via Jess Martin https://jessmart.in/

Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

https://frankmcpherson.blog/2021/12/03/i-think-folks.html

https://thesephist.com/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Frank McPherson</span> in Frankly... (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2021 12:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

tools

https://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

technologies

https://github.com/judell/h_notify

quizzes and assignments at the end of each section to track their performance

effectiveness of using technology devices in online English classrooms.

usage of the tool increased substantially at the start of lockdown, with the bulk of study activity occurring on weekday mornings.

easy access to digi-tools.

5.a.

1. preparedness

5.a.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

discussions, assessment, sharing and interaction

both teachers and students were ready with digital skills and tools

What is missing in this train of thought is search. The real challenge is recalling of information easily, whether that is traditional search or something more AI-ish that can uncover connections between items that I don't see myself. What I want is a tool that can search across all my repositories, and that requires either APIs for communication or standard data storage formats. I prefer APis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_information_managers

Network map of relationships between greek philosophers

https://www.tweetshelf.com/

Discovery tool for Twitter recommendations

"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xodo.pdf.reader&hl=en_US&gl=US

https://www.squidnotes.com/

Wow, the Thingiverse website is a real rabbit hole: https://www.thingiverse.com/

It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

Lean Canvas

For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

create animated drawings. export to gif

At the moment, I guess I’m currently doing this in Drafts, but without any real rigour. What I’ve intended to do is host my atomic notes in iThoughts. But maybe this is part of my system that needs closer attention. Maybe there’s legitimate cause for another tool in the stack? Or maybe this just calls for another workspace? I think this is the space I wanted Project Meta to fill…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV1DsqwbmO0

Take away: mortar and pestle and paper towels are your friend if you're in a bind.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunhjmtxtg6KlCOVpHGKbqUzW-Y/edit#gid=0

Hypothes.is Historical Survey of Annotation Efforts

https://www.zachleat.com/web/indieweb-avatar/

Manual for Seltani

Platform for writing social interactive fiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX-rpV5PPQ4

Reasons people quit:

• Time 29.9%
• Overwhelm 28.7%
• Performance 14.9%
• Perfectionism 13.8%
• Comparison 12.6%

Most of the reasons relate to social media and pressure of perfectionism related to it. Definitely fits into my productivity porn thesis.

These are all things for people in the digital garden space to watch out for in the future. Presenting one's learning in public can eventually evolve into something negative if not done for the correct reasons. Bullet Journal's rise to popularity in coordination with the rise of social media can be a means for forcing people to quit it all.

https://systemcrafters.cc/build-a-second-brain-in-emacs/getting-started-with-org-roam/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Joel Chan</span> in on Twitter: "@RoamBookClub next book? Extended Mind draws on distributed cognition, which is a powerful theoretical perspective for understanding #toolsforthought and #BASB" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>09/14/2021 10:01:01</time>)</cite></small>

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_005.mp3

This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

https://roambrain.com/how-my-road-led-to-roam/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381953081697562625.html

This looks like a reveal.js presentation, but it could be an interesting tool to create online cartoons or comics with.

Tool for wrapping web pages into an app

Tool for writing interactive fiction

https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou

Boris Mann has created a lu.ma community for Tools for Thought!

https://asuth.com/about

Founder and formerly of Quizlet, Invite to Gardens and Streams event.

http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2021/09/01.html

Episode 002 – Organizing Information for Use

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_002.mp3

This is an interesting series, but I'm starting to wish that the episodes were longer and/or interview/discussion based.

Andy only gets to scratch the surface of some of his topics.

http://scripting.com/2021/09/01.html

http://scripting.com/2021/08/01.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Andy Sylvester</span> in Episode 001 – Introduction - Thinking About Tools For Thought (<time class='dt-published'>09/01/2021 11:39:20</time>)</cite></small>

http://scripting.com/2021/06/24/150234.html?title=theGlossaryInLittleOutliner

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dave Winer</span> in Scripting News: Sunday, August 1, 2021 (<time class='dt-published'>08/01/2021 19:31:13</time>)</cite></small>

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-001-introduction/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_001.mp3

https://listifi.app/u/erock/knowledge-management-apps

A list of knowledge management apps that is fairly complete looking. One or two here that I don't think I've seen or played with before.

Soumen's work in virtual world design is elegant; complex interactions connecting users and components with (and thru) data..

Question: Are these tools ready for prime time?

Note: First use of'resources' tag?

See you soon, Later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TO-OkIMtI

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

Howdy Max!!!

A cool tool born of need after VWBPE 2013.

Mary Anne Clark's Genome Island serves up a master class in virtual world pedagogy, along with the genetics course content.

Example of clearing the mental clutter by writing using Julia Cameron's Morning Pages concept.

https://jisho.org/

A Japanese-English dictionary for kanji, sentences, etc.

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 a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.

Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.

What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?

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

Paper Discovery:

• Research Rabbit
• Connected Papers
• Citation Gecko
• Papers With Code

Zotero SciHub - for downloading papers into one's Zotero instance

Academic Networking

• lens.org (also good for discovery)
• OrcID
• Impact Story

Ginko App (trees and cards interface) for writing with interesting import and export

around 2:56: A bit too much Andy Matuschak worship? Pretty sure he didn't invent the so-called Andy Mode. Index cards pre-dated them surely as did Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki. There are many other idex-card UIs prior to Matuschak.

Map of Content (MOC) apparently comes from How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro.

• it's a glorified Table of Contents really

Plugins he's using:

• 3:22:15 add codemirror matchbrackets js
• 3:23:31 advanced tables
• 3:26:09 Better word count
• 3:26:41 calendar
• 3:27:32 copy code block
• 3:28:25 cycle through panes
• 3:29:55 Dataview
• 3:30:33 editor syntax highlight
• 3:30:43 extended mathjax
• 3:31:08 file explorer note count
• 3:32:04 full-screen mode
• 3:32:23 highlgiht public notes
• 3:33:11 kanban
• 3:33:35 kindle highlights
• 3:33:56 metatable
• 3:34:24 mindmap
• 3:35:36 NLP dates
• 3:36:10 pane relief
• 3:36:42 paste URL
• 3:37:21 periodic notes
• 3:37:44 recent files
• 3:37:59 relevant line number
• 3:38:33 show current open note
• 3:38:45 review
• 3:39:43 sliding panes
• 3:40:42 super charged links
• 3:41:11 random note
• 3:41:39 tag wrangler
• 3:42:22 templater
• 3:46:05 zoom

textsniper for OCR and potentially text-to-speech, apple only, so leark for others.

MathPix

WeasyPrint is a smart solution helping web developers to create PDF documents. It turns simple HTML pages into gorgeous:

Tool mentioned in IndieWeb chat. Could be used to turn a site into a physical book.

This looks like a bookmarking service that is billing itself as a digital commonplace book. I'm not sure about the digital ownership aspect, but it does have a relatively pretty UI.

Looks like it works via a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/commonplaces-your-digital/ckiapimepnnpdnoehhmghgpmiondhbof

https://textsniper.app/

A paid Apple based tool for text recognition and extraction

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

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

Watched up to 2:33:00 https://youtu.be/wB89lJs5A3s?t=9181 with talk about research papers.

Some interesting tidbits and some workflow tips thus far. Not too jargony, but beginners may need to look at some of his other videos or work to see how to better set up pieces. Definitely very thorough so far.

He's got roughly the same framing for tags/links that I use, though I don't even get into the status pieces with emoji/tags as much as he does.

I'm not a fan of some of his reliance on iframes where data can (and will) disappear in the future. For Twitter, he does screencaptures of things which can be annoying and take up a lot of storage. Not sure why he isn't using twitter embed functionality which will do blockquotes of tweets and capture the actual text so that it's searchable.

Taking a short break from this and coming back to it later.

A Chrome extension for doing time-stamped notes on YouTube.

Point solutions could evolve socially, and so, collaboratively.

Strands of content form fibers that can be tthreaded best in a local K-12 space.

Karen Costa suggests that someone "create a tool for students to plan their online work and time management. It needs to aggregate all of their courses and include due dates"

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Eleanor Konik</span> in 2021-07-17: Obsidian Mobile, Community Events & Graph Tips (<time class='dt-published'>07/28/2021 23:00:32</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Eleanor Konik</span> in 2021-07-17: Obsidian Mobile, Community Events & Graph Tips (<time class='dt-published'>07/28/2021 23:00:32</time>)</cite></small>

Search Hypothes.is annotations

https://github.com/judell/h_export

There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.

Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.

nice point of view

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.

While this may be Nicholas Carr's statement, it's actually pre-dated significantly by Marshall McLuhann

There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?

https://deepstash.com/ appears to be a note taking tool geared toward zettelkasten and productivity. It's got an interesting card-based UI.

Inviting folks like Dorothy Nell to see this cool new tool in action!

(Clicking on highlighted text should open the annotation tool.)

https://obsidian.md/mobile

Looks like Obsidian mobile app is finally available to the public on the app stores.

The easy way to manage scientific publications and bookmarks

BibSonomy helps you to manage your publications and bookmarks, to collaborate with your colleagues and to find new interesting material for your research.

Reasonable tool for searching and filtering Twitter followers.

In a few months many tools described in this article might be standard UI options to be selected.

"...by letting the user** "choose from thousands of user scripts that modify web page behavior and appearance."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jonathan Zittrain</span> in The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic (<time class='dt-published'>07/08/2021 22:10:42</time>)</cite></small>

I like the hovercard-like UI that enables one to see prior versions of links on a page. It would be cool to have this sort of functionality built into preview cards for these as well.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jonathan Zittrain</span> in The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic (<time class='dt-published'>07/08/2021 22:07:17</time>)</cite></small>

A solid overview article about the architectural deficiencies of the web for long term archival and access as well as some ideas for fixing the issue and a plea to attempt to make things better for the future.

<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>