Notes

Rambling blog post alert: there isn’t a simple, straightforward way to tell the story of how I use Obsidian. This is going to be a bit of a winding post as I start to describe my setup and workflow. And there will be gaps because a) I don’t have time to write an omnibus description of this and b) you don’t want to read that anyway. I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but kept getting stuck by the scale of what was needed. So, forget that, here’s a first and incomplete blog post to get it started…

I’ve been using digital notebooks for many, many years. Everything was in Evernote, until it wasn’t. Then I used Noteshelf for the great ink. Then I used OneNote for the organization and even better ink. All along, I’ve kept a series of paper notebooks, which I’ve found myself using more often in the last couple of years ¹. And, our campus IT had been making somewhat-arbitrary changes to configuration involving OneDrive (and therefore OneNote) that made me uncomfortable continuing to keep The Sum of My Digital Notes™ in one basket that was configured by people with a track record of changing things without consultation ². I’ve moved my OneNote notebooks to my personal account, and am starting fresh in Notes. I’ve been using Notes (mostly on my phone) for trivial notes-in-passing for years, but the app has been improved a lot in the last year or so, with many more improvements about to drop.

Gehl, R.W. (2013). What’s on your mind? Social media monopolies and noopower. First Monday. 18(3).

On noopower¹ through marketing and repetition extended into ubiquitous social media:

Operating within the larger political economy of advertising-supported media, it is not surprising that Facebook, Google, and Twitter mirror marketing’s penchant for experimentation and repetition. Software engineers working for these firms pore over data about what actions users most commonly take — that is, what is most often repeated within the architectures of the sites. These engineers then constantly tweak their interfaces, APIs, and underlying software to reinforce these actions and to produce (they hope) new ones. The tiny changes in the Google homepage, for example, are akin to ripples on the surface of a body of water caused by motion deep underneath, as software engineers seek to increase the attention and productivity of users of these sites.

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The potential for thinking through new re–combinations, new ways to draw up code and language into a new media politics are suggestive. But I want finally to return to the question this article began with: more or less? This text has been framed by a belief that social media monopolies ought to be disrupted — and in the name of at least two of the things they are axiomatically understood to promote (social justice, solidarity as a form of community) and do not. It has been argued that this disruption might be attempted through a toolset — silence, disruption of language, and the exploitation of language's capacity for polysemy (the metaphor and the lie) — that is not often considered as apt for such a task. My conclusion, and here I return to salute Ivan Illich, is that these tools can be deployed to produce other kinds of more convivial engagements — a better commons — than our apparently ‘social' media enable. Above all, I have wished to take seriously the idea that communication density, and increasing communicational volume, does not — in and of itself — indicate more understanding, freedom, openness, or ‘good'. To make this case demands also taking seriously the idea of a media politics that begins with silence.

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I've been doing most of my work on an iPad for a couple of months now, and have finally come up with a workflow that fits how I do things. I had initially been typing notes directly into Evernote, which is awesome and extremely useful, but the flow of notes felt entirely too linear. I tend to wander a bit, and come back to things later. Typing notes into a document felt too constraining.

Carpenter, E. & McLuhan, M. (1956) The new languages. Chicago Review. 10(1) pp. 46-52.

on the format of newspapers, and the effect on perception:

The position and size of articles on the front page is determined by interest and importance, not content. Unrelated reports… are juxtaposed; time and space are destroyed and the here and now are presented as a single Gestalt. … Such a format lends itself to simultaneity, not chronology or lineality. Items abstracted from a total situation are not arranged in causal sequence, but presented in association, as raw experience.

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Coulthard, M. (1974). Approaches to the analysis of classroom interaction. Educational Review. 26(3). pp 229 - 240.

On directing discourse:

Participants with equal rights and status, as in everyday conversation, negotiate in very subtle and complex ways for the right to speak, to control the direction of the discourse and to introduce new topics. We therefore determined to reduce the number of variables by choosing a situation in which one of the participants has an acknowledged right to decide who will speak, when they will speak, what the topic of the discourse will be, and the general lines along which it will progress. The classroom was an ideal situation.

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wherein I repeatedly use "affect" instead of "effect." oops.

At CeLC 2010, there was a session on various bits of technologies, and how McLuhan’s 4 laws of media apply to them - what does the technology enhance, retrieve, obsolesce, and reverse? One of the presenters ended up talking about how the ability of profs to post their lectures online - whether through the .ppt files, podcasting, or some other format - made the act of note taking by students obsolete.

This struck me at the time as a gross oversimplification. Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sensemaking and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking. There is no part of the valuable process of note taking that can be obsolesced by mere content being posted online.

Hara, N., Bonk, C.J., & Angeli, C. (2000). Content analysis of online discussion in an applied educational psychology course. Instructional science. 28(2). pp. 115-152

The study looked at a graduate-level psychology course that used online discussion as a core graded activity. The researchers looked at:

1. student participation rates
2. electronic participation patterns (what form of interaction takes place when led by students? does it change over time?)
3. social cues within the messages (“it’s my birthday.” etc…)
4. cognitive & metacognitive components of student messages
5. depth of processing - surface or deep - within message posts

While we were ultimately interested in how a community of learning can be built using online discussion, this study was more specifically focused on the social and cognitive processes exhibited in the electronic transcripts as well as the interactivity patterns among the students.

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I'm working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn't read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

Notes for week 2 of David Wiley's Intro to Open Education course at Utah State University, on Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation.

I think I'm definitely falling down on the academic rigour of my responses - I should be providing a much deeper response, rather than just barfing out some thoughts and questions. I'll try to pick it up for week 3.

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The following are my notes made while reading the first 3 articles for the Open Education course facilitated by David Wiley. The reading list (and links to the original articles) is available at the course wiki page. (I'll clean up the categories/tags asap, but the course wiki and David's blog are down at the moment, so I don't have the exact course tags handy right now...)

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