Dave's Whiteboard

I haven’t read any of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, and now I don’t have to, thanks to the reviews at Pop Suede.  (I started with the third, the one for Twilight: Eclipse, but here they’re in what I think is the proper sequence.)

Review of Twilight:

Review of Twilight: New Moon

Review of Twilight: Eclipse

What’s the point (other than a teensy bit of humor)?

It struck me that, based on the little I’d picked up from newspapers and online, the Pop Suede folks have done a great job of capturing the plot of each book, then tweaking it enough that you see both the textual source and the satiric object.  It’s like a wildly informal approach to… a book report.

Understand: I no more want everyone churning out lolcats book reviews than I want another couple thousand terabytes of online-learning Jeopardy quiz.  But think what it took to put these things together: you had to grasp the key points of the original book, weed stuff out, and then express your understanding in a way that communicates.

It’s that kind of reworking and recasting of a complicated set of ideas that helps foster learning, not a 20-item multiple-guess test at the end of the half-day module on Twilight: New Moon.

I once needed to mitigate the effect of the typical marketing department information dump.  New victims employees were sentenced to hear 90 minutes’ worth of feeds and speeds about three major products.   So I asked the product managers to agree to a new format in which they’d present for only an hour, take a short break, and then participate in a discussion with the new hires.

This is how I explained the “discussion” to the sales folks, immediately before the first presentation:

We’re going to have three one-hour presentations today.

Yeah, I know, but after two of them, you get a 15 minute break.

Look on the back of your name card.  You’re in one of three groups based on the colored dot.

At the end of each presentation, I’ll name one of the colors.   During the break, that color group has 15 minutes to make a pitch on “the 10 main ways to sell [whatever the product is].”

After the break, you make your pitch.  The rest of you get to ask questions, kibitz, figure stuff out.
At the end, the Product Manager will jump in.

Yeah, it was manipulative.  Hey, I’d been working with sales reps for a while.

Some of the things I had in mind:

• Reduce potential product-manager-induced sleep by 33% (one hour instead of 90 minutes).
• Increase attention, at least in the first session, since the sales rep didn’t know if he had to work on the pitch till after it was over.
• More breaks than expected (a feature, but for most folks, a benefit).
• Rethinking / reworking by the sales reps replaced canned product-manager summary.
• Product manager got to hear what the sales reps thought were the main sales ideas.

In a way, it was very formal learning: one-time, face-t0-face,  scheduled.  We even had mediocre coffee, pastries, and PowerPoint.  But we also got the salespeople doing what their jobs called for: thinking about the products and how they could sell them to potential customers.

I know “knowledge management” is a high-value buzzword; I just tend to feel a twinge of weariness when I see it.  I’m not sure you can manage knowledge; the best you can hope for, I think, is to try and set up weirs, reservoirs, sidings, and whatnot to channel some of the flow.  The idea is that you’ll eventually be able to retrieve it and put it to use.

What helps foster that retrieval?  Note-taking.  I’m not sure I agree with the authors of this study (PDF), who believe that “learning to take notes well… takes as much time as learning to write in a relatively experienced way.”  They see the purposes of taking notes as “to record information and/or to aid reflection.”

A note to take: “and/or” is nearly always the worst possible phrase.  It implies precision but just smudges things.  You’re dithering or obsessing or both.  (See how I managed to say that without “and/or?”)

“Aid reflection” isn’t the term I’d use.  I like Stephen Downes’s description of note-taking as your contribution a two-way communication with the source of learning.  Downes recently noted a post by D’Arcy Norman, who says:

Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sense-making and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking.

Granted, that’s not the way people often think about note-taking.  For them the phrase is a quick trip back to a lecture hall, with a professor relentlessly flinging chunks of some “body of knowledge” at you.  Eventually you’d have to reassemble them to the satisfaction of the flinger.

I can be  a very traditional note-taker.  As an undergraduate, I adopted two strategies that I thought were worth about 0.75 on a four-point grade scale: sit in the first or second seat of a row, and take notes.  Both of these acted to keep me more awake and more engaged, even during the tedium of English Literature: The Augustans.

I have a longstanding habit of taking notes in ink:

Two of my 101 pages of notes from "Complex Learning in Ten Steps"

Ink’s no more essential to note-taking than a soup spoon is to lunch, even if the lunch is soup.

If I’m trying to capture a lot of information for later analysis and search, my first stop is… Microsoft Word’s outlining.  I’ve created a few outline templates (one with I-A-1-a numbering, one with that technoid 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 format, and other with indents and various bullets for different levels).  I type fast and can shift outline levels almost without thinking, which means I’ve got more bandwidth available to take in and reprocess whatever I’m outlining.

Especially when the knowledge stream’s wider than it is deep, I use Evernote.  I like the idea that my notes are in two places–online, where I can access them from any computer, and on my own laptop, where my useful paranoia means I back my stuff up.

Evernote extends the concept of “note,” because I can take photos of signs, whiteboard sketches, or flipchart pages.  Evernote lets me search for text in images, as in the example on the right (click for a larger view).

I’ve used personal wikis to collect information, and I use several blogs as well.  Each wiki or blog has a focus, a way of deciding what parts of the flow to direct into the format.  And by actively directing–through entering text, through tagging, through classifying and moving–I’m working with the information and increasing the likelihood that I’ll recall it in a context that makes sense to me.

Some more-or-less related items I found along the way:

• iPad, Therefore iKludge: David Dobbs writes about problems with noting, and sharing notes, on devices like the iPad.
• Teaching with Wikis: Sandra Porter enables electronic notes for students who forget the dead-tree kind.
• Cognitive Effort during Note Taking (PDF), a 2005 paper that appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Much of what I found deals with note-taking in an academic setting.  That last paper by Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg makes the point that

…from a cognitive perspective, note taking cannot be conceived of as only a simple abbreviated transcription of information that is heard or read…. on the contrary,it is an activity that strongly depends on the central executive functions of working memory to manage comprehension, selection, and production processes concurrently.

I thought it worth including that statement.  For one thing, note-taking looks obvious–you take notes.  But what you really do, as the researchers are saying, is manipulate incoming information while managing the technical aspects of recording the results of your manipulation.

If you were into straight transcription, like a court reporter, then it’s possible you learn very little, because your focus is purely on the capture.  But for notes to be useful, other than as a transcript, you’re doing things mentally while you’re doing things physically.