I'm launching a newsletter: "Networked thought and learning", first issue this Friday. networkedthought.substack.com/p/coming-soon?… I've been incredibly inspired by @RoamResearch, not just the tool, but the community of people who are thinking deeply about note taking, knowledge management, interface
People like @JoelChan86, doing HCI research on synthesis and literature review, @andy_matuschak with his ideas about Evergreen Notes, and integrating spaced repetition with note taking, @nateliason showing us "the way" to write with Roam, @VladyslavSitalo hacking on a Roam plugin
Discussions about Zettelkasten with @ctietze, amazing PhD lit review workflows from @10ch, digging into @Malcolm_Ocean's public Roam DB about personal growth, or maybe exploring #gameb resources, learning stoicism with @shuomi3, and analyzing claims with @acesounderglass
The goal of the newsletter is two-fold. I want it to be an unofficial Roam community update, with links to videos, hacks, discussions and secret features (if you don't have time to obsessively follow Twitter or Slack conversations), but I also want to make it much broader.
I hope to make it interesting for people using completely different tools - discussing tools and interfaces, workflows and approaches, but also going back to the classics - Vannevar Bush and the memex, Doug Englebart, Bret Victor, and what we can learn from different disciplines
What does Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (@bod0ng) have to say about collaboratively constructing knowledge, how is @hypothes_is used by @remikalir to foster a community of learners, how does CSCW study collaboration, how does HCI talk about interfaces @amyhoy
Looking back at some of the projects I've been working on which I still find meaningful (at least as inspiration) - my eventual goal is to curate links and resources in my digital garden, but for now I seem to often email or share links, maybe I should just make a Twitter thread
PhD thesis - designing a collaborative MOOC for teachers on EdX, what can we do _because_ of scale (2000 teachers), and what can we _still_ do _despite_ of scale (groups)
Index: reganmian.net/blog/2017/01/0…
Last year I applied to become a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, and I wrote a four page research statement. These are very difficult to write, and I have no idea if this is good or not - position was cancelled in the end. Thought I'd share drive.google.com/file/d/1NWciJj…
To ensure that rich interactive collaborative learning gains a foothold in universities and
schools, and leads to better learning outcomes, we need to conduct research across different grain sizes, and make connections between separate
disciplines and research approaches.
Of course the only reason I'm sharing this publicly is secretly hoping people will say "Oh my god, they should have hired you. Their loss!"... Mutuals, you know what's expected of you... :)
Experimenting with a way of organizing linked references into useful content in @RoamResearch. This isn't quite Evergreen Notes, but useful to me. I start with a lot of incoming stuff, almost all from Daily Pages. Let's say I've been researching @wikidata.
I open the page in the sidebar, expand the linked references, and begin thinking about how to organize them. I pull them in using mentions (for single blocks) or embeds (for grabbing children too), and begin organizing them in an outline.
As I go along, I add the tag #p whenever I've fully processed a note, and use a filter to remove these. When there are two important tags, and I might want to process the second tag, I instead change from [[Wikidata]] to [[[[Wikidata]]-p]].
I've finally figured out my Instapaper->@RoamResearch workflow. Here's a Chrome plugin github.com/houshuang/inst…, based on the work of @sawyerh and @GeirGulbrandsen. It goes through all the Instapaper pages, and copies all clippings to the clipboard in Roam friendly format.
I've been reading a lot, and putting off the processing. Pasting into Google Docs, I have 82 pages of dense clippings. I start each bullet with the page title, link to the original URL, and a tag so I can easily distinguish clippings from other content.
I can then leisurely process a few inputs every day. Here's an example of some notes from a great article by my colleague Christine Looser medium.com/@celooser/were…. I read this while in transit, or maybe at the playground while my kid was playing. Now I can go back and process.
trigger new associations and insights. Traditionally Anki has been used for more factual questions, but I love Andy's "taxonomy" of cards, where he might ask himself to sing a song, reflect on a metaphor, refute the notion of philosophical zoombies, etc.
On the other hand, @fortelabs's concept of progressive summarization (praxis.fortelabs.co/progressive-su…) is the idea that you first capture things, and then revisit progressively adding structure and refinement. This spacing out in time again improves memory, because you are revisiting