This is a video I made partly for my students in an upper-level undergrad course, to model the process of reading a chapter and making Obsidian highlights and short notes and then transferring those to Reading Notes in Obsidian. They did a good job with this and the discussions we had in this course, using this preparation technique, were very good!
I edited this lightly in Descript and made a transcript, which is below:
Hello! This morning I want to talk a little bit about the transition from Hypothesis to Obsidian. This week I think some of my students felt like I threw them a bit of a curveball when I told them that my expectations for what they would do in Hypothesis with this week's reading in my US and Latin America course was different from what I normally expect.
Normally, and especially in the survey courses that all of these students have been in with me and got their first taste of Hypothesis, what I ask them to do is to make five kind of detailed annotations where they really engage with the text, and then to go back through and to comment on three of their fellow students' annotations. So that we can kind of get a social annotation or a discussion going. Before we meet on discussion day and that gives that process kind of a jump start. This time in this class I told them that they weren't really doing it for my benefit and to be graded. The reason that they should be using Hypothesis is to highlight and make quick notes for themselves, so that when they go back and they reread the text a second time, they'll be able to hone in right on things that interested them and transfer those notes in the second stage of this note taking process, which is moving from highlights to reading notes. And so that is what I'm modeling for them this week. So I read the chapter that I assigned to them, which I scanned out of this book. This is the Colonial Latin America, fourth edition by Burkholder and Johnson, published by the Oxford University Press, first in 1990. And I had them read the second chapter about the Spanish conquest. (I occasionally have students read monograph chapters I have scanned, which I think is generally understood as “fair use”.)
And so what I did was I scanned it and I ran it through Adobe Acrobat Pro's OCR so that they could actually highlight it. Then I put it in the course shell and I went through and I made my first highlights and notes to model this process for them. And then in the second stage, I took those notes and I made a list of them in Obsidian on a page that I made for that purpose. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite the students to do the same thing, to highlight the actual document using Hypothesis in that first stage, and then to take those highlights and those quick notes and turn them into short reading notes. So say a sentence or two about the thing that caught your attention and that interested you.
And this is the beginning of that process of turning Burkholder and Johnson's knowledge and their understanding of the events into the student's own understanding. And so putting things into their own words and starting to engage with them in their own language is, I think, a beginning key to that process of understanding.
So, I hope that my demonstration of this is useful for them and helps them to fill in the rest of this document. And then we'll see what it is that jumped out of this reading at people and what we have to discuss when we come to discussion day later in the week. So, just a quick take on the beginning of that process and what the mechanics of it actually look like. I hope people found that interesting. Thanks for listening. I'll see you again next time.
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