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[Music] okay so let's start again just before
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starting I want to remember you that we have a room of continuous mob programming where you are invited to contribute and test mob programming it's
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continuous experience during all the conference so please go there and know that you will find people and you can try stuff so let me present you Sanka I
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discover this thing a few months ago it just blew my mind because it's it make words and it explain mine connections about a lot of stuff but I just couldn't
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explain so it's really amazing and that's why I invited Sanka which is and thank you uncle to have written a book in English because most of the resources
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about the subject we're in German so not accessible to most people so thank you to have done that and please welcome zonka
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[Applause] thank you very much for the kind invitation and the very warm welcome especially as I'm I'm an outsider and I'm speaking about what might seem to be
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a rather obscure subject for a software developer conference and that is with the background of social sciences and liberal arts how to take smart notes
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especially in higher education on the example of a technique from the 1960s containing out of pen and paper in wooden boxes so thank you for that
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note-taking it seems even in higher education to be more of a sideshow not the real matter writing though is an issue for students and academics alike
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and that's what most students and professors struggle with the writing of a paper getting things published know
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taking it seems is just one tool among many and I try to convince you that is way more than that there's a plethora of study guides and self-help books for
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this writing papers getting things published aiming to help this writing and some of them address note-taking as well but what I try to convince you is
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that most of these books are based on underlying assumptions what the connection between note-taking and thinking is that doesn't fix the problem
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but actually aggravates it there are some people he have always taken note taking seriously richard fineman the
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Nobel Prize winner and great teacher of physics is one example so one day he got a visitor a historian great admirer of him
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and he looked around at his office and then on his desk and admired his notes and said something alike well these are great records of your thinking and
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instead of being flatter than nice fine men get a bit angry and said no no no these aren't records of my thinking they are my thinking progress and this Torian
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said well come on I mean the thinking happens in your head and then you write your ideas down right and phiman said no that's not how it works they are not a
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record it's working you have to work on the paper and this is the paper okay and we might be inclined to say okay fine calm down a bit there's a great admirer
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of yours and treating your notes like they're some precious artifacts and you'll get wound up in semantics but he isn't because it makes all the difference
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cognitive sciences and psychology etc seem to be mostly concerned about the inner workings of our mind and brain but among all the different theories and the
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different schools of thought they seem to emerge it's surprising consensus and the consensus is that notes or the external environment of our thinking is
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what matters most so notes on paper do not make contemporary physics or any other kind of intellectual endeavor easier they make them possible and so in
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the in a handbook for neuroscience it says in the beginning no matter how internal processes are implemented you need to understand the extent to which
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the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding and that is what I want to talk about but not on the example of Feynman but from one of my academic heroes
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in my field social sciences and that's Niklas Luhmann someone probably few of you know because he's mostly known in Germany some parts of Japan surprisingly
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and other parts of the world but not so much in the english-speaking community the lumen was an outsider to his field as well trained in law he worked a 95
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job in the German administration but the interesting bit happened in the evenings when he went home and did was most of us do reading about things he was
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interested in and he was taking notes while he was doing that and over time he accumulated quite a bit of notes and he started to think about how to handle
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this amount of notes and then after a short period with a scholarship in Howard where he explained target pastilla then Fame most famous sociologist what everything was wrong
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with her theory he came back taught a bit at the administrative school and then was discovered one of his early writings by the then famous helmet shell
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ski-in sociologist in germany he was who was looking for a professor for a new founded University and what he read from this outsider of his field made him ask
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lumen if he want to become professor for sociology problem lumen had no habilitation what is required in Germany at the time he had no dissertation
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written he didn't even have a sociology degree but within one year he handed all three things in and then he was asked in
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1968 in his inaugural lecture so what's the project what you're working on and his answer became Fame because he briefly said well modestly
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theory of society duration 30 years costs none twenty and a half years later he published a book which I consider one
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of the greatest works in sociology which is the last chapter of his theory of society a two-volume book and in these
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almost 30 years he also published about 60 books hundreds of articles published
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on subjects like sociology law politics media administrative science philosophy art even love and you name it so that's
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impressive but that's not what draw me really into the method he used because whenever you was asked how on earth he was able to combine such vastly
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different topics and be so productive he said well I'm not doing that on my own I'm doing that with my settled custom my
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note-taking system what drama to it is that he also said well I only do things that are easy whenever I'm stuck I do something else I
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never forced myself to do anything I don't feel like and that sounded very attractive to me so his settle custom is
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actually papers in a wooden box up until 90,000 notes with an index of terms about at 1,250 entries that settle
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customers at the moment part of a research project at the University of Bielefeld they digitalized everything and try to understand and the inner-workings which are surprisingly simple and there are a lot
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of unfinished manuscripts left so even after he died he kept on publishing for years based on almost finished manuscripts many of my colleagues and
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myself would be happy to be half as productive during the lifetime how he was after he died so it seems like that
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is just an enormous amount of work to put into that here come up with a note-taking system like that but if you break it down it's just six notes a day
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and that doesn't include Saturdays and Sundays and I give you rough just a brief idea about how it works but then I want to talk a little bit more about the
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ideas behind it and why it makes such a difference for higher education a typical workday for a woman begins with reading and while he was reading he was
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taking literature notes very simple on a small piece of table of this size in just on page X it says y that's it on
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the back side you will find the source and then in the evening he would write the actual notes and he would go through his literature notes and stop thinking about well what does that mean for the
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projects and thoughts I'm developing and then he would would write that down in longhand in the way that it can still be understood by others or by himself a
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week a month ten years later which is probably the same and then he would give every note just in index he started with note number one
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the second node would be physically stored just behind it note number two three etc and then he would put Mew notes directly into the notes which are
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most related to so sometimes you will find a thought spread out over many notes which are just stored after each
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other by using slashes and numbers and letters he can branch out indefinitely so after note 1 if 2 is already given
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then it becames 1 a and cetera et cetera you have links in these red in red that connects to other notes related within
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the subtle Caston and it looks very much like like like hypertext and in some ways but it isn't and it's important to
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keep that in mind there are notes which contain just rough ideas about manuscripts with links to other notes
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which give you a kind of overview over a topic but there is nothing like a topic structure everything builds up from
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below so these are basically that that's basically it there is an index with terms but you have surprisingly few entries for each term because it's not
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an entry doesn't contain all the notes which are related to one subject but they are more like entries into a line of thoughts so you might look at one
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term look into that settle Kirsten and you find a kind of entry and then follow up on that that's the technique and granted that doesn't sound revolutionary especially
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not for today it rather sounds like a needlessly laborious pen and paper version of what we can do with links and tax with almost any program so
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I'm gonna talk a little bit about the specifics about this and then compare it with what is usually taught in higher education because the main difference is
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what kind of workflow for the everyday routine this technique enforces and not so much what this tool taking as an isolated
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tool can do so the core features are the note sequences are really for developing ideas it's not so much about storing information so adding a new note
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develops an idea further secondly links and indices are helpful but not at all the central features they are just entries to get as quickly as possible
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into the thinking that happens on the notes the workflow is completely streamlined towards writing when he writes a paper he would take notes
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sequences out of the turtle casting put them in an order and then turn them into a written text and he said the time-consuming part is not the actual
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writing it's finding the right water because in the turtle cast and things are circular they are not in a linear way and trying to put it into a linear
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order that's the real challenge you can roughly distinguish between three different kinds of notes that are relevant at all fleeting nodes which are notes you take during the day but only
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reminders of what you have in your hat so you won't understand what you mean if you forget the connection they are just like oh that should mind me of that these are the kind of
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notes you chuck after a day and any of the literature notes which are in a separate box project related notes manuscript notes scribbled etc they might go into a project folder and then
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you have the permanent notes these are the main notes I've shown you before and they are understandable even if you forgot the context of where it came from
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so by having just one type of permanent note without any delusion of notes that are just fleeting a project related the
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settle casting enables you to build up a critical mass of ideas that then can spark newer ideas it's highly
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standardized everything regardless of the kind of literature or the source of an idea everything is treated in exactly
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the same way and everything ends up one idea one note same format and now when I talked a little bit about the status quo
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of Higher Education and how it is taught and I hope to show you what kind of difference that actually makes almost all study guides on writing for a linear
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approach it's almost always in kind of variation on the same idea well first you have to start with a topic you know what you have to write about then you go and do some research then you take notes
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then you draw conclusions and then you write it down proofread it and then it's about hitting or missing the deadline next project you again start with a new idea you have to have a research
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question and then you go through these steps again and you might think well that kind of makes sense because but you have to start with an idea for if you don't have an idea in the beginning you
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don't know work to begin and don't you have to make a plan for if you don't have a plan you're bound to wander around aimlessly and don't you have to make one step after
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another wouldn't you ever otherwise go in circles intuitively it makes sense and it's a linear order which raises the
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question what else do students have to do except writing papers well they have to go to seminars listening to lectures having discussions groups etc which
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means that is actually that if we change perspective and take seriously what Feynman's had that notes are not records
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of our thinking but that we think in our notes the whole picture changes and then we can start thinking about the inverse
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model isn't it rather that to be able to have a good research question you already have to have done a lot of research and how can you realistically
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make an educated guess of what kind of literature is worth reading if you haven't read a lot before and how can you realistically plan the process that
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is about insight about coming up with new ideas so it's about something that is per definition not foreseeable in the
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linear model the previous work or rather that all the things that should be accompanied by writing are compartmentalized as if they were a
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separate task and not the preparation of giving an account in a written form about the inside your hat if he is
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streamline everything towards writing you don't take anything away from listening to lecturers having discussions grew up attending seminars but you improve everything you have done
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before one quick look at the literature if you look at study guides for note-taking they have lists about what you are supposed to do for example first
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Google had collect notes for each course in one place in a separate notebook or section of a notebook well you end up doing what most students do they have a folder with notes to one lecture and
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then they have another folder for a different lecture and then they collect these binders in well that was the year I encountered this ideas that doesn't make any sense if you want to do
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something with the knowledge later on and then it prepares you to review what you have written which as I want to show
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you is another thing you really shouldn't do if you want to learn what you encountered it gets worse you get
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systems on how to read with five six steps with five six sub steps in between I spared you the most of the details but
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anyone who has ever read a book knows you you don't go through a checklist of like thirty five bullet points you kind
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of intuitively know how to approach different kinds of literature so the difference between using one tool in another tool if you focus on the
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workflow it enforces does make a difference on the one hand only written ideas count and that's that's especially
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richard fineman said if he can't explain it in your own words you haven't really understood it so it's focused on writing and it's not just one task among others
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and you can invert the whole process of how can you make it easier in the moment for the moment when you are about to write a paper so it's not you start with
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coming up with a research question but well um it isn't difficult to write a paper if you already have all the
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content sorted or notes right in front of you all you have to do is write a rough draft about that then it isn't difficult to put notes in order if you
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already have these nodes and an index where you can look them up and you might say well then it means that the main work is still to be done and that is
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writing these notes but this main work is not additional work you have to do on top of other things but that's the outcome of a change in a daily routine
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of the things you do anyway so you end up with a huge resource of notes not by doing additional work but by changing
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your routine of your everyday work a top-down approach where you start with a question immediately comes with a
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conflict of interest between having insight and getting things done because everything that is not in your plan like having insight or realizing that you had
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a wrong approach and you should do it slightly different becomes a problem of getting your paper done while when you start bottom up it doesn't really matter
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because in the end you can look up where things accumulated you this is obviously where things were so interesting that you came back to them
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again and again and material accumulated and that also means that if you start writing and make a informed decision about the topic and the question you're
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writing about it already comes with material so you don't have to guess if there is literature to that question that is worth reading and worth working
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with because you already know that and most often you're surprised because the things that are interesting in the end of the research process of not of things
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you've thought in the beginning were interested the questions in the end are usually very different to the questions you started with so if you have a top-down approach you're constantly bringing yourself into
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trouble categories emerge bottom-up and they are not enforced on your reading from the beginning that is the precondition for actual
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interdisciplinary work and the problem is higher education is that most knowledge already comes in modules so intuitively it makes sense to use the same categories and then just copy the
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knowledge into the same categories that comes with two problems there is no connection between these compartmentalized parts of knowledge it
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also comes with the problem that you don't elaborate on what he encountered because he just copy things into your own system and elaboration is what makes
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learning I say something about that in a second it's highly standardized and process orientated and I think you are fully aware of the importance of
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focusing on the process or the flow instead of the goal in academia it's not so obvious just a quick look at what it does for
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productivity the things in social sciences liberal arts if you work where or in philosophy where you work with text the things that really bring your
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project forward and usually the very things that don't feel productive at all and that is thinking understanding basically just sitting in your chair and
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staring out of the window it doesn't feel productive so there is the tendency to procrastinate and do something that feels immediately
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productive at the same time and that might be washing the dishes because we immediately see the outcome what can we set set accustomed means you turn these
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vague work of thinking making connections into concrete actions so understanding turns into writing a
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sentence writing in account of what you read in your own words which you can only do if you understand what you're writing about making connections is the
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physical act of looking through all the previous notes and thinking well how does this connect with that it's not happening in the brain it's a concrete action the focus on the process and not
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the outcome is much more motivating because if you focus on the outcome you're kind of failing every day until you reach your goal because up until then you haven't reached your goal but
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if you start focusing on the process and enjoying the process that's what the daily routine really is about writing is
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broken down as reasonable steps some study guides recommend well you have to write one page a day that doesn't make sense when writing a page sometimes means to
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do months of research reading and checking a lot of ideas away what does make sense is say write three four notes a day because that's just the outcome of
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well I read something when I fought a little bit well I made some connections so you have reasonable steps you can go and you can measure your progress because really I've written two or three
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notes a day that that's actual progress and I can do that every day you can't write a manuscript page every day and
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then the value of each idea can counts it is a little bit like the difference between putting a coin into a piggy bank once in a while or investing something
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with compounded interest if you store your notes in separate folders you're building an archive and the best thing is best-case scenario standing up was a
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big archive but if you put them in the settle cuff and they start to mingle with each other you have the ideas you tinker with that previews new ideas because if you take a note and try to
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put it behind another note and you first might realize well I already have that idea and actually that wasn't me that was someone else because now I see I've written about that before all you detect
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subtle differences and now suddenly have to think about what that difference means you have make to make a decision on what is this correct or is that correct
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does it add does it confirm or contradict what I thought before and that sparks new ideas which are new notes you don't have that if you work in
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a kind of archive the overall work process the clear distinction between permanent and temporary nodes can be compared to something like getting things done by
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David Allen in that case that everything ends up in an inbox and then you process everything and you have to make decision on each idea you're handling it is
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different to getting things done in that sense that now he can't start with the goal because it is about inside which you cannot foresee okay a quick word on
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learning what we know about learning today is first of all that it's not about storing information but it is
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about the question of retrieving information later from our memory and forgetting is not losing information but forgetting is the successful inhibition
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of information in our daily life that is a very useful mechanism we need otherwise we could it got overwhelmed
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with information and memories whenever we account encounter something so the successful intubation of memories is our normal state to circumvent that we have
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to make connections that make sense between the knowledge we encounter and the knowledge we have somewhere stored
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in our brain and that is what you actively do when you make connections between nodes [Music] interleaving is sorry spacing is
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basically the technique of the flashcards which you can use for learning vocabulary because it's better to space out a little bit and to once in
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a while come back to something you read instead of cramming it together the problem with flashcards is they don't come with context interleaving
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that means if you want to teach children to throw beanbags in a basket that's three meters away don't let them train throwing beanbags
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in a basket three meters away but let them train throwing beanbags in a basket key meters away and four meters away because in the end they will be better at throwing beanbags in a basket three
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meters away then those pupils he only trained with a three meter beam back even if they've never tried it before because that's how her brain works we
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need to make to look left and right and not focus on one thing at a time connecting is obvious self testing is the difference between what intuitively
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fields like progress in learning and what actually makes a difference in learning the most often used technique from students is reading something
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underlining some sentences and reading that again it doesn't do anything for learning it's it can just not do it what really makes sense is to put it
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away and try to find your own words to give an account of what you thought you already learned and then you pointed to your gaps in knowledge and that feels highly frustrating so
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even if you teach students that rereading doesn't make any sense because there are Studies on that and it's obvious and teach them that self testing
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works because their studies on that after four weeks they are back to rereading because it feels like progress because when they reread an underlined sentence the second time they think well
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that's familiar to me I know that but familiarity is not the same as competency or knowing it but it feels much better an elaboration basically is
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asking these questions about what your encounter what is it about what does it mean what does it mean for this and what does it mean for that how does it connect it's about swapping perspective
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from the argument of the author you're reading to well what does it mean in the context of my own argument it's about comparing contradicting complimenting confirming or specifying
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what you believe before which is what the settle Casson forces you to do every time you add a new note in terms of creativity first of all we go through
00:38:17
different forms of attention every day in the linear model you're supposed to be creative four days to come up with a good research question then you have to
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be full of focused attention for a couple of weeks while you're reading and then you have to you have another form of attention again if you work with it
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set of kasnia constantly going back and forth through different forms of attention the brain is care about keeping factual knowledge we constantly reorganize our
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memories so it fits to our current idea of how things work the telecasting doesn't work that way it presents you with what you actually a week before a year ago but the brain
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is brilliant in comparing things and even and detecting even subtle differences but you can only do that if there are not in your brain but right in
00:39:20
front of your eyes if you physically come tinker with them do something with them and only ideas that are able to mingle with each other can spark near
00:39:35
ideas and the precondition is that that everything is in one place and not spread out and compartmentalized I recommend another big for those who
00:39:48
are interested in learning let us make it sticks from three authors here are really good and giving an account of the current state of research and I just
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want to finish with some final thoughts and that is why I think it would be so important to have a digital version of the settle Caston that is easy to use
00:40:15
that's open source and that can develop over time it's a very simple tool but I think it could be like the lever you use
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to change the way higher education works because we should stop teaching students to follow plans or checklist of 35 bullet points and give them the
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opportunity to learn the skill of independent research instead which is first and foremost the learned ability to make informed decisions about what is
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the most important task at any given moment in time and that might be reading more or doing a bit research more or writing another paragraph or going back
00:41:12
to step 1 or jumping 1/2 to step 5 and this is a skill that can only be learned if you actually do that if you follow a plan you don't
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learn the skill you're stuck with learning following a plan real experts though a social scientists from Sweden
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says real experts don't mag plants they become experts in making informed decisions depending on the situation they are in we never start from scratch we never
00:41:50
start with step one and there's no universal order of steps to take we always start somewhere and at some point in time a good note-taking system
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allows us to move freely between these tasks and develop our thinking long term not contained within one project and
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ideally it is something that builds up over time and allows us to have an external space to think in and I think
00:42:29
there is a reason why this or comparable tools were not seen for the longest time in their importance and I think one of
00:42:44
the reasons is that for the longest time we thought about thinking as something that just happens in our hat and why when we think that note-taking is not
00:42:56
very important it's just a way of scribbling down what happened before here now that it's more common knowledge that it doesn't work that way but that
00:43:10
we think with the tools we use and external have to externalize our thoughts then something like note-taking suddenly becomes the most important
00:43:23
skill for students and those whose profession is to develop thoughts and this second more pragmatic reason might be that someone like Niklas Luhmann and his
00:43:37
system was very contained in a rather obscure community of social scientists who were interested in systems theory
00:43:48
almost all you can could read about that set of Kirstin was contained within the german-speaking community but really
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hope that it's in a way now the time to discover this or comparable methods of notetaking that maybe could be used to
00:44:13
change the way learning and writing is taught in higher education thank you I think it's now Q&A is now are you
00:44:36
doing the moderation or oh hey you are talking about that it would be nice to
00:44:54
have a tool to do that like on your computer but don't you think it will destroy the process and part of the process is to note down manually the
00:45:06
stuff and by the way I saw you had notes on the paper on kneeled so I like to know what you think about I think it's a it's a real problem because there are
00:45:20
huge advantages to dealing with paper and one of the reasons is you can shuffle it around on your desk and even the physical putting it in gives it
00:45:34
something haptic of that it works but at the same time it's really not very practical and sometimes it's nice to do
00:45:48
a full-text search and just finding a note you remember it is in there I mean the main idea of the Turkish news that it points you to notes that you've long
00:46:01
forgotten all the other systems require that the brain still remember somehow what's in but in many ways it's nice to have it all on your computer and have it
00:46:15
transferable and not having to move around with a huge bit of furniture when you change flats yeah any other
00:46:29
questions yeah so how do you do it today dear shoebox is full of paper cards or are you trying to go digital well I tried out different
00:46:44
formats I have you two sheet boxes I gave up on that I'm using a to buy from a colleague of mine he's written a small program
00:46:58
based on lumen set accustomed but it's a one-man show I mean he's it's not an open-source project but it's the only one that really tries to emulate that system so
00:47:11
I'm using that at the moment but one of the reasons I was delighted about this invitation is to get the word out in the hope that something happens within the
00:47:24
software developer community I don't know if it works that way but that's kind of my idea what zonker is trying to say is that it's an invitation for
00:47:36
everyone to contribute and build that too because it doesn't exist in fact if
00:47:51
you look at my pipes my webs in mind maps yes yeah one main difference is that it's about visualizing connections and it puts you in a perspective of
00:48:05
trying to get an overview over parts why that set of custom draws you into it you don't have an overview it's like the complexity of your own brain you can wander around in it but you're not
00:48:19
taking a step back and there are many tools who kind of try to give you the impression of having an overview and this rather works by pulling you into
00:48:31
these already existing lines of thoughts so I I don't think it it works for that another question do you think wiki can
00:48:45
walk as you're smart knocked bookshelf sorry Ricky do you think a wiki can do the trick for you yeah I think the main difference there is that you don't have
00:48:57
these note sequences which are the main feature so all links are kind of the same but the the main feature of the subtle Caston is that you're branching
00:49:09
out ideas and follow up on that so you can always come back to them and the moment all links are kind of equal you you lose that and it's more than again
00:49:23
about storing information than about developing thoughts I'm sorry but we have to close the session to start the next session in time so thank you all
00:49:36
and thank you sir [Music]
End of transcript