I mentioned the notebook/textbook approach in my previous post, so I thought I’d take a minute here to explain it further. The idea is pretty basic, and something a lot of people already do without necessarily calling it that. To me, it’s just an approach to these tools that integrates blogs and wikis into a continual (and transparent, interactive) aspect of learning by:

1. maintaining a blog (or a few blogs) as a “notebook“:¹ a place to record notes and think through their implications, with little concern for whether or not there is an “audience” and without an emphasis on timeliness or polemics
2. maintaining a wiki as a “textbook“: a place to attempt some synthesis of thoughts and ideas over time, with the added benefit of minimizing redundancy and forgetfulness that can happen on a blog

Where the blog tracks fragmented thoughts and hypotheses over time, the wiki attempts to build some cohesive, connected (and still tentative) conclusions.

Certainly, there are more ways to use blogs and wikis, but this personal approach appeals to me right now as I seek to dig deeper into a few topics. I’ll probably be keeping some notes here about how this experiment is going.

1. a thought inspired by Christopher Sessums’ post [back]

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