Category: Learning

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I’ve been long fascinated by memory palaces. As a primary school kid and again as a teenager when I encountered the concept, I concluded that, while fascinating, they were more effort than what I would gain. My memory was fine, and first conjuring up a set of locations and then visualising evocative things in them to remember something seemed an awful lot of upfront trouble.

In recent months I’ve looked at memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques again. Reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond gave me insights into the role of the spatial brain in remembering, but also mental health and ageing. Reading Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft gave me lots of insights both in various memory methods, as well as the effort and repetition that goes into them and which thus supports learning. Both were fun reads.

I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!

I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace! 😀
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.

Not a whole lot examples of memory palaces used for something ‘real’ and significant to its user.

Do use memory palaces? What do you remember with them for the long term? Why that? Would a note to link to be enough too?

In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen

On a mailing list last week someone mentioned they had a subscription to the university library of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. It turns out that Dutch universities offer outsiders access to their libraries. The conditions may vary, I don’t know.

Utrecht University being nearest to us, I checked out if they offer a similar service. They do. Registering with them as an outsider is free, and that provides access to their digital and physical collections on-site. They also have a paid subscription that allows lending books.

I registered for a subscription last weekend, and yesterday visited the university library to take the needed administrative steps and pay. I now have a library card.
On-site you log in into the university’s wifi network, with your library ID, and then have access to their digital collections.

I look forward to exploring how this can aid my reading and work.

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The past year I’ve had more conversations about personal knowledge management than for a long time before. Regularly questions come up along the lines of what structures should one use, what should one keep in their notes, what are the best tools? Most of my contributions to such conversations boil down to ‘there’s nothing you should do other than what fits you, and I could show you what I do and why that works for me’.
Ultimately I keep thinking people don’t take the P in PKM far enough. I think PKM is personal not just in one way, but in at least three ways.

  1. It is personal knowledge management in the sense that your system is yours only. You do it, build and extend it as you see fit. It can exist independently of whatever other working environments you have, it is fully personally yours. This enables and secures your professional and learning autonomy, allows you to be pro-active. You bring professionalism to its upkeep and tools. When you go someplace else, you take it along with you.
  2. It is management of your personal knowledge. Personal knowledge in the sense of your own networks of meaning, your insights, the expressed connections you made between pieces of it, your associations and verbiage that tie into your internal world. It exists to feed your agency, your combinatory creativity, and is aimed at your own mix of evolving personal interests. It’s there for just you to interact with. This allows you to steer the direction of your own learning intentionally, and enables an activist and artisanal stance towards your interests, professional or otherwise. Your personal knowledge doesn’t need to be understandable or be useful to others. Sharing in context is an act in itself, an output rather than a function.
  3. It is personal management of knowledge. You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you. You create your own mechanisms and algorithms working with your material, and reflect on them. Your system does not need to be understandable or workable for others. Your structures fit your internal world, have their logic and starting point in the fact that your behaviour is pretty predictable to yourself at least. Some of the structures in your system may well be just in your head rather than made tangible in your external system. Some structures may be intentionally omitted to ensure you can surprise yourself with your system, feeding discovery and wonder.

I can’t tell you how to do PKM, I can show you what does and doesn’t work for me and tell you why I think that is. I will tell you to take PKM very personally, and then some more.

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Bookmarked Latticework: Unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking by Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak

Back in early February I got a chance to work with a beta tool for sense making in my notes. See my impressions at the time. Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak watched me for an hour as I used their prototype tool to start shaping a workshop design from various inputs. I was intrigued and enthusiastic, but a few weeks later due to some tech glitches I stopped using it. Today Maarten den Braber in an e-mail pointed me to Latticework from last June, describing the project as it stood at the end. It’s an interesting read, which I annotated (if you read those annotations, start at bottom of the page to read them from the top of the article (or use Hypothes.is to see them in context,there’s no way to link to the overview directly for non-users I think).

I re-installed the plugin in Obsidian, and will work with it some more. Here’s hoping some of the original glitches no longer occur.

We had a strong personal motivation for this project: we often find ourselves stuck in our own creative work. Latticework’s links might make you think of citations and primary sources—tools for finding the truth in a rigorous research process. But our work on Latticework was mostly driven by the problems of getting emotionally stuck, of feeling disconnected from our framing of the project or our work on it.

Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak

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Wayfinding, The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. This is a fascinating book. It is fun to read but also highly relevant to me in multiple ways.

Wayfinding, orienting ourselves, is an old skill providing an evolutionary advantage. Our brains are evolved for it with cells that fire in distinct places, to mark boundaries, for head directions, in recognition of landmarks or in grids at different levels of resolution. They allow us to build cognitive maps of our world. How we navigate and what happens when we get lost and fear grips us impacting quality of decisions is however just the beginning.

The book brings together recent research on the connection between our navigational skills, cognition of abstract concepts and mental decline due to aging. Reading it renewed my urgency to do more with Systems Convening in our work, helped me think about my mental health, and about physical fitness w.r.t. aging and dementia, something that runs in the family.

I picked this book up last May in an independent book store in Utrecht, Steven Sterk. Burn-out and depression are akin to being lost, and it’s why this book jumped out at me browsing the book store.

Read it over summer, and have now finished transcribing my annotations from the many post-its I added to the book’s pages. Some 6000 words in total.


The book Wayfinding next to a large pile of post-its with annotations that I removed from the book after transcribing them into my notes.