Incremental, Iterative, Collaborative Book Reading and Note-taking


I had a satisfying experience in annotating a book. Although it’s not the first time I am following this process I feel I am, finally, onto something.
I’ve read the first two parts, about 80 pages, in one week, three times.
The first time I quickly made sense of the book’s topic, its structure, the premise and the author’s stance. The second time I highlighted the interesting parts in Google Play Books and I’ve added, not for all notes, a brief statement about their sense. Since the author hints the content of the chapters ahead I make connections between the initial parts and I can see their pespective.
The third time I get my automatically created Google Doc with with all notes exported and I do a summary reading. This time I copy each note and I paste it into a Mural Canvas.
By positioning each note in cluster and connecting them I started to build a concept map of the book enriched by keywords and comments.

The first reading was quick, the second took me the longest, while the third iteration was very fast and I felt like moving a familiar ground. The highest point of this learning experience was sharing my notes in a call with another person reading the same pages. In less than one hour we had a stellar co-learning sessions, we exchanged notes, considerations connections with adjacent topics. I’ve annotated and integrated in real-time the concep map and we got really excited about the amount of information we were able to do in such short time.

I adore this format, I want to read book in his way in the future. It’s fun, engaging, active and It makes me learn, connect and remember more.


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