I use Obsidian to take conceptual notes, as opposed to sequential notes. This video is a really good resource.
Things I’ve noticed
- I spend way too much time on my notes, like disproportionate to the amount of learning I actually do.
- I have the habit of turning this into a mini-Wikipedia. This is terrible for a lot of reasons, but it’s inefficient as hell and bloaty.
The motivation
I reached a bit of an identity crisis after first year of my undergraduate degree. For the most part in high school, I was able to take detailed notes of the entire curriculum and study off of that — because we had detailed textbooks to work off of.
But in first year of university, things don’t work the same way. Concepts are taught in a way that deviates from the textbook and from other resources. Notion is a nice tool — it’s legitimately well-engineered, but it’s hugely sequential and hard to link concept together.
It was clear that taking notes lecture by lecture wasn’t working. Between high school and university, I was re-learning things I already knew and forgetting what I learned quickly. Taking conceptual notes ensures we don’t have to do this: and that we build solid foundations for future learning.
By creating a system where we can remember things better, and organise information outside of our brains, we allow ourselves to access it as quickly as possible when we need to. This is instead of notes decaying and staying on some Google Drive folder somewhere — and centralises things.
We also build our notes up, and they continue to grow as our own knowledge grows.
The idea
We’re evaluating whether the information is:
- Unimportant
- Self-explanatory
- Easy enough to memorise
So we filter out much of the information we might take in, and note down what is really important. The idea is that as we learn new information, we might want to add onto what we already might have about that topic (or create new notes). Link related ideas together.
Sub-concepts on their own should be kept in separate notes. Examples are good. The video above mentions that instead we should try to predict what the instructor might do next and take note of where things deviate, so that we observe what might be unintuitive for us.
What’s the point? This promotes active learning and questions happen in real time. We also get to link things together, and continue to build off of what we learned before.
Concepts also don’t exist solely within their subjects. Some concepts can help explain topics in other subjects, and by connecting things together we avoid limiting our thinking. Notetaking in concepts takes the context we learn them away from the notes — i.e., by taking linked lists out of APS105 understanding, we can continue to expand outside of that scaffolding. We also link concepts in a way that makes most sense to us.