he term tools for thought has become a new rallying point over the last few years. People who might otherwise gather around keywords like personal knowledge management (PKM), note-taking, networked thought, computer-supported collaborate work (CSCW), knowledge graphs, or human-computer interaction (HCI), are reframing their work.
Notes
It might feel strange to call some of these things “tools”. The scientific and socratic methods seem more like techniques for problem-solving. While drawing and writing are surely mediums or representations of ideas rather than “tools”?
Difference between mediums and tools?
In the 3 years since taking the course, I've learned much more about the world of personal knowledge management (PKM) and its long history. Tiago's course is a light introduction to the concept of knowledge management, but not deeply rooted in the historical literature. I'd encourage you to explore beyond it.
This is a deep insight
local rules
What is the difference between a local and a global rule?
I'll also slowly capture some details about my workflows and hacks here
Test
who cares https://journal.michalkorzonek.com/routine who cares…
I do. I got lot's of deep ideas through reading Andy's stuff, Anne-Laure's stuff, your stuff... Which I wouldn't have gotten if I had to wait for Andy's book (or whatever) to get published. I can also discover people working on similar stuff which I wouldn't have found otherwise.
digital gardening would make sense if we bridged the tech gap and invented a form that allows people to navigate and digest the author’s ideas and body of work (on different levels) more easily
Totally... I wish it was much easier to interlink... it's funny, like 10 years ago people had personal wikis, and we had the concept of interwiki links, blogs had pingback etc... These days we're reinventing everything...
What does it look like to "mention" someone across sites? How can I easily subscribe to updates to this post? See new posts you write that are relevant to what I write... Really wish Hypothes.is was more social in this regard (let me know when someone adds a comment to a page I've commented on for example)... What does a change log look like for a wiki?...
We might be able to hack some simple things like this across digital gardens... Generate an XML that we upload somewhere - or spider these sites... And then send notifications? Not sure. Curious about trying. Would be good if whatever we build is not dependent on the technology (I use gatsby and he uses Tiddlywiki etc doesn't matter). Perhaps webmentions, haven't looked into it yet. Seems complicated.
is this whole notion of digital gardening just a mental crutch to destroy the inhibiting self censorship?
Partially, but I think there is more focus on building up an internal structure, and less on the time aspect. Part of this maybe comes from the way people like Visakan use Twitter to build up chains of argument that cross-links.
but don’t expect people to read it and understand and start interacting
I think it depends - if people are really interested in your content, they might be willing to engage... It also feels more like a dialogue, more unfinished. Some of Andy's stuff is honestly scary because it's so well written... And he rarely asks questions. With you I feel more like I'm actually brainstorming with someone...
well if we can get to a format that allows lossless speedy transfer of knowledge between minds (and possibly consciousness and physical “info” / DNA / knowledge, there is no need for writing a linear chunk of text, right?
I don't think we'll ever get to the "lossless" part, but it can become more effective... I'm also really interested in "accretion" - that all of our scattered conversations and discussions on so many media actually slowly build on to each other instead of just being like leaves in the wind... Right now there is so much friction - I need to somehow bring these ideas into my Roam to be able to track them.
is it really easier to “read” mindmaps than text (also called concept maps in a couple of whitepapers I read today)?
I don't think so - most of what I've read indicates that mind maps etc are useful when constructing, but not necessarily reading someone elses... But again perhaps if you connect it to a narrative, that mindmap is still really useful.
thus the mindmap / alternate and multi-leveled representation of information
Yes! I'm really interested in combining different "representations" (in math learning people talk about the need for students to see multiple representations of the same content to get the underlying concept - like formula, table, graph, simulation, etc)... Would be interesting to combine a narrative with a concept map, could even be audio/video (indexed?)... Simon Buckingham-Shum did something interesting with this - live-mapping a meeting, and concept map time-indexed to video.
T
Interesting to think about this kind of work (of which I've seen others before) which do the work of systematizing and providing you with ready-made mnemonics, with the work of [[Andy Matuschak]] on [[Quantum Country]], providing carefully designed pre-written [[Spaced repetition]] questions. Also interesting that most of this work was done in analogue books - now we have the possibility (perhaps) of collecting usage data to calibrate which stories/questions etc work better (as a whole, or even for individual learners)?
e
Important
Sometimes I think I have a new thought on a subject, so I open up the file and write it down, then afterwards I see I had that same thought a year ago and had forgotten about it. If you care about your thoughts, keep them.
This is similar to how [[Zettelkasten]] encourages you to append your ideas to an existing note.
Accessibility (along various dimensions)
This is very important
Algorithms are available for transfer learning in Markov logic networks[12] and Bayesian networks.[13] Transfer learning has also been applied to cancer subtype discovery,[14] building utilization,[15][16] general game playing,[17] text classification,[18][19] digit recognition[20] and spam filtering.[21]
Can we use Bayesian networks for other things?
What
Clarity of trajectory - choose to work on important task, start pomodoro timer, make a list, or understand underlying conflict (I'm distracted because I'm hungry, get a snack). Timebox distraction (like Youtube).
Self-Expression
Hva betyr det for en sykkelmekaniker?
Zettelkästen?
Blog post by someone trying out the system, writing about the background etc.
Most of the writing about him and his system remains in German
References would have been nice
One of my favorite books of all time is Badass: Making users Awesome by Kathy Sierra.
[[toRead]]
Social annotation supported robust discussion and facilitated productive connections between the content and relevant contexts
How do you situate this finding in the literature? Is this a new finding, or are you adding nuance to previous findings about the usefulness of social annotations in general? (Could also be interesting in the future to compare the effect of private annotations vs social annotations)
Designing with expansive framing resulted in generative learning
Would have been interesting to vary the instructions provided to students, to distinguish the effect of using Hypothesis from the specific approach - like expansive framing. Which is distinct from using expansive framing as a framework for analyzing the annotations of course.
asked to
Did they get any instructions regarding how to respond to other people's annotations, or did they just do that spontaneously?
Anywhere
I'm going to leave an annotation here, we'll see if anyone finds it :) So one of the things that was very powerful to me with Marlene Scardamalia's Knowledge Building (video) was how ideas could begin one place, and get reorganized as you developed your (community's) understanding.
One thing I'm wondering about is how to deal with that with Hypothes.is annotations - that's something we've been trying to experiment with in FROG (example), but I'd love more ideas.
In addition, and one thing Knowledge Forum also missed, is a forum for "meta-talk" - talk about the process of building knowledge together... Which is why I decided to leave this comment here - didn't know where else to discuss this?
Go back to 1962
For those of us born 20 years afterwards, I understand that this is "before Internet, before smartphones" etc - but are there other important features of that specific time in human history (and perhaps academia/tech in the US etc) that you think are important for us to understand the context of his ideas?
Engelbart hated our present-day systems.
I understand the point he is trying to make, but I feel like the conclusion is a bit too strong - what he describes above isn't very different from Skype + Google Docs (with different cursors etc), or collaborative coding, which is how a lot of my work is done these days. I'd like to dig more deeply into his ideas, and see what we have today that can begin to answer the challenges.
"Hypertext"
There is a whole strand of humanists experimenting with hypertext, like hypertext literature, Mark Bernstein who works on TinderBox has been a great introduction to this area for me.
collective intelligence
I wonder about the relationship between "private" and "collective" intelligence (and perhaps there are also "group" intelligences etc - anything more than one, but less than public?). How would annotating this article for myself, or for a small trusted group of friends, change what I chose to highlight etc. What is the effect of reading a paper that already has a lot of annotations, vs. being the first to annotate?
España protesta ante Bélgica por una carta oficial de apoyo al secesionismo
I don't agree
Connected ideas not trapped in individual discourse spaces
I would love to see more of this in academia as well. I'll repeat here what I wrote in my personal email to you: Would be useful to set up a small community in LAK or CSCL to read and collectively annotate one paper per week or something? Maybe as part of NAPLES, of DANCE, or just random interested people...
(if not any)
do you mean "if not all"?