I like how Dr. Pacheco-Vega outlines some of his research process here.
Sharing it on Twitter is great, and so is storing a copy on his website. I do worry that it looks like the tweets are embedded via a simple URL method and not done individually, which means that if Twitter goes down or disappears, so does all of his work. Better would be to do a full blockquote embed method, so that if Twitter disappears he's got the text at least. Images would also need to be saved separately.
A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences supports Wieman’s hunch. Tracking the intellectual advancement ofseveral hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years,its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generatinghypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to thestudents’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance theyreceived from their faculty mentors.
Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.
Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16
Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?
Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)
Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?
Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?
A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.
An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.
Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.
You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
-Mortimer J. Adler
https://www.amazon.com/Marginalia-Paper-Very-Margin-Notebook/dp/192689202X/
Marginalia Paper, you know, for annotating your own writing...
A must-have for the Hypothes.is fan who wants to go the hipster route.
example from your colleague, Victor Lee. We began a recent talk about Annotation.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(57, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Remi Kalir with Victor’s tweet. His perspective on access, ownership, and power helped us to discuss a tension between readers who can and do write annotation —whether in books or the built environment— and the cultural rites of annotation, often unwritten, that also constrain where and how notes are added to everyday texts.
Ipsa annotātiō potestas est.
(Annotation is power.)
I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).
I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.
Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.
Social learning does not mean learning without tension or argument. In “Thinking with Peers”, Paul shows that argument and conflict are useful ways to focus attention and strengthen ideas, so long as the arguing is done with a certain amount of openness to new ideas. She approvingly quotes Stanford Business School professor Robert Sutton’s formula for productive conflict: “People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” The brain, it seems, likes conflict. Or, at least, conflict helps strengthen attention.
I wonder how this may be leveraged with those who are using Hypothes.is for conversations in the margins in classrooms?
cc: @remikalir, @jeremydean, @nateangell
Could teachers specifically sow contention into their conversations? Cross reference the idea of a devil's advocate.
I love the aphorism:
“People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.” — Robert Sutton, Stanford Buisness School professor's formula for productive conflict
Helping Hands on the Medieval Page
👈
As I'm thinking about this, I can't help but think that Hypothes.is, if only for fun, ought to add a manicule functionality to their annotation product.
I totally want to be able to highlight portions of my reading with an octopus manicule!
I can see their new tagline now:
Helping hands on the digital page.
I'm off to draw some octopi...
If this blog had a tagline it would be "an ongoing conversation with myself."
Here's an example of a blogger using the idea of writing a blog as being in conversation with himself.
It obviously doesn't predate Niklas Luhmann's conversation with slip boxes, but the general tenor is certainly similar in form and function.
Fleeting notes while reading is your way of having a conversation with the author. It may not eventuate to anything but the process instantly places agency back in your hands.
The idea of taking notes here as a conversation both with onesself as well as the author is essentially the old idea of making annotations in the margins of a book.
He's repackaging it in the framing of a zettelkasten, but it's the same sort of conversation that @remikalir talks about, though in that case Remi is usually talking about class-wide group conversations with a text.
Cross-reference this with Luhmann's paper Communicating with Slip-boxes which is a portion of the story from the zettelkasten perspective.
Certainly someone in the commonplace or annotation traditions mentioned the idea of a conversation? Either with themselves, with the author, or with the text itself? Was this ever tacitly acknowledged before Luhmann?
the more active the reading the better.
How much more active can it be than also actively annotating and note taking?
Jonathan Edwards’s so-called “Blank Bible.” JE received as a gift from Benjamin Pierpoint, his brother in law, a unique book. Structurally, it is a strange animal. It is a small, double-column King James, unstitched and then spliced back together again inside a large blank journal. The result is a one-of-a-kind Bible that has an empty sheet between every page of Scripture text.
If one is serious about annotating a text, then consider making a "blank Bible" version of it.
Jonathan Edwards apparently received bible as a gift. It had a copy of the text of the bible which interspersed blank pages between every page of text thereby allowing massive amounts of space for marginalia!
"Marx's scholia: Annotations Involving Classical and English Literary Texts in Capital," in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 29 (2020), 190-219 [CLICK HERE FOR PDF] "Much can be learned from tracking Marx’s use of literary texts in his footnotes, a practice that best can be understood in the context of his classical rhetorical training. His annotations, I argue, both contribute to and—as a kind of counter discourse—reflect the larger dialectical process carried out in his critique of political philosophy. Even though Marx is not writing a literary text as such, he is in fact doing a fair amount of literary criticism, all neatly tucked away in his notes, going so far as to quote long passages from key works in the classical tradition and from the English Renaissance that he then annotates."
Karl Marx's annotations? I'm in!
This may be the sort of thing that @remikalir may appreciate as well.
This looks like the sort of thing @remikalir would appreciate.