Visual Notes from My Conference Session

Derek Bruff attended the panel where my colleagues and I presented about Domain of One’s Own at Educause Learning Initiative and posted these sketchnotes about the session to Twitter. As far as I can tell, he took them in real time while we spoke and he captured the essence of what we talked about. As you can see, there’s a fair amount of text still, but with just a little bit of doodling and diagramming, he’s sketched out relationships and concepts instead of writing out lots of words.

I retweeted the heck out of this image, to be honest. Being able to give people a sense of our entire panel in a single image is a real gift Derek offered to us by tweeting it out.

Sunday Funny 3 – Visual Notes

Business Economics Visual Notes

When we first discussed this assignment, I was curious and skeptical. It took me some time to think of a class in which visual notes could really further my understanding of the material. I chose Business Economics. The process of formulating these notes was not too difficult, as this specific class is very real-world application oriented and essentially, a visual class in it of itself. I enjoyed being able to genuinely “doodle” for a class without feeling like it would affect my understanding of the material (as it has in the past because the essence of my doodling generally did not relate to the topic we were discussing). Truthfully, drawing a literal example of a price ceiling and a price floor has solidified my understanding of both – something that I previously was having trouble differentiating.

After completing this task, I recognize the positive aspects of this form of note taking. With that being said, however, the concept of drawing pictures to represent whole ideas does not seem time-effective or fully descriptive enough to cover an entire lecture. In the future, perhaps I will take visual notes after regular notes to draw out examples and further engrave the concepts in my head. All in all, I enjoyed making my brain think with a less traditional method.

*I originally, accidentally posted this as a page instead of a post, so I just double-posted so that it is in the right place.

Sunday Funnies 3

Visual Notes

This process was really fun for me. I normally love art but I never thought of using art as a tool to incorporate my class notes. This is for my Art History class and some major concepts we need to learn. I found visual note taking to be particularly useful because it really helps me understand the structure and style of the building when I try to draw it more than just looking at the picture. It was slightly time consuming but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the concepts and notes on that page.

Sunday Funny 3: Visual Note Taking

Scannerino-page-001

 

I decided to use macroeconomics for the visual note-taking assignment, because I felt that Macro-economics, a subject where there are a lot of connections and terms, would be a useful seeing in a visual format. I at first had trouble initially starting, but after beginning to draw/write I started to get more into it. I feel like for certain subjects such as my financial accounting and macroeconomics class, visual note-taking would honestly be a useful way to further better imprint the information into my brain.  I feel that it would be hard for me to take visual notes during a class since I’m not used to this new style and I personally felt I had to use a-lot more effort and attention when visually note-taking. But, this can be useful prior to a test or a quiz just for a great study guide to have a large amount of information on one page that I would understand would be a great study tool. I honestly enjoyed this process, it takes note taking, a dull and boring task, and incorporates creativity into it to make it not only fun but also productive.

Noah Lee-Shapiro

http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org/2015/01/sunday-funnies-3/

SUNDAY FUNNIES 3: VISUAL NOTE TAKING

Sunday Funny 3

I chose to take visual notes for my Statistics class. I often do a bit of visual note taking outside the margins of the paper, as a visual aid since visuals serve as a different medium of learning. Although, I did find being more heavy on the visuals an interesting task. I do believe that rather than just text, anyone taking notes would benefit greatly from any sort of visual (to an extent) that reflects the original text since it uses a different thought process which can help to retain information.

Sunday Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking

christiannotes

 

After my PSYC 111 class on Wednesday, I decided to take my written notes and draw them out.  Above is a visual representation of the “W.E.I.R.D” people that are Americans.  In the field of psychology, the majority of researchers use Americans as their test subjects.  However, Americans are a very specific type of people that do not represent the entire world population.  Concerns have raised about whether or not American psychology is actually trustworthy.

I enjoyed creating these visual notes because it made me think critically about the class lecture.  By spending a long time on my drawings, I now have a stronger understanding of the material.

Check out the assignment here.

 

 

Sunday Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking

After taking visual notes in my Astronomy class, I can definitely say that I better understand the material. I’ve always been a visual learner, and after looking through the pictures that I drew, the concepts became clearer than before. The pictures were especially helpful with learning the phases of the moon. When just describing where the Moon is in regards to the Earth and Sun, it is hard to distinguish which phase is occurring at a certain time of day. When viewing a drawing of the Moon in between the Earth and the Sun, it’s clear that the Moon is at the New Moon phase. I found it interesting how much easier it was to understand certain content when drawing it.

Sunday Funny# 3

 

Sunday Funny #3

Sunday Funny #3

Taking visual notes was an extremely challenging experience for me. When I first saw the examples I hoped to create a similar result, however, after 6 drafts I realized that my drawing skills were those of a six years old. I decided to use this opportunity to study the concept of logical fallacies, which we learned last week in my psychology class. Despite the difficulty of this assignment, I now understand the fallacies better and I was able to understand the relationship as well as the differences between them.
When I was creating the visual notes, the most challenging part of the process (besides the drawing itself) was to make a cohesive picture. At first I began to create small drawings at the corners of the page. However, I wanted to find a way to connect those drawings, in a way that made sense both conceptually, and visually. Therefore I decided to take on several themes instead of a bunch of independent drawings. I used the importance of school, the need for food and several philosophical ideas as the mean themes of my visual notes. The use of arrows also proved extremely efficient when connecting ideas. Another challenging part of this assignment was trying to stay away from creating a comic “book”. In several occasions I leaned towards expressing a concept using conversations between characters. However, at the end of the process, I understood the notes that I had taken in a distinct way, instead of words in my head, when approaching the concept of fallacies, I now see images, which makes it easier to understand such an abstract topic.

To see other visual notes click here.

 

 

 

Sunday Funny 3: Visual Notes

sunday funny 3

I decided to explore the visual note taking skill using my Chem 142 notes. The hard part about this assignment was figuring out which class would this be the most useful. I have a test coming up in chemistry and using this skill I was able to grasp the concept of phase changes and intermolecular forces vs intramolecular forces better. I combined the concepts together through the use of pictures and diagrams. Even though I have never used this note taking skill it help me study better. I will definitely consider using this method more often especially in chemistry.

I used a mixture of words and pictures for my notes because on test I would have to explain for example what constitutes a hydrogen intermolecular force etc. While transferring that idea to pictures, it is really important in chemistry to be able to explain what is actually happening. So after drawing the pictures of the phase diagrams and the different intermolecular forces, I included key ideas to tie the two concepts together and quizzed myself by identifying the pictures with the corresponding explanations of the intermolecular forces.

Sunday Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking

IMG_1420

I hardly ever take visual notes, but after this assignment I might do it more frequently. I made these notes for my Chemistry 142 class. Most people don’t think science and drawing go together but after making these visual notes, I think they do. Many concepts in science can be explained with visuals. This assignment was more difficult than I thought it would be. Most of the things we learn in chemistry are done by reading or just doing problems. Taking concepts from the reading and making them into visuals actually helped me grasp a better understanding of them. I believe I will think about concepts, not just in chemistry but other classes as well, in a more visual manner. It makes you think in a different manner and truly understand what you’re learning. Moving away from reading and just doing problems to learn was pretty interesting and to be honest, somewhat refreshing.

1 2