MakingHistory

Part 2 of my Reading Notes section, where I try to make the case that good books are much bigger than the notes we make on them, but that we should make notes anyway, using William Cronon's book Nature's Metropolis as an example.

The second installment of my three-parter on my reactions to Sönke Ahrens book, How to Take Smart Notes, covering chapters three through six.

In this one I respond to a half dozen interesting questions asked by listeners. I appreciate the feedback and enjoy the interaction -- I'll plan on doing it again if the questions and comments continue!

As I'm working on my new Note-taking series, I thought I'd review my own notes on Sönke Ahrens very helpful book, How to Take Smart Notes.

In this one I begin talking about turning highlights into reading notes. This can be a time-consuming process, especially when the text is full of good material. In the background, the notes I made on part of Taleb's book Antifragile, while traveling last week.

I just returned home from a short vacation in California to see my parents. Stayed in my father's study while I was visiting. Looked at his books and highlights, walked and talked. The only thing that beats a zettelkasten is a real discussion partner.

Part 3 in my series on Heuristics and Biases, based on Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. This one covers the Anchoring Effect, which not only biases our estimates of numbers, but can affect our ability to perceive new information.

This is the sixth installment in my new Note-taking, Research, Writing handbook and series. I have some suggestions on highlighting and on the types of questions to ask as you are reading and processing a text.

I've just gotten beta access to Research Rabbit and it is a really powerful tool for chasing ideas down rabbit-holes. I used it to find a bunch of articles and monographs is a very short period of time. Super useful!

I've discovered a couple of new apps that I'm excited to try out this summer, to make my online course a little more personal and interactive.

I've decided to use the part of my vault I'm publishing through Obsidian Publish as my public website.

This is the fifth installment in my new Note-taking, Research, Writing handbook and series. I begin talking about sources and then say some things about arguments.

My first experience trying out Obsidian's website publishing tool. I'm pretty pleased with the results and I'll be using it, I think, to do my current big research project "with the garage door open".

Part 2 of my new series on Heuristics and Biases, influenced by recent books by Kahneman and Taleb.

This is the beginning of the first section of my new Note-taking, Research, Writing handbook and series. A lot of people have said "writing is thinking"; I believe thinking should be writing.

A quick demonstration of some of the things I do when making Reading Notes in Obsidian after processing documents using Zotero. Includes a brief tangent into my appreciation of Wikipedia and Hypothesis.

Introduction to a series I'm beginning to describe the heuristics discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow (and also maybe touching on Taleb's Black Swans. Hopefully, installments will follow weekly covering the individual heuristics.

I used an Obsidian Vault in my Modern World History class this semester. It went very well! Here's a quick retrospective on that experiment.

I received an interesting letter from the executive editor at my publisher, which got me thinking again about publishing and looking at the experiences of some folks I know.

This is the first part of a new series I'm going to make, for my expanded update of "A Short Handbook for Writing Essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences", which I'm enhancing to include a lot more content on Note-taking. This will be a video series on YouTube and an audio series here. I'll add a new one weekly for about the next seven months.

A quick description of how I make PDFs and some of the apps I've used to annotate them and share them with my students.

A quick description of how I'm working on filling in the Empty Notes I make in Obsidian, and along the way editing a Wikipedia page.

Some initial thoughts about making the open educational resources I create available to my students (and maybe to the general public?) as Obsidian "Vaults".

How I use private groups in Hypothes.is to create a safe space for students to explore ideas, to focus them on classmates rather than the outside world, and to avoid annotation saturation in texts I assign.

Markus Krajewski's 2013 article, "Paper as Passion", and my process taking the notes and getting them into my workflow.