Thread by @calhistorian

Its been 2 years now since I began using Roam regularly... quite remarkable frankly. #roam #TFT

https://twitter.com/calhistorian/status/1459785057124511746?s=20

My PKM journey has been one of significant pedagogical trials and tribulations. I detailed much of it here: roambrain.com/roaming-in-the…

The TL:DR - it began as a search for a single tool to manage my pedagogical development as a college instructor and the curriculum I was developing for the 6 courses that I taught.

Keeping track of assignment templates, instructional techniques, pedagogical experiments, and the massive collection of notes on any given topic from the "history of the holyland" (Southwest Asia) to Post-9/11 U.S. foreign intervention was getting too difficult with random docs.

From Word docs, to Evernote in the early 2000s, to Google Docs and DEVONthink in the early 2010s, to Bear notes after 2016ish - I began to see the significance of the interoperable nature of the knowledge I had scattered in tools and in my head.

I stumbled onto Roam on a DEVONthink forum post in October 2019 but was too deep in the semester. I had been using Bear notes successfully for some time - creating a personal wiki network reminiscent of the local webpages I created in MS FrontPage in the 90s.

In November I decided to take another look at that app I spotted in the forum the month before. I logged in and was instantly transported into an environment where I felt uneasy.

Roam was both familiar and like nothing I had used before. I had a brief relationship with Workflowy (too expensive at that time) and Dynalist (didn't "click for some reason) but Bear Notes had its wiki-linking that I loved from DEVONthink in a nicer package.

But to be frank. I didn't recognize its utility at first. It had wikilinking, bullet-level zooming, and the sidebar. Honestly the selling point was this combination, but especially because I could open x-callback-urls to DEVONthink right in the app.

I had/have an elaborate system by which I use my notes and files as resources for live whiteboard presenting in my classes. And having a more dynamic application AND the ability to open DEVONthink links on my iPad compelled me to switch.

So I did.

The two year since not only enabled a more powerful PKM system to leverage during class, but also on the backend as well in becoming a better instructor.

Further, I became enmeshed in the emerging Tools for Thought community - something I was not aware of prior. I have been on Twitter since 2011, but had limited my interactions to the #digitalhumanities sphere.

That changed quickly. Since switching to Roam, my preference for thinking visualizations and outlining was only fueled further. The block based system of Roam meshed well with my "card-based" note-taking method I had used in college.

https://twitter.com/calhistorian/status/1332890351103741953?s=20

As a historian we were always trained to think in "blocks" - this or that piece of evidence as a piece in a larger puzzle to form a viewport into the past. The pieces were modular, typed, and infinitely varied in composition.

As an instructor of historian, we were little more than story tellers, but those stories were composed of thousands of "blocks" of evidence - memories, histories, and relics - a composite mosaic.

While tools no doubt influence us dramatically, this one in particular created an environment for me to operate and learn in the way that i enjoyed but also an environment that was "computable" in a way that paper or other tools were not.

https://twitter.com/calhistorian/status/1206386935083651072?s=20

The remainder of this story is well documented on Twitter in 2020 and 2021 - collaborations, declarations, arguments, criticisms, and celebrations.

@RoamResearch Thanks for the norm-bending software - a lot of work to go, but the influence on the market has been positive for all involved.

....... 😶 I mean all positive in terms of tool development, we all know about the TFT wars (cc: @NickMilo ) and other not-so-great developments.