Our Journey, Day 75
I'm in Edmonton, preparing for the first day of OE Global 2023. I'm staying about a block from the Edmonton Convention Center, so it will just be a brief stroll this morning and I'll be able to leave my car in the underground parking. I'm looking forward to seeing what people are doing all over the world to advance open education. Even more than textbook cost, as I started to mention yesterday, I'm curious how people are imagining the future of education.
This morning in my Readwise review (the app has given me fifteen passages to review each morning for the last 975 days) I read one from Sönke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes. Ahrens said, "Translate them into something coherent and embed them into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time." I had added a note of my own, saying "more needs to be said about this". As I was looking at it today, it seemed to me that what I ought to add to my own book is a distinction between making notes for a particular project and making notes to build a general understanding of things.
I certainly write notes when I'm working on a particular research paper. This is the thing that's probably most familiar to students. They pick (or are assigned) a topic to explore, then they find a bunch of books and articles and read them. They make notes about what they'll need to support their thesis and argument. This seems to be what Ahrens is talking about here. I think this is great, but there's a lot more to my note-making than just piling up a bunch of stuff to spit out in a paper.
I write daily, so I clearly have nothing against output. But if the point is increasing our understanding and building a connected collection of ideas we've explored (I didn't say second brain), then much more often when I make a note, it will be for my own purposes. That doesn't mean it won't show up in my output at some point. But the reason for making it usually isn't to talk about it right now. It's more about adding a new idea to a conversation of thoughts, to see how it will fare when it rubs up against other ideas. It's really the comparison that's key for me, I think. Another reason to call that stage of reading "Comparative" rather than Syntopical like Adler does.
So I think it will be useful to expand on this difference in the next edition of the handbook, when I add reading. If the goal is to make a lifelong habit of self-education, then the focus will only rarely be on embedding new thoughts "into the context of your argument while you build your argument out of the notes at the same time." I'm not being entirely fair to Ahrens, quoting him out of context. He probably said something to qualify this statement, that I didn't highlight and comment on. My point is not that I disagree with him, but that I want to focus on another purpose of note-making.
My chair when I was a graduate student was a life span developmental psychologist. The life-span approach was a different what of approaching development that was most obvious to me in how textbooks were organized. Were they structured by topic (language development. cognitive development) or by age category (infancy, childhood, adolescence). At some level, the information was the same, but the emphasis on transitions did vary. I retain some of the terminology and have applied it to the purposes people apply to notes. You make a similar distinction here while indicating that adults can take notes for immediate projects or for use over time. My argument has been that even college students do not imagine their notes being useful into the future and this is too bad as they are preparing for their future but they do not often think in this way as they work their way through their courses. https://learningaloud.com/blog/2023/09/23/notetaking-across-the-lifespan/