Collaborative Note-taking

Collaborative Note Taking

> Goal: everyone takes notes as experts speak so when they present copious materials, the information gets organized and upgraded to digestible and high quality form - curriculum that can be the substance of further progress including formalized training programs.

Team

Marcin, Paul, David.

What Has Been Tried

Paul asked the organizing question: "What do we want as the final result of collaborative note-taking?"

Below are methods that were tried, what our goal for each was, and analysis of what could be improved.

Paul proposed a fourth visual method to several of the methods and propose a post processing.

The visual method could be enhanced also by collecting learner videos summarizing the learning. Or during instruction, take breaks in the learning and ask someone to volunteer a summary, commented on by the presenter. It likely is faster and helps in the learning itself to direct the need for explanation or detail.

Learning Process Method - LPM

> Goal: create learner independent notes (usable beyond individual) & start a curriculum outline

The format (need a link) with (the 14 questions) is intended to form the content for the instructional design step. We use it with students to build their self-regulated learning, too, so the learning process becomes visible and develops metacognition. The obstacle, I realize now, is the students need more time and supporting resources to make it work. They need coaching on the method, too. A reference for the instructional design usage with an overview of the process and comparison to other models is here: [1] Cornell Method (capture, process, extend knowledge)

Cornell note taking method done in parallel

> goal: make collaboration possible with the google tool (doc or presentation), supported by prompts, resulting in at least a record of what students are thinking with insight for presenter into the learning being done

,,! Add link to the template.

Appears to depend on whether there are shared concepts enough to collaborate plays strongly here. If students simply answered questions their own way in parallel, it would help. They could take an extra step of harmonizing after the event, but only if they're motivated and it would improve their learning and the utility of the result. See the bottom of the email for the 5Rs of the method for a good summary that shows the need to work after recording information.

Morse Code Method

> goal: identify and create useful notes while not slowing down during lecture/demonstration.

,,! Add link to the template.

The morse code method of Cal Newport relies on the transcript of the video. The note taker listens/reads and mark main points with a dot and supporting points with a dash. This is the fastest. Like the other methods, it requires going back over the material.

Visual Note Taking

> goal: produce learning summary

Same general approach as Morse Code but with faster capture in meeting environment by using screen shots and time stamps as the dots and dashes, saved to a collaborative document.

5R Post Processing of Notes

> goal: add value to notes by revision and enhancement

The LPM builds in the progressive learning/summarization steps. For the rest, Cornell,  Morse, and the Paul Visual method, post processing is required and could all be the 5Rs: Record: During the lecture, write all meaningful information legibly.Reduce: After the lecture, write a summary of the ideas and facts using key words as cue words. Summarizing as you study helps to:Clarify meanings and relationships of ideasReinforce continuityStrengthen memory retentionPrepare for exams in advanceRecite: To study properly, you must recite all the information in your own words without looking at our notes or the text.Reflect: Think about your own opinions and ideas as you read over your notes. Raise questions, then try to answer them creatively. Record original ideas in your notebook and review them regularly. Use your creative ideas when answering exam questions, in classroom discussions, and when writing papers.Review: Before reading or studying new material, take ten minutes to quickly review your older notes. Skim over the main ideas and details. Review enhances your retention of old material while adding new material to your memory. - Pauk, W. (1989). How to Study in College (4th Ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Other Resources

35 Tools for Online Brainstorming and Decision Making in Meetings (2020 update

The bottom line for OSE purposes is a recommendation for small groups using almost open software with minimal training is to use google docs and consider looking at etherpad for an open solution.

Academic Papers

• Almusharraf, N. M., Costley, J., & Fanguy, M. (2020). The Effect of Postgraduate Students’ Interaction with Video Lectures on Collaborative Note-Taking. Journal of Information Technology Education, 19, 639–654. https://doi.org/10.28945/4581
• Orndorff, H. N., III. (2015). Collaborative Note-Taking: The Impact of Cloud Computing on Classroom Performance. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 27(3), 340–351.
• Wetcho, S., & Na-Songkhla, J. (2020). A Proposed Framework of Online Collaborative Note-Taking Strategy in Self-Regulation Learning to Promote Instructional Design Practice for Preservice Teacher. Distance Learning, 17(1), 1–11.
• Yang, Y.-F., & Lin, Y.-Y. (2015). Online collaborative note-taking strategies to foster EFL beginners’ literacy development. System, 52, 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2015.05.006

History

On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 6:32 AM

Paul Cuciureanu <paulcu@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe, to help us reason towards a solution... Imagine we had a working solution, that generated the best notes, the best collaboration, and the best reproducible results How would we know we have a good solution? The end state is murky for me.

Could cheatsheets for prep on an upcoming exam (a kind of highly distilled 1-page format) be the target? In my experience, these are terrible for sharing with others, only the person who handwrote the thing can usually make sense of it, and find out what's where to use when needed fast, to replicate a concept or procedure during an exam.

Feels like the wiki acts like Marcin's brainstorm and a collection of synthesised cheatsheets

Another solution might be to do away with words and notetake diagrams and images only, to increase the bandwidth of information being transmitted, and relax the "linear" language brain AR for IRL building?

In the Dreyfus nursing model re: skill acquisition, they talk about pairing experts with competent people, and beginners with competent folks, and never beginners with experts, probably because of the too-large intuition/models differences

David, your notes, and framework, if it were used/practiced, the artifacts would be an input to what next step?

On Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 1:04 AM

David Leasure <davidleasure@gmail.com> wrote:

I need to check the notes to see if they are getting filled in. My guess is no. One of the problems is taking notes live and capturing the thoughts if one doesn’t have a model. (An example at a simpler level or an abstract framework.) Novices need models to understand something as cognitively complex as what’s being presented. Experienced people don’t need a model because their experiences can be pulled into memory and find places for the new concepts, or at least take notes on the questions they have when things don’t fit. If we could give a short big picture view before the details, that would help. It would be nice if the capture that in notes and fill in the framework as details go. Models may exist in the wiki. That is where the wiki linking could help, but would require the software as you suggest or a dedicated searcher who could add the links into the notes real time. However, that won’t be enough without the framework. Another way to do it is have the topics up front before the next day, read the files or the wiki, and apprentices be prepared with questions. In a really important work Lave Wenger wrote about “legitimate peripheral participation” for apprentices. The work they were learning to do was legitimate contributions, but simpler. It was structured for incremental skill building so that concrete work was being done, but never overwhelmed the learners. That’s the part that’s “peripheral” since it starts at the edge of expertise and moves to the center. Start with cutting pipe, threading it, then doing the joints, then measuring, designing solutions, planning, estimating, getting inspected, etc. it scaffolds the learning from simpler to more conceptual with the physical experience being the foundation for learning. I’m sorry I didn’t remember that work sooner. It would be a solution, too. Are there things coming up that could be structured that way? One other thing is the idea of learning from failure. That’s where learners are given a task that is just beyond their reach so that they see their existing knowledge is inadequate and they become ready to learn more quickly because they willingly unlearn. This is used in the better physics classes, now. 

Finally, if there’re videos they could watch with transcripts, that’s what made note taking easier for me. I did that with day 14, I think. It takes discipline, too, but can make a lesson from a video with a little effort, but only for more experienced or trained learners. I pulled a few articles on collaborative note taking and need to process their lessons and outcomes, but the gist was frustration with the results. David 

On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 21:24

Marcin Jakubowski <marcin@opensourceecology.org> wrote: Can you propose a solution to the low context issue?

On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 4:05 PM

Paul Cuciureanu <paulcu@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey David - did you see an uptick in usage for your note taking framework? Sometimes I Google image search on the side to give me context of what's being discussed, presented I wonder if we can setup a more powerful (read: type-ahead predictive instant) search for the OSE wiki, so that we can bring up relevant wiki pages quickly for editing as Marcin and the team refine concepts

Imagine there were 2 Marcins, one would innovate with the group, and add a conceptual delta to the knowledge graph, the other would actually connect the dots to the existing wiki paragraphs, create pages, and cross-link just-now edited-in content Of course this is not possible because we don't have 2 Marcins that know and understand each others' contexts, but can we get some part of the way there with, say, 2 equivalent groups that work well together, or can be trained to work well together? I think part of the problem is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures

The 2-Marcins conception would be on the high-context culture end of the spectrum, where they can iterate on small deltas of knowledge creation fast, without needing to explain to each other what they mean by different things, repeatedly.

This anthropological insight at least seems to suggest that an individual can become more situationally and context aware, if only by at least joining a different context culture, and learning that language; which might take some time. If that's true, then Marcin's impatience with apprentices "not getting real-time collaborative note taking" is not justified. There are plenty effective techniques to learn languages fast (Michel Thomas, mnemonics, spaced rep, immersion, direct instruction), most Americans seem oblivious to this idea, being mostly English-only speakers. But I suspect this will be less of an issue once OSE becomes more global, because the majority of the world is at least bilingual. This is at best an analogous explanation of the challenge we think we have. What would be a first-principles based explanation?

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:03 PM

David Leasure <davidleasure@gmail.com> wrote: Yes, slides have their own advantages, especially if people are used to the UI. I posted up the notes doc until day 21 and added an index for all 120 days. I can look at the slide approach and we can try it. To the point of where to start?, the slide notes and lectures should be collecting all the important docs a beginning designer needs to see and capture a guide on how to work between them.

David

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:44 AM Marcin Jakubowski <marcin@opensourceecology.org> wrote: "Part of the answer is what’s in it for the note takers? My answer is you have a world expert teaching things few if any people know, so here’s how you can make the most of that opportunity to become powerful yourself. Doing it collaboratively elevates the impact an order of magnitude. Oh, you also leave a trail for others to follow, Trailblazers (Lewis and Clark?)" How do we operationalize this insight?  "no specific interaction about the daily content on Discord, Marcin tends not to participate (any reason? I see chat as a low-fi form of documentation)" Confusing interface, and it is likely ephemeral, and not open data because it's not open source. I favor eternal, searchable, open source databases/platforms such as the wiki as I'm it this for the the next 500 years. "- on one day people claimed a docs slide by putting their name up top; I believe this was the nail in the coffin of collab documentation :-)" Bring this up next time. "I'm also working with the assumption that the knowledge *is* somewhere on the wiki, eventually findable - perhaps other folks feel the same way?" Anything that comes out of my mouth is on the wiki, except what comes out of my mouth has more value added as I always iterate on knowledge and its expression. This is the core of why I want people to take notes!!!!!!!!!!!!! The whole point here that I can't get across is incremental improvement of content. "If someone were to reproduce the self-organizing experience at another location, would they watch the recordings, copy the collaborative tech-stack, read the synthesized documentation, and/or bring one of the past-participants to the new site to demonstrate the workflow in person?"

They would want to watch as much as they can handle, otherwise they are reinventing the wheel. That is common: I bring stuff up, then it comes out as a question because people didn't see the recorded content. This fails at time-binding. "I didn't see the mob session (but I've done mobbing in the past), why not mob on docs? (Saw some comments from people appreciating the experience, in Discord)" What do you mean by that? Isn't that exactly what I'm asking for? "Or is it peer-designers trying to understand our design decisions,"

Documentation is for designers, aiming at converting an average citizen into a designer. We will never attain democracy without such public capacity, I think. Paul, try to take David's template and use it with us? Or David? First, we need to paste it into slides, not docs, as slides is more flexible, no? On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 9:34 PM Paul Cuciureanu <paulcu@gmail.com> wrote: The focus on speed note taking reminded me of: https://dynalist.io/ (steeper learning curve due to the many shortcuts: it's a list of lists of lists... an infinite tree where you can also link to any other branch, Wikipedia style)

I like the open ended questions in the template because they spark a reflection-first note taking habit

From my conversation with Jean/Yann today I understood the target audience for this documentation might be first-time builders(?)

Or is it peer-designers trying to understand our design decisions, or ADRs?

Or is it builders trying to engage deeper with the design+build process?

Builders seem to care about step-by-step instructions and BOMs? Hard for me to connect with this group, it seems they need to be able to validate the docs by building the documented artifact on their own (no videos?) On Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 2:24 PM David Leasure <davidleasure@gmail.com> wrote: Paul and Marcin, Here's a collaborative template that tries to improve over the one we have: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Me-KIRyYxuyOh2dWm7IHJF7f76iZTqABYIB_aOH1jPQ/edit?usp=sharing  Features:Has a big notes column for quick, multi-contributor notes and uses number list with indent/outdent keystroke commands -- it's in landscape mode Has a questions column that allows a designated person or persons to fill in answers to the questions using the notes; the questions prompt reflection based on increasing Bloom's levels for higher order thinking Has a navigation bar on the left (enable with view>show outline)Includes unstructured space for screenshots, links, etc.Has a process described at endDavid Topic: Recorders:Interpreters:Editors:Date:Link to Resources:Describe this topicWhat makes this topic important? What does knowing the topic enable us to do?What new terms are used?What are some related topics?What are some examples of its use?What is its most important use? Describe the process of using it. What would make it more valuable?What questions need answered?How do we demonstrate we know it?What would make the wiki or these notes more complete?Notes (for speed, use bullets and ctl-[ or cmd-[ to outdent and ctl-] or cmd-] to indent)

Supplemental Screenshots, Pictures, Web-resources Process:Identify a major topic and copy this template into a doc to take notes on itName the doc by its topicWork together as a team on the document filling in the notes, screenshots, links, wiki links, and web resources; designate recorders who take notes and interpreters who document the answers to the questions in the left column of the table; keep the roles flexible - anyone can work in either column or at the endAppoint two editors who will edit the answers in the left column the same day after the note taking session Don’t duplicate a wiki entry if one exists, just link to it and propose what could be added

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:37 AM David Leasure <davidleasure@gmail.com> wrote: Paul,That's helpful perspective. Am I safe to assume mobbiing is everyone contributing? Also, the gdocs interface is partly clumsy from supporting on the wiki vs. a liink directly to the file. What if we had direct links at least during creation and a shared directory through OSE to host them? Marcin, I also wondered if the template which came from a tool for individual use could be more collaboration friendly and will take a crack at it. One other possibility is having a captain, reviewer, and contributor roles identified. It's a bit anti-mobbing, but has worked for me in the past to create a single point of contact for a given set of results. Finally, notes of a lecture may be better as micro topics rather than a monolithic document. People could sign up for the micro-topic, make sure (to your point, Paul) that any links into the wiki are found, and do the incremental additions, either in the wiki itself, or in a proposed enhancement. if no wiki entry, then they're creating it. An advantage is that when you hit a topic multiple times, it lets a small group of people own a thread all the way through the 120 days. Then the captain or recorder could make the daily notes as a set of links to the micro-topics.  Maybe it sounds more complicated than it is, because I just see simple note taking for your talk in one document, then breaking apart the pieces as they are discovered to pull into a parallel micro-topic doc that is reviewed, linked, and cleaned. David On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 8:54 AM Paul Cuciureanu <paulcu@gmail.com> wrote: What I saw so far was: - initial daily notes guide the daily discussion (maybe that's enough notes?)- some struggling with the gdocs interface (it's less trivial to use than it looks)- video recording of entire day made me feel like if I missed anything, I can always go back, which I never do (don't know the link, also didn't feel the need to review since I'm participating part-time)- no syllabus, rather it's a self-organizing evolving process, IMO this is a fantastic win (hard to beat self-organization)- excellent diverse conversations on Discord, lots of info being shared by many people (I don't know what the on-site vs. remote breakdown is); no specific interaction about the daily content on Discord, Marcin tends not to participate (any reason? I see chat as a low-fi form of documentation)- on one day people claimed a docs slide by putting their name up top; I believe this was the nail in the coffin of collab documentation :-)

I'm also working with the assumption that the knowledge *is* somewhere on the wiki, eventually findable - perhaps other folks feel the same way?

If someone were to reproduce the self-organizing experience at another location, would they watch the recordings, copy the collaborative tech-stack, read the synthesized documentation, and/or bring one of the past-participants to the new site to demonstrate the workflow in person?

I didn't see the mob session (but I've done mobbing in the past), why not mob on docs? (Saw some comments from people appreciating the experience, in Discord) On Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 9:13 AM David Leasure <davidleasure@gmail.com> wrote: Marcin,Anecdotally, a study long ago showed that 30% of info is captured and 20% of that is correct. I think the threshold on correct was too high, but nonetheless, it represented average ug note taking skills. I view this activity more like knowledge engineering: how do I capture the powerful concepts, relate them to what we know, make the usable for my problems, and even elevate them for greater impact. I had the advantage of the transcript of the video when filling out my template. That let me take the little bit of extra time to think about what you said and translate it to the place in the template. I will try to simplify the template down to smallest useful form. Then I will make a short video on purpose and technique. Part of the answer is what’s in it for the note takers? My answer is you have a world expert teaching things few if any people know, so here’s how you can make the most of that opportunity to become powerful yourself. Doing it collaboratively elevates the impact an order of magnitude. Oh, you also leave a trail for others to follow, Trailblazers (Lewis and Clark?) David

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 05:12 Marcin Jakubowski <marcin@opensourceecology.org> wrote: Paul and David,

So far collaborative notetaking remains but a dream:

Goal: everyone takes notes as I speak so when I go through copious materials, this gets organized and upgraded to digestible and high quality form - currriculum that can be the substance of further progress including formalized training programs.

Reality: Collaborative notetaking is not happening after multiple invitations. Not only that, I am repeating myself multiple times - people do not recall critical info - and only a trickle of information is being transferred. I completely do not get why people are not able to take notes. This is basics. Is this the reality of modern internet culture where people have limited focus? Or am I forogetting that there is a large skill set required for this task?

Please fill me in on what I am missing and what we could do. My hope is that by the end of the Apprenticeship, we are upgrading my knowledge to increasingly clear communication. This should not only be about knowledge transfer, but knowledge distillation. It's possible.  What is missing to make it happen? MJ