Thoughts on open notebooks, research, and social media

I remember thinking over a decade ago how valuable it would be if researchers kept open notebooks (aka digital commonplace books) like the one Kimberly Hirsh outlines in her article Dissertating in the Open: Keeping a Public Research Notebook. I'd give my right arm to have a dozen people in research areas I'm interested in…

👓 Dissertating in the Open: Keeping a Public Research Notebook | Kimberly Hirsh

Read Dissertating in the Open: Keeping a Public Research Notebook by Kimberly HirshKimberly Hirsh (Kimberly Hirsh)
I’m making a few notes to myself here to document my process for keeping a public research notebook. They might be of interest to you, too. First, I’m talking here mostly about keeping up with the literature. There are (in my opinion obvious) ethical implications of actually sharing your data on...

Reply to Open Science notebooks | Ryan Barrett

Replied to a post by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)
Notebooks like Jupyter and Observable are great for research, data science, and really any interactive computing or documentation. I want to start using them for ops/SRE projects too. Thomas Kluyver‘s bash_kernel works, but has lots of rough edges. Anyone have any other ideas?
I've been watching that space for a few years. Apparently you saw the same article push them into the broader mainstream consciousness. I would mention Mathematica, but you're certainly aware of it. There are a few other math-related platforms I've used, but I suspect they're not within the realm you're looking for. I've seen one or…

Following Open Pedagogy Notebook

Followed Open Pedagogy Notebook (http://openpedagogy.org/)

Sharing Practices, Building Community

There are many ways to begin a discussion of “Open Pedagogy.” Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions: What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?

“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.

👓 What Open Education Taught Me | Open Pedagogy Notebook

Read What Open Education Taught Me by Jaime MarshJaime Marsh (Open Pedagogy Notebook)
A Keene State College undergraduate reflects on her experiences with Open Education:
So…for those of you just joining me on this 16 week journey through Tropical Marine Biology (and our 9 day trip to Turks and Caicos in 2 days), you might be wondering what all these blog posts are about, and why are we doing them? As a junior, and incoming senior studying Biology at Keene State College, several of my teachers have changed their teaching philosophy to open education. Open education is the philosophy and belief that people, even the world should produce, share, and build on knowledge that everyone has access to. It is believed that open education will promote a higher quality education and community that has been so limited by the textbook companies and licenses.
Nice student-written piece about open pedagogy within her biology program. Nice to see that the author has her own website where she also owns a copy of this article. Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia ...it is okay. YOU choose what YOU want to learn, and how YOU want to do it, and when YOU want to…

Vocabulary notebooks, Criminally Insane Asylum Patients, Zettelkasten, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and Digital Dictionaries

A Sixth Grade Vocabulary Notebook The sixth grade language arts class at the school in Altadena, CA, which my daughter attends, has a weekly set of vocabulary exercises which they keep in a simple composition notebook. Each week the teacher picks two vocabulary words (eg: passage, intelligent) and throughout the week the students fill in…

📺 Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo | YouTube

Watched Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo by Michael NielsenMichael Nielsen from YouTube

Michael Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text in the field, a text which is now one of the twenty most highly cited physics books of all time. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His research contributions include involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine's Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998. Michael was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico, and has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Queensland, and as a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Michael left academia to write a book about open science, and the radical change that online tools are causing in the way scientific discoveries are made.

Sadly this area of science hasn't opened up as much as it likely should have in the intervening years. More scientists need to be a growing part of the IndieWeb movement and owning their own data, their content, and, yes, even their own publishing platforms. With even simple content management systems like WordPress researchers can…

A Zettelkasten, Commonplace Books, and Note Taking Collection

Below I've aggregated a list of some of the longer articles and material I've written about these topics. The completist can find and search my site for even more specific material with these tags: zettelkasten, commonplace books, and note taking. I've also contributed a fair amount to the Wikipedia pages for zettelkasten and commonplace books. …

👓 Interviewing my digital domains | W. Ian O’Byrne

Read Interviewing my digital domains by W. Ian O'ByrneW. Ian O'Byrne (W. Ian O'Bryne)

Alan Levine recently posted a series of questions to help others think through some of thoughts and motivations as we develop and maintain a domain of our own.

I’ve written a lot about this in the past, and I’ll try to include some links to content/posts as I respond to the prompts. This is a bit long as I get into the weeds, so consider yourself warned.

And now…let’s get to it…

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia Having a domain is important to me as I research, develop, and teach. Highlight (yellow) added on June 21, 2018 at 09:07AM example of a domain as thinking out loud or thought spacesblogging as thinking This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have.…

Learning Typewriter Maintenance and Repair

So you want to be a typewriter mechanic?  As some typewriter collectors have realized there is a typewriter revolution going on out there. This means that there's a growing need for people who can clean, maintain, repair, and restore typewriters. If this sounds like something you're interested in doing, there are a huge number of…
"I'm always trying to get back to the 20s a little bit." —John Dickerson, in Field Notes interview (2016)  Perhaps lamenting too much technology, Dickerson says he's got two screens on the computer in his office as well as an iPad and a phone. But he's also got "a notebook [that] does only one thing".…
I'm now a full two years into using my variation of the Memindex/Bullet Journal on index cards and starting a third. I still find 4 x 6 inch index cards more freeing and flexible than using the more common notebook format. One big difference since a year ago: I've moved into using a significantly bigger…

Knowledge management practices on romantic display in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Given that George Eliot had her own commonplace book, it's fascinating but not surprising to see a section of prose about note taking and indexing practices in Middlemarch (set in 1829 to 1832 and published in 1871-1872) literally as the romance story is just beginning to brew. [Naturally a romance with index cards at its…

Steelcase 8 Drawer Steel Card Index Filing Cabinet for 4 x 6 inch cards

Maybe I didn't have enough filing space for index cards yet? Maybe it was because the price was too alluring to resist? Maybe it was because of the stunning black and grey powder coat? Maybe it was because I didn't have any serious Steelcase in my atomic era furniture collection yet? Maybe it was the…

Book Club on Cataloging the World and Index, A History of the

Dan Allosso has been hosting a regular book club for a few years centered around sense making, note taking, and topics like economics, history, and anthropology. Our next iteration over the coming month or so will focus on two relatively recent books in the area of intellectual history and knowledge management: Wright, Alex. Cataloging the…