I just finished reading an interesting article Social media & learning – note taking on steroids by Donald Clark. He discusses the benefits of note taking and using social media tools. After reading his post, I realized I was using similar strategies.
Clark comments on note-taking at conferences and questioned why many professionals did not. I personally am an avid note taker at conferences. Lately, I have been using Evernote as my primary tool. You can read more about this strategy here. Evernote has been a great tool for collecting and later finding notes and ideas. My friend, Deb Beck recently wrote about taking notes with pen and paper. While I appreciate her need to do this, I personally can not make the connection. My connection is with technology – having a digital record that I can quickly retrieve.
I also use Twitter to get the word out about items I find interesting. If I happen to be retweeting a link, I often capture the link into my Diigo account. Diigo is my actual note-taking tool for keeping track of great finds in the wilds of the Internet. Most importantly, I use Diigo’s tagging system to organize and make sense of all the links. Diigo’s search feature is also extremely useful.
For my academic and professional research, I use Zotero. I have gotten into the habit of reading books with a note-taking focus. Once I have read a book and scribbled notes in the margins, I then spend the time to add it to my Zotero library. When I started my library, I would only add notes regarding my academic research. I now add notes about all the books and journal articles I read. This has helped me on a number of occasions when putting together articles, reports, and grants. It has increased the breadth of my research. Here is a little more on Zotero.
Finally, I use this blog to pull my ideas and notes together. This blog helps me make sense of things I have read or discussed. Again, as Clark points out, it allows me to search through my writings, which I have had to do on a number of occasions.
I would be interested to hear how you use social media for your note taking, or even, why you don’t.
Additional Reading
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I’ve been playing around with both Evernote & Zotero for a couple of months. Now I’m trying to decide if I need both. You use both; is there something in one that’s not in the other so that you do not use only one?
I use Zotero for my academic research. It allows me to cull a number of references in the correct format. I use Evernote for everything else.