Massimo Curatella

Tag: personal knowledge management

  • Annotating Podcasts and Connecting Contextually

    I find stimulating to take voice notes while listening to podcasts. Not only do I highlight, paraphrase and summarize the most relevant parts but I connect immediately with whatever comes to my mind by association or contrast. I am walking, I cannot (or I find uneasy to) check my notes, so the connections are coming from my memory. But the kind of interpretation and connection that I do is particularly satisfying.

    I take notes directly in my real-time voice transcriber. Problem: I am outdoor so the transcription is only 90% good and, in the end, the notes are longer than the podcast duration. I will never find the time to listen back to what I captured, moreover, I should listen carefully to fix all the mistranscribed words.

    I would call that a partial success. I am looking to improve this knowledge capturing workflow because I like how it started, I don’t like how it ends.

    352/365

  • The Knowledge Creations Process

    Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.

    Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.

    But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.

    And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?

    This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.

    I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.

    How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?

  • Talking to my future self about my knowledge

    There will be a time in the future when I will have organized part of my knowledge. I will be able to point at it as a tangible artifact and say, look, here is my book|website|course|software. I will feel proud although still not completely satisfied. It might be the moment when I will realize how much I have waited for that and I will ask myself: why didn’t I start earlier?

    338/365.

  • Checklists to Pursue Learning Goals

    These are checklists to make my learning workflow tangible.

    Learning goal preparation checklist

    1. What’s your most important learning goal?
    2. What’s the most relevant source related to (1)?
    3. Identify the most useful content from the source in (2).
    4. Plan deep study of content in (3).

    Deep study checklist

    1. Why have you selected this content?
    2. How is this related to your learning goal?
    3. What is your expectation from studying this content?
    4. What other questions can you ask related to reading this content?
    5. Read quickly by skimming and getting a sense of what the whole piece is about.
    6. Identify those areas more relevant to your learning goal.
    7. Read a second time, carefully, slowly. Check the meaning of words you don’t know.
    8. Highlight those parts that are catching your attention. Rewrite the concept with your own words and keep track of the source.
    9. Collect all notes taken on this content.
    10. Review the notes, one by one, and add them to your Personal Knowledge Base.
    11. Create a plan to retrieve the key concepts expressed in the notes you’ve captured and test yourself against carefully craftef questions.

  • Note-Taking Liberates You from Your Moods

    Note-taking allows you to separate your current mood from the idea you want to capture. If you have a commitment to write at a certain time, in a certain context, you are slave to the context. You might not feel like writing, you might have no ideas, you might want to do something else. And, since you are human, aren’t you, you are profoundly affected by that context.

    Note-taking, instead, allows you to capture the essence of your thoughts, observations and considerations and store them. If you deem it meaningful you can still save the mood of the time you took that note, but it would become a record, like many others you can have. And you can choose, when it’s finally time to write, if you want on the spur of the moment or if you want to carefully select your idea from the catalogue.

  • Contextual Paraphrasing Must Be Done Early

    Paraphrasing a concept is a way to extract knowledge while interpreting its meaning. It promotes understanding, memorization, and thus learning. The rewriting should happen immediately after the annotation to maximize leveraging the freshly acquired context. It becomes less efficient and practical to collect highlights first and then trying to make sense of them and finally rewriting them. That means reading much slower than just going over the text while quickly taking notes. But it means also saving time in rereading and reinterpreting the context after the superficial first iteration. Further rereading is still useful, by understanding better and better the concept expressed by the author we open up the possibilities for connection and even deeper understanding.

    Paraphrasing contextually requires a change of habit if you are used to reading quickly and highlight what interests you. You still have to reread the source but it makes you more effective and efficient when you stop, make an effort to interpret what caught your attention, and rewrite it with your words into notes to add to your archive.

    Article 324.

  • Note-Taking is Personal

    Summarizing an article means compressing information. If I am able to reduce an article to a summary, annotated and I can efficiently remember what’s in it, I should be able to read my summary and throw away the source. But besides filler words or elaborated ways of conveys meaning, when I am summarizing I am interpreting that content. So I need an intention. I should have clarified the reason why I am reading that source and what I want to do with the knowledge I can extract from it. So a summary can never be universal, each reader will do their own version of their summary and their notes. That’s also why the value of personal notes is limited unless you are annotating for specific public and you are curating the readability and the consistency of your notes.

  • Reviewing Notes While Deep Reading

    At the of of the first chapter, in the book I am deep reading, I have more questions than answers. Besides the internal ones, related to the treatment the author reserved for the topic, I have a lot of external questions. Or, at least, questions pushing towards comparisons, similarities, counterarguments: ways of connecting notes. That is, finally, the place where I can reference my notes: where did I write about the mentioned topics? Who wrote about something similar? How can I debate the author’s position? This is an inspiring context to review and connect my collection of thoughts and references.

    I am going slow, rather slower than usual. But I feel close to the knowledge shared by this chapter’s author. It’s taking me several days and it’s like having a continuous conversation with what I read and what I can connect. I feel less rushed towards complete the book and passing the next one. Although I am now in the critical stage of reviewing my notes and rereading, where needed, the related passages (the place where usually I get lost), I enjoy the sensation of a close encounter with other minds, carefully and accurately considering what they have to say.

    And I like it.

    This is my daily post 316.

  • Un-Hoarding

    Accumulating open tabs in your Web browser can be a waste of time. Will you ever read it later? Worst is if you save it in a list to be read somewhere in time. It’s better to save immediately any web clipping according to the potential action you can take over it. Reading it is only the first step, what did catch your attention about it? You should archive it or better extract the bits you deem relevant to be found again in a specific place related to a specific project or action. It is still an illusion of productivity and a “who know when it will be useful” so you need to create a workflow where you are continuously reviewing and reorganizing your notes according to their purpose. When should you do that? Each time you find something useful and you want to archive it. Leave the note better than how you found it.

  • Deep Reading: Authors and Sources

    I am starting to have a good pace with my private writing practice. Early morning, instead of late at night. I decided to pick a book and to slowly, accurately and deeply read it page by page. By going slow I was able to collect so many questions and connections that I got already a lot of inspiration. Even before getting into the first chapter.

    Checking the background of the authors give a sense on their authority on the subject. When it’s an anthology or a collection of already published essays, it helps to trace it back to the original source. How is the collection curated? Are those the best articles? Is it worth it to find the original publications of to follow in their next issues? It’s a great way to gather sources around the book topic.

    It’s useful to compile lists of the mentioned authors and books. They can be cross-referenced or selected to be read when you want to go deeper.

    It’s also important to put the book in the context of the time when it was published. How was it relevant? How is it considered today, if it is not recent? The publications at the source of the selected essays are still published today? What’s their reputation.

    I’ve only read the introduction and I feel like I’ve learned a lot.