How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)

a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy

video

Types of Sketchnotes

• Lecture based
• Experience based

Skills for sketchnotes

• Listening
  • looking for ideas, high level
• Writing
• Drawing

Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.

One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.

memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty

Basic drawing

Seven building blocks for drawing

• dot
• straight line
• crooked line
• curvy line
• circle
• triangle
• square

Rules

• The fewer elements, the easier
• Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes

People

• standard stick person
• A person
• oval person
• star person

Containers and connectors

Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.

• boxes
• frames
• nails/thumbtacks
• star "pow" outline
• box with a shadow

Tell people where to read next

• Create a really clear header
• help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)

Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats

Tools

• Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
• Tombow dual brush markers for color
  • two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
  • small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)

How to Sketchnote

• Step 1: Header
• Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
• Step 3: Consistency
  • headers, characters, size of writing,
• Step 4: Refine
  • check spelling
  • whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
  • ensure connectors are obvious
• Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
  • stippling
  • cloud outlines
  • lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
• Step 6: Coloring in
  • greys first, dark then light
  • highlighting connectors
  • shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
  • color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)

Higher contrast notes are better

Resources

• 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
• 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
• 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills

Anecdotal mention here of someone using sketchnotes or doodling as a mnemonic device.

Sketchnotes could be a means of implementing visual method of loci in one's note taking. Like creating a faux memory palace. Also somewhat similar, expecially in the case of the leaf doodle mentioned above, to the idea of drolleries, but in this case, they're not taking advantage of the memory's greater capacity of imagination to make things even more memorable for long term retention.

Sketchnotes by Chad Moore and Chris Wilson

https://vi.to/hubs/microcamp/pages/chad-moore-and-chris-wilson?v=chad-moore-and-chris-wilson&discussion=hidden&sidebar=hidden

Sketchnotes are ideas not art.

Squiggle birds - take squiggles and give them beaks, eyes, and bird feet. (Idea apparently from Austin Kleon.)

How you might take notes if you'd never been told how to.

• There is no particular app or platform that is the "right" one.

Common elements:

• Headlines and sub headlines are common
  • Elegant text / fancy text
• Icons
• containers - ways of holding information together
  • this can be explicit or via white space
• flow of information (arrows)
• arrangements or layouts of how information is displayed
  • top to bottom, circles, columns, stream of flow of ideas
• people
  • emotions, perhaps using emoji-like faces
• shadows, highlights

Icons

Simple can be better. Complexity may make understanding more difficult.

Examples

A few they pulled off of the web

Sketchnote Selfie

Goal: Create an info rich portrait with character. Portrait, name, info, location, passions, hobbies, interests, social usernames, now section, etc.

https://mentalpivot.com/more-solutions-for-taking-podcast-notes-a-survey-of-the-apps/

Nothing much better here, but interesting to see that a handful of apps at least support something.

https://mentalpivot.com/solutions-for-taking-notes-when-listening-to-podcasts/

I definitely need a better way of doing this myself. Not a fan of paying $5/month for NoteCast. Airr is iOS only.

Sharing the link from the app with timecode seems the best, but it would be nice to have the transcription piece as well.

https://chromeunboxed.com/cursive-google-app-chrome-os-hp-x2-11/

https://hellotimking.com/2020/05/bear-a-three-year-journey/

http://www.connectedtext.com/manfred.php

A nice essay about note taking in general, the author's long history using many methods including index cards and a variety of digital versions. Ultimately he settled on a private desktop wiki called ConnectedText.

He talks about Luhmann's zettelkasten and some of the pros/cons as well as things that can be left out when implemented in a digital version like ConnectedText.

He's reasonably connected to the tradition of note taking, though doesn't seem to be as steeped in the Renaissance traditions of commonplace books specifically.

on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing

highlight is a quote from

C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]

This is also related to the ideas of invention as well as the analogy of the bee in relation to commonplaces. Link this to the bee analogy of Seneca the Younger and Macrobius in Saturnalia.

Some thoughts about leaving space in new notebooks, especially for one's future self:

• contact information in front in case of loss
• space for a future table of contents to come
• space for page numbers and dates
• space in the back for house keeping, indices, etc.

http://www.notesaboutnotes.com/Notes/FrontMatter.html

Just noticed that Mark Bernstein, the writer of Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, has page about commonplace books on his site, which he wrote with his note taking cum digital gardening tool Tinderbox.

Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I've seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.

What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?

The two questions addressed in this article.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm

An article indicating that President Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace book throughout his life. He maintained it on index cards, often with as many as 10 entries per card. The article doesn't seem to indicate that there was any particular organization, index, or taxonomy involved.

It's now housed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA.

Google Ngram Viewer for "commonplace book",florilegium,memex,"note taking"

I take this more inclusive approach to note taking as well.

Is this similar to the mixing of a daily journal page with note taking seen in systems like Roam Research and the way some use Obsidian?

The distinctions between being informed and enlightened.

Learning might be defined as the pathway from being informed as a preliminary base on the way to full enlightenment. Pedagogy is the teacher's plan for how to take this path.

How would these definitions and distinctions fit into Bloom's taxonomy?

Note that properly annotating and taking notes into a commonplace book can be a serious (necessary?) step one might take on the way towards enlightenment.

How much more active can it be than also actively annotating and note taking?

Highfive Notebook indexing method

A clever method for creating an index or tracking system in a bound notebook by creating an index and then marking the edge of the page for related pages.

Could also be used for tracking one's mood or other similar taxonomic items.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/mor-leidr </span> in Has anyone used this indexing system? Curious what you think : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>07/30/2021 12:29:53</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.kristofferbalintona.me/on-zettelkasten-purism-and-the-misdirection-of-backlinks/

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-connect-obsidian-with-ebooks/11418

Workflow for connecting Obsidian to either Zotero or Calibre for note taking.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/epub-support/1403

Some interesting resources here, though none currently suit workflows I'm keen to support yet. There is a reference to FuturePress' epub.js which could be intriguing, though even here, I'm more likely to stick with Hypothes.is for annotating and note taking to keep context.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/workflow-reading-ebook-epub-mobi-azw-etc-in-obsidian/17977

This is a clever hack for getting ebooks from Calibre to be readable within Obsidian, potentially for cutting/pasting and taking notes directly.

I think I still prefer my other methods, but this might be fun to play around with since I have so much stored in Calibre.

In the Western tradition, these memory traditions date back to ancient Greece and Rome and were broadly used until the late 1500s. Frances A. Yates outlines much of their use in The Art of Memory (Routledge, 1966). She also indicates that some of their decline in use stems from Protestant educational reformers like Peter Ramus who preferred outline and structural related methods. Some religious reformers didn't appreciate the visual mnemonic methods as they often encouraged gross, bloody, non-religious, and sexualized imagery.

Those interested in some of the more modern accounts of memory practice (as well as methods used by indigenous and oral cultures around the world) may profit from Lynne Kelly's recent text Memory Craft (Allen & Unwin, 2019).

Lots of note taking in the West was (and still is) done via commonplace book, an art that is reasonably well covered in Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001).

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/oi3x16/how_did_university_students_take_notes_during/

https://bzawilski.medium.com/using-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-learn-more-effectively-333ac90d001a

Facile overview article that touches on the basics but looses sight of the longer flow of history.

Don't recommend.

The goal of note taking and tools for it is to make capturing ideas and creating connections between them as easy and friction free as possible. This allows note taking come closer to actual thinking with better long term retention.

https://dev.to/tmhall99/beyond-taking-notes-or-how-i-joined-the-roamcult-22k3

Lots of resources on the topic to start down a rabbit hole, but no clear outline or thesis of what is going on or why it's useful. At best a list of potentially useful links for getting started.

This is pretty slick and looks pretty in its published form. Great to see others are using clever set ups like this as posting interfaces.

I have a feeling that other TiddlyWiki users would love this sort of thing. While TW may not seem as au courant, it's still got some awesome equivalent functionality and great UI which is what most of the users in the note taking space really care about.

I do still wish that there was a micropub set up for Hypothes.is to make this sort of thing easier for the non-technical users.

Notes often require some context to give them value and more meaning, but when collecting them, placing them in contexts where they might be discovered in the future and connected to other ideas can give them additional value.

This idea is a bit on the extreme side, but it does suggest that having a multi-card comparison view in a PKM system would be useful.

Drawing on Raymond Llull's combitorial memory system from the 12th century and a bit of Herman Ebbinghaus' spaced repetition (though this is also seen in earlier non-literate cultures), one could present two (or more) random atomic notes together as a way of juxtaposing disparate ideas from one's notes.

The spaced repetition of the cards would be helpful for one's long term memory of the ideas, but it could also have the secondary effect of nudging one to potentially find links or connections between the two ideas and help to spur creativity for the generation of new hybrid ideas or connection to other current ideas based on a person's changed context.

I've thought about this in the past (most likely while reading Frances Yates' Art of Memory), but don't think I've bothered to write it down (or it's hiding in untranscribed marginalia).

Best Bible Note-Taking System: Jonathan Edwards's Miscellanies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqq-4-LiFVs

Overview of Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies system along with a a few wide-margin bibles. Everhard apparently hasn't heard of the commonplace concept, though I do notice that someone mentions the zettelkasten system in the comments.

This reads like a content farm.... ugh. Re-encapsulates content without any real valuable context.

While the programming part creates a lot of flexibility, the creation of this system seems awfully heavy and kludgy.

I wonder about the long term stability and data ownership, but it seems so heavy I'm already turned off.

Most of this is material I've seen or heard in other forms in the past. It's relatively well reviewed and summarized here though, but it's incredibly dense to try to pull out, unpack and actually use if one were coming to it as a something new.

3 Productivity hacks

• Zen Meditation (Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryū Suzuki
• Research Process -- Annotations and notes, notecards
• Rigorous exercise routine -- plateau effect

The Zen meditation hack sounds much in the line of advice to often get away from what you're studing/researching and to let the ideas stew for a bit before coming back to them. It's the same principle as going for walks frequently heard from folks or being a flâneur. (cross reference Nassim Nicholas Taleb et al.) The other version of this that's similar are the diffuse modes of learning (compared with focused modes) described in learning theory. (Examples in work of Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski in https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

I've generally come to the idea that genius doesn't exist myself. Most of it distills down to use of tools like commonplace books.

Perhaps worth looking into some of the following to see what, if anything, is different than prior version of the commonplace book tradition:

The Ryan Holiday Notecard System @Intermittent Diversion - https://youtu.be/QoFZQOJ8aA0

Article On Notecard System [1] https://medium.com/thrive-global/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read-4f48a82371b1 [2] https://www.writingroutines.com/notecard-system-ryan-holiday/ [3] https://www.gallaudet.edu/tutorial-and-instructional-programs/english-center/the-process-and-type-of-writing/pre-writing-writing-and-revising/the-note-card-system/

On the difference for writing for one's self and for others. Of course there's also the need to be able to re-decifer one's notes again in the future. It may be best to keep more detailed for your future self as if you're writing for the public.

I like the idea of distance in "communication space" which comes up in the comments. This is related to context collapse and shared contexts which are often too-important in our communication with regard to being understood in the far future.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in Commonplace Book | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:13:34</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in About | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:09:19</time>)</cite></small>

I've only run across the German "Gemeinplatz" a few times with this translation attached. Sad to think that this negative connotation has apparently taken hold. Even in English the word commonplace can have a somewhat negative connotation as well meaning "everyday, ordinary, unexceptional" when the point of commonplacing notes is specifically because they are surprising or extraordinary by definition.

Your phrasing of "evergreen notes" seems close enough. I've seen some who might call the shorter notes you're making either "seedlings" or "budding" notes. Some may wait for bigger expansions of their ideas into 500-2000 word essays before they consider them "evergreen" notes. (Compare: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history and https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes). Of course this does vary quite a bit from person to person in my experience, so your phrasing certainly fits.

I've not seen it crop up in the digital gardens or zettelkasten circles specifically but the word "evergreen" is used in the journalism space) to describe a fully formed article that can be re-used wholesale on a recurring basis. Usually they're related to recurring festivals, holidays, or cyclical stories like "How to cook the perfect Turkey" which might get recycled a week before Thanksgiving every year.

I like that you've got such a fascinating system. It's very similar in form and substance to one that I use, but which relies on a wholly different technology stack: https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/29/a-note-taking-problem-and-a-proposed-solution/

Some of the value of notes being done and readable in public means that one typically puts a bit more effort into them at the start. This can make them much more useful and valuable later on. It also means that they usually have more substance and context for use by others in collaboration or other reuses.

Short notes are often called fleeting notes which may or may not be processed into something more substantive. The ones that do become more substantive can more easily be reused in other future settings.

Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes is one of the better arguments for the why and how of note taking.

I often find that doing the work in public ups the quality and effort I put into the thing because I know there's at least the off-hand chance that someone else might read it.

Generally this means a better contextualized product for myself when I come back to revisit it later, even if no one else saw it. Without it, sometimes my personal scribbles don't hold up when I revisit them, and I can't tell what I had originally intended because I didn't flesh out the idea enough.

based on Notational Velocity and nvALT

nvALT 2 is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and interface modifications, including MultiMarkdown functionality. It has been developed by Elastic Threads (David Halter) and Brett Terpstra, and made available for free (donations accepted).

Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes.

An interesting tool for taking notes from Jeremy Ho. Designed with Roam Research in mind.

The Eloquent tool is available to install! Capture ideas in-context with:<br>• On-page highlighting<br>• Nested bullets<br>• /snippets<br>• [[braces]] and #tag syntax<br>Quick capture is a hotkey away. Bonus hotkey sends your highlights/links to @RoamResearch pic.twitter.com/vLLbPX4zwW

— Jeremy Ho (@jeremyqho) July 21, 2020

I wish it could save data as a local text or markdown file so it would also be easier to use with Obsidian or other note taking tools. It's similar in nature to the Roam Highlighter extension.

Details at https://www.notion.so/Eloquent-Resource-Center-72f95c2a71d34c5181e4907edf7a96e1

For this panel I think it might have been useful to have someone like Maggie Appleton participate for her perspective with respect to some of the history, design, and even anthropology of this space.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff might have been an interesting participant for her leadership and writing on use and UI as well as thinking about "why" note taking.

I'd also nominate Argentina Ortega Sáinz for her work on academic integrations of Zotero with tools like Obsidian.

Perhaps worth noting when revisiting this topic next year? cc: @dwhly @nateangell @hypothesis

A privacy-first, open-source knowledge base

Logseq is a joyful, open-source outliner that works on top of local plain-text Markdown and Org-mode files. Use it to write, organize and share your thoughts, keep your to-do list, and build your own digital garden.

Note taking/annotation tool discussed on day two of I Annotate 2021.

Note taking/annotation tool discussed on day two of I Annotate 2021.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>I Annotate 2021</span> in I Annotate 2021 | Program (<time class='dt-published'>06/19/2021 16:10:21</time>)</cite></small>

Bookmarked on 2021-06-20 at 7:19 PM

Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor.

Ran across this in the closing party session of IAnno21.

I've seen this pattern. I suspect some of the issue is having a clean, useful user interface for actually using the thing instead of spending time setting it up and tweaking it.

Synopsis of two different methods for creating a Zettelkasten in Roam Research:

• page based method
• block reference method

Nothing earth shattering here, though one must wonder about import/export of notes into other potential useful systems.

Nothing dramatically new here.

Innos seems like an interesting note taking app in the vein of Obsidian, but the lack of ability to own the raw data is a deal killer here for me.

Dissonance of juxtaposed ideas, and particularly those just at the edge of chaos, can be some of the most fruitful places for learning.

Attempting to resolve these frictions can generate new knowledge.

This is what commonplace books are meant to do. Record this knowledge, allow one to juxtapose, and to think and write into new spaces.

It's also important to look more closely at things that don't cause dissonance. Is it general wisdom that makes them true or seem true? Question the assumptions underneath them. Where do they come from? Why do they seem comfortable? How could one make them uncomfortable. Questioning assumptions can lead to new pathways.

An example of this is the questioning the final assumption of Euclid (the "ugly" one) which led mathematicians into different geometry systems.

One of the toughest parts of note taking systems can be moving from one to another, particularly digital ones, as the technical overhead is almost never easy and typically requires a huge amount of work. Wouter's description here may seem facile, but I'm sure it wasn't simple, not to mention the fact that he's got more facility with coding than the average person ever will.

I do like the idea of basic text or markdown files that can be used in a variety of settings with relatively easy wiki mark up.

Of the systems I've seen, this seems to be the most portable format, but it also requires software that supports it at the base level, but which still provides search and other useful functionalities.

Early versions of annotations. Sad to realize that most of them likely perished.

Interesting to think of this problem of note taking actually coining the phrase "scrap heap".

I love all of these various topics.

http://www.verzetteln.de/books/monographs/4_paper/

I was just about to ask you what your system looked like Michael, but then I realized that you've tucked many of them into Hypothes.is at https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/11/100-days-in-obsidian-pt-4-writing-notes/

Ton delineates his ideas between notions, notes, ideas, and work notes. It's not too dissimilar to the ideas others like Maggie Appleton have written about various smaller pieces being built up from small "seedlings" into larger evergreen pieces within a digital gardens framing.

I do like the idea of emergent outlines he notes over Ahrens' speculative outlines.

I love the phrase "elephant paths" (the correct translation?) for maps of content.

I also like the idea of having a set up for doing digital captures of physical notebook pages. I'll have to consider how to do this most easily. I should also look back and evaluate how to continue improving my digital process as well.

Example of the author's notes. JG probably the initial of patient, followed by the date m is the gender/sex AP abscess is the diagnosis The second line is the learning point, procedure, or a piece of the patient's story. The third is freestyle.

Interesting structure. Might be able to start from here.

Important. SOAP only dictates an order, not style nor content. The quest is to improve readability and transfer information as objective as possible, without losing any important narrative transmitted orally from our patient. It includes how we take notes for our future self.

In the attached YouTube video Dan talks through his post as usual, but he has the added bonus here of showing a split screen of his annotated copy of the book with his Obsidian notebook open. We then see a real time transcription of his note taking process of moving from scant highlights in the book to more fleshed out thoughts and notes in his notebook. We also see him cross referencing various materials for alternate definitions and resources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HBL-c_nXXQ

ECHO360 Note Taking

Others on the page here (specifically Dpthomas87's A, B, C) have done a great job at outlining their methods which I'm generally following. So I'll focus a bit more on the mechanics.

I rely pretty heavily on Hypothes.is for most of my note taking, highlights, and annotations. This works whether a paper is online or as a pdf I read online or store locally and annotate there.

Then I use RSS to pipe my data from Hypothes.is into a text file in OneDrive for my Obsidian vault using IFTTT.com. I know that a few are writing code for the Hypothes.is API to port data directly into Roam Research presently; I hope others might do it for Obsidian as well.)

Often at the end of the day or end of the week, I'll go through my drafts folder everything is in to review things, do some light formatting and add links, tags, or other meta data and links to related ideas.

Using Hypothes.is helps me get material into the system pretty quickly without a lot of transcription (which doesn't help my memory or retention). And the end of the day or end of week review helps reinforce things as well as help to surface other connections.

I'm hoping that as more people use Hypothesis for social annotation, the cross conversations will also be a source of more helpful cross-linking of ideas and thought.

I prefer to keep my notes as atomic as I can.

For some smaller self-contained things like lectures, I may keep a handful of notes together rather than splitting them apart, but they may be linked to larger structures like longer courses or topics of study.

If an article only has one or two annotations I'll keep them together in the same note, but books more often have dozens or hundreds of notes which I keep in separate files.

For those who don't have a clear idea of what or why they're doing this, I highly recommend reading [[Sönke Ahrens]]' book Smart Notes.

I do have a handful of templates for books, articles, and zettels to help in prompting me to fill in appropriate meta data for various notes more quickly. For this I'm using the built-in Templates plug-in and then ctrl-shift-T to choose a specific template as necessary.

Often I'll use Hypothes.is and tag things as #WantToRead to quickly bookmark things into my vault for later thought, reading, or processing.

For online videos and lectures, I'll often dump YouTube URLs into https://docdrop.org/, which then gives a side by side transcript for more easily jumping around as well as annotating directly from the transcript if I choose.

I prefer to use [[links]] over #tags for connecting information. Most of the tags I use tend to be for organizational or more personal purposes like #WantToRead which I later delete when done.

When I run across interesting questions or topics that would make good papers or areas of future research I'll use a tag like #OpenQuestion, so when I'm bored I can look at a list of what I might like to work on next.

Syndicated copies: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/research-phd-academics/1446/64?u=chrisaldrich

I suspect that this could be modified to work with [[Obsidian]] and other related note taking tools.

Well interlinked notes increases their future expected value which in turn gives one more reason to not only take more notes, but to take better notes.

This is a major problem of most note taking applications. Having the ability to inter-link one's notes in ways that allow one to revisit, revise, and rearrange them is incredibly valuable.

too many people forget this simple fact

This is exactly the opposite of what Luhmann was doing (he only read things once)

I'm already doing this same sort of thing in my TiddlyWiki and simply using tags to distinguish the sources, books, etc.

This is a reasonable synopsis for why to keep a zettlekasten or commonplace book and how to use it to create new material. It fits roughly in line with my overall experience in doing these things.

Getting data into any of these note taking tools quickly always seems to be the most difficult part of the process.

This is where bits like version control of academic documents can be incredibly valuable!

See: https://boffosocko.com/2014/09/17/revision-control/

I do much this same thing, however, I'm typically doing it using Hypothes.is to annotate and highlight. These pieces go back to my own website where I can keep, categorize, and even later search them. If I like, I'll often do these sorts of summaries on related posts themselves (usually before I post them publicly if that's something I'm planning on doing for a particular piece.)

I can easily see some extensions for using Hypothes.is here.

• Cornell Notes
• Reviews notes
• Flash cards for spaced repetition
• Notes for building memory palaces

I've been trying this sort of thing out with a TiddlyWiki for a while and have got a reasonable sort of workflow for doing it. The key is to reduce the overhead so that one can quickly take notes in a manner that interlinks them and makes it seem worthwhile to come back to them to review and potentially reorganize them. Doing this practice in public has a lot of value as well. I'll have to come back and look at some of how this was built at a later time.

Alright, I think I may now have things set to use an IFTTT applet to take my Hypothes.is feed and dump it into a file on OneDrive.

The tiny amount of clean up to the resultant file isn't bad. In fact, a bit of it is actually good as it can count as a version of spaced repetition towards better recall of my notes.

The one thing I'll potentially miss is the tags, which Hypothes.is doesn't include in their feeds (tucked into the body would be fine), but I suppose I could add them as internal wiki links directly if I wanted.

I suspect that other storage services that work with IFTTT should work as well.

Details in a blogpost soon...

Testing cross-linking:

See Also:

• [[Obsidian]]
• [[Hypothes.is]]
• [[note taking]]
• [[zettlekasten]]
• [[commonplace books]]
• [[productivity]]

hat tip to Hypothesis, for such a generally wonderful user interface for making annotating, highlighting, bookmarking, and replying to web pages so easy!

How To Get The Most Out Of Virtual Learning – Research Digest. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/07/30/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-virtual-learning/

I never really got into the habit of writing in the margins of books, it was something that never really occurred to me. While I am still hesitant to write in the margins of physical books, doing so digitally does appeal. Something I am starting to get more into, now that I'm on the journey to getting my Arts and Humanities degree.

This is good point about blogging, however it's also a different way of thinking about writing than using e.g. Zettelkasten, where the thinking process is within the boundary of slip-box, but the outcome is composed from the notes you have.

Sketcho Frenzy: The Basics of Visual Note-taking

note taking resource

Let me dive into these articles.

Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011 found that teaching Iranian EFL students how to take notes using graphic organizers, the experiment group did better in recall and comprehension tests.

Boyle, 2013 used a method called "strategic note taking" which performed better than regular note-taking methods. What does regular and strategic note taking measures mean?

Boyle's paper goes over strategic and guided note-taking.

guided notes

Guided Notes are teacher-prepared handouts that outline lectures, audiovisual presentations, or readings, but leave blank space for students to fill in key concepts, facts, definitions, etc. Guided Notes promote active engagement during lecture or independent reading, provide full and accurate notes for use as a study guide, and help students to identify the most important information covered.

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strategic note taking

Before the lecture begins, the students identify the lecture topic and relate it to what they already know. This helps to activate prior knowledge and make information more meaningful.

During the lecture, the students record notes by clustering three to six main points (or related pieces of information) and immediately summarizing them for each section of the lecture. Typically, this process will be repeated multiple times throughout the lecture. The clustering of ideas helps students remember the information, and summarizing helps them to monitor comprehension and store the information in long-term memory. To effectively teach students how to record important information, and summarize the content, the teacher can introduce the students to the CUES strategy. The teacher should do this while teaching students how to effectively use the strategic note-taking paper, making sure to emphasize that the C (Cluster) and U (Use) steps should be used when listing lecture points in the section titled “Name 3 to 6 main points with details as they are being discussed,” the E (Enter) step should remind them to enter vocabulary terms in the section titled “New Vocabulary or Terms,” and the S (Summarize) step should be used to quickly summarize the clustered lecture points under the “Summary” section. In addition, it is important that teachers encourage students to use abbreviations as they often do while texting to help them to record notes quickly.

At the end of the lecture, the students should always list and describe five important lecture points that they remember. Although this serves as a quick review of the lecture, students should review their notes to help them retain and recall the information presented during the lecture.

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PDF Worksheet

source: local file | DOI: 10.1177/0741932511410862

Good intro on Zettelkasten note management method.

Further reference:

The Zettelkasten Method - Lesswrong 2 »Link«. on how to create "physical" Zettelkasten notes.

Wiki-Style creation of new pages is cool, but there is no tracking of changes. This means you can create a new page simply by referencing it right from your writing, e.g. I like [[JS]]. But should you later rename the JS page to JavaScript, any of your old reference will go awry, creating yet another new note called "JS".

Also automatic backlinks would be really helpful, to see where references are coming from.

Word choice! What does it mean to be "intellectually lazy"? I think a great example of this can be seen when we talked last class about note taking and how taking notes should be a continual process, one which you constantly refer to and add to your notes, as opposed to taking notes and not looking at them again until you need something.

Indeed memory is being atrophied as a result of easy to access externalization, the temptation to just offload it onto the computer makes the forgetting curve even sharper. The concepts don't present to the mind when needed because since we didn't commit to our memory we can hardly perceive correlations to what we previously read. Simply we miss our chances to recall & connect new concepts and knowledge because we don't commit them to our memory.

Great stat for hypothes.is..

Pre-post tests showed better gains (again by about 8%) for collaborative note-takers than for students who did not take notes collaboratively.

Students who took notes collaborative scored nearly 8% higher on their course grades than students who did not.

Summary of the problem with taking notes on computers as opposed to by hand, ie the temptation to try to be a stenographer rather than engaging with and interpreting the material.