More detailed work in the history of reading has cast aside the strict periodization and the suddenness of change implied in the notion of a “reading revolution.”215 Rather than sudden shifts, I trace the development and spread of new methods of reading along-side the continuation of older options. Consultation reading existed among the learned in earlier centuries, and in an unbroken line of transmission at least as far back as the thirteenth century, so the most distinctively new kind of reading in the eighteenth century was not consultation reading but rather engrossment in the novels that were a new and successful genre. Conversely, “intensive reading,” classically identified with repetitive meditation on the Bible, was also practiced in the eighteenth century, in religious circles at least, for example, among Pi-etists, Methodists, and in Catholic religious orders. (Witness the 1786 publica-tion of Sacchini’s recommendation for intensive reading, which I discuss in the next chapter.) Proficient readers engaged in different kinds of reading depending on the text and their purpose in reading it.
Broad forms of reading: - consultation reading - intensive reading (meditation, religious) - entertainment reading (novels)
Even as he was critical of overabundance, Gesner exulted in it, seeking exhaustiveness in his accumulation of both themes and works from which others could choose according to their judgment and interests.
Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.
to develop concepts for thinking about how programmable attention systems can extend beyond productivity (which is where these systems are most prolific, as can be seen from above examples)
Netflix-like autoplay but for binge reading...
Although it is productive: Incremental Writing
serendipity that sends the user down a rabbit hole to find new ideas and the links between them
Big Incremental Reading vibes
A recommendation engine for reading that could reliably supply enjoyable inceptive experiences would be a marvel.
.c2 Likely the best way to achieve this is on a platform with shortform introductory content that can then funnel you to high quality longform content. This already exists in a unofficial way on Youtube and Tiktok, but no platform would commit to it (as it is taking people away from their site). Readwise could do this through their supplemental highlights feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I44oMVd4Cw
Become a Better Reader in 8 Minutes - Write down basic Impressions - Write actionable takeaways - Limit it to 10 items to create a level of selection - Create a list of favorite quotes - Bonus section: Catch all for other important tidbits. Also good for important questions.
This is useful for its brevity and actionability, but it's also glossing over so much more that could be valuable. It specifically is leaving out methods and means of actively reusing all these written notes. No mention of reviews of the material or spaced repetition.
Saw this via YouTube algorithm.
sometimes it's 00:55:43 not the actual information bit but in a combined order that this is what it's all about and that often makes a difference between yeah you understand it and 00:56:00 you really understand it and um so maybe that's a good reminder that when we write it's it's not so much about new information and yeah don't have to 00:56:15 be too worried about not having the new information but about making this difference to really understanding it as something that 00:56:28 a significant or makes a difference
For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.
what i don't really do 00:48:10 is having a checklist like going through possible biases i don't feel that's very helpful i think it's important to keep them in mind but i think it's more about detecting okay 00:48:25 what kind of question is [Music] the author trying to answer
Understanding the sorts of questions an author is looking at and attempting to answer are often more important than going through a checklist of biases which may come into play.
give the text your reading the opportunity to tell you something new and something 00:49:02 you have not expected so i'm worried a little bit of having fixed [Music] categories to look through 00:49:16 text because it might turn every text into something that is um already fitting your categories instead of expanding them 00:49:26 or adding to them
Coming to a text with too rigid a set of questions or preconceived categories may cause you to be blinded by what you expect to get out of it rather than allowing the text to surprise you with new and interesting insights you may not have anticipated.
it is a tool for productivity um but i think it's a technology that forces you to [Music] engage more deeply with 00:29:06 the text you're reading
The zettelkasten is a tool for thought that forces you to engage more deeply with what you're reading.
Put Eidsheim 2015 and O'Callaghan 2007 in dialogue with each other.
Brandon Lewis seems to be talking about actively taking two papers and placing them "in dialogue with each other" potentially by reading, annotating, and writing about them with himself as an intermediary.
https://highlighted.app/
Highlighted.app Tagline: "Capture, organize and revisit important parts of your books."
Apple iOS only
Creative work is not complete until it is disseminated
This is an interesting perspective, but are there cases where it's false?
Link to the idea at CAA that you haven't really read a script unless you've actively acted upon what you've read.
Evaluations of the platform show that users who follow the avatar inmaking a gesture achieve more lasting learning than those who simply hear theword. Gesturing students also learn more than those who observe the gesture butdon’t enact it themselves.
Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.
How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?
Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?
Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.
Research shows that people who are asked to write on complex topics,instead of being allowed to talk and gesture about them, end up reasoning lessastutely and drawing fewer inferences.
Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?
Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?
Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?
we use theCoSP framework (Backes, Hofheinz, and Unruh, CCS 2009)
ஒரு நல்ல படைப்பை அடையாளம் கண்டுகொள்ள சில அவதானிப்புகளைச் சொல்கிறேன். முதலில், எது அதிகம் பேரால் பகிரப்படுகிறதோ அது நல்ல படைப்பாக இருக்க வாய்ப்பே இல்லை. இரண்டாவது, ஒரு நல்ல படைப்பு பெரும்பாலும் நம்மைத் தேடி வராது; அதைத்தான் நாம் தேடிச் செல்ல வேண்டும். வேறுவிதமாகச் சொல்வதானால், வாசிக்கச் சுலபமாய் இருக்கும் ஆக்கங்கள் பெரும்பாலும் குப்பைகளாகவே இருக்கும். வாசிக்கச் சிரமம் தருபவையும், பல்துறை ஞானத்தைக் கோருபவையுமே நல்ல படைப்புகளாக இருக்கும். மூன்றாவது, வாசித்து முடிந்தவுடன் மறந்து போவது நல்ல படைப்பாக இருக்க வாய்ப்பில்லை அல்லது தற்காலிக மகிழ்ச்சியைத் தருவதும் நல்ல படைப்பாக இருக்காது.
The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms
Annahme: digitales mind-set und Lektürekompetenz schließen einander nicht aus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvke-vriQbY
Morgan Eua talks about her active reading practice for fiction and non-fiction and how she transcribes her notes into Obsidian.
https://only-the-questions.glitch.me/
A tool for extracting all the questions out of a particular text.
Via: https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d
Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]
Take Smart Notes
It's important to be able to understand an idea within it's given text fully, but good readers are able to take the idea and place it into other contexts, to extend it, connect it to ideas beyond the text, and ask additional questions that the original author may not have considered or even thought possible.
Even though your highlights from books typically include a page or "location" number, this context is largely meaningless unless you happen to be writing a paper requiring proper citations.
Page numbers are terrible for anything other than looking up a location or citing where a quote is from, it provides little meaningful organizational context.
consistent use of the concatenate action tag will elevate your reading practice to the next level. Analyzing a text to decide what is and isn't worth saving is a form of actively engaging with what you're reading.
Identifying what parts of a highlight are important and which are superfluous is another aspect of active reading.
when everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted
Verbose highlights are painful to review
Highlights that are too long however are painful to review. There's a balance to providing just enough context.
As you develop the habit of revisiting your highlights, you'll increasingly start to think in terms of your future self. As you highlight, for example, you might starting asking: Will my future self be able to understand what this passage is saying and why I highlighted it? To ensure your future self has enough context, you might then also take much longer highlights.
To become a more proficient active reader who uses highlighting effectively you need to think about what contextual information will be required for comprehension when you review annotations in the future. Longer highlights may be required.
Not only does inline tagging make it easy to add keywords and categories to your highlights, consistent use will also elevate your reading practice to the next level. Distilling a highlight down to a single keyword or forging an association between a passage and something you're working on are both forms of actively engaging with what you're reading. And actively (rather than passively) reading is essential to getting more of what you want out of books
Adding keywords isn't just to make finding things easier later on, the act of associating a highlight with a keyword or linking it to a project through a tag elevates your reading to be active rather than simply passive.
To create trails When we are studying a text we need to take the time to understand more than just the storyline. During your second reading, any comments made during the first reading (marginal comments or summaries) will quickly give you the gist of your first reading, so that you can take advantage of your second.
While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.
Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.
Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.
But it isn’t. This is because over such a long period a message can easily be distorted or altered without this being in any way intended. (This distortion or alteration in the meaning or method of transmission of a message, whether intended or not, is called “noise.”) Languages, both written and spoken, always change. The meanings of symbols are often lost in the passage of time. In fact, most messages are bound so closely to a particular period and place that even a short time later they cannot be understood. Therefore, ensuring that a message created now can be decoded by future generations is highly problematic.
Can symbol that represents one thing change over a long period of time to mean something different?
ea. It is only because there is already a well-established connection in our minds between the appearance of an apple and the idea of temptation that this fruit is used in the picture. It is this connection that makes the picture successful in terms of communicatio
Why was the apple chosen as the representation of temptation?
semiotician,
A Theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with there function in both artificially constructed and natural languages.
The learner, just by clicking or hovering on a word, is always in a position to answer three questions: what does it mean, what does it sound like, and where have I seen it before.
Brief description of what the LARA system does.
https://www.unige.ch/callector/lara
example: https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/research/projects/callector/le_petit_prince_abc2vocabpages/hyperlinked_text.html
That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not “How should it look?” but “What must it do?” and to that extent all good typography is modernist.
Typography is not about how it should look but rather how it can convey the message.
because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing that it was meant to contain.
I like this statement because when it comes to typography it is meant to reveal the beauty behind the design.
that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds.
It's true that if you can transfer your thought and ideas in your design, your audience would be able to understand your message.
In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.
In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.
He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.
“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]
In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!
I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.
If you now think: “That’s ridiculous. Who would want to read andpretend to learn just for the illusion of learning and understanding?”please look up the statistics: The majority of students chooses everyday not to test themselves in any way. Instead, they apply the verymethod research has shown again (Karpicke, Butler, and Roediger2009) and again (Brown 2014, ch. 1) to be almost completelyuseless: rereading and underlining sentences for later rereading.And most of them choose that method, even if they are taught thatthey don’t work.
Even when taught that some methods of learning don't work, students will still actively use and focus on them.
Are those using social annotation purposely helping students to steer clear of these methods? is there evidence that the social part of some of these related annotation or conversational practices with both the text and one's colleagues helpful? Do they need to be taken out of the text and done in a more explicit manner in a lecture/discussion section or in a book club like setting similar to that of Dan Allossso's or even within a shared space like the Obsidian book club to have more value?
We face here the same choice between methods that make us feellike we learned something and methods that truly do make us learnsomething.
What methods of studying actually make us learn something versus make us feel as if we've learned something?
Active reading, progressive summarization may be on this list while highlighting and underlining might not. Or perhaps there's a spectrum of poor to good, and if this is the case, what does it look like? Is it the same for everyone or are factors like neurodivergence part of the equation which might change this spectrum of learning methods and techniques?
Reading, especially rereading, caneasily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading isespecially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: Themoment we become familiar with something, we start believing wealso understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more(Bornstein 1989).
The mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.
Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.
Reading with a pen in yourhand is the small-scale equivalent of a lecture.
Active reading with a pen in your hand and the creation of smart notes is a small-scale equivalent of a full introductory lecture from the perspective of Richard Feynman's technique for testing understanding.
Active reading is roughly equivalent to the idea of reading with a pen in your hand or showing evidence of a mind at play.
