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 Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking

Visual Note Taking

Visual note taking is something that I have never tried before but I found this technique incredibly interesting. I decided to create my project based on my Health 200 class. This is a class that prepares you to be a PHP (peer health partner). We spoke a lot about the roles that we play as a PHP as well as how students only get as much as we put into the presentation. Similarly, we focused a lot on the determinants of health such as environment, behavior, and biology.

I didn’t that that this assignment was too hard, especially since I find that most of the material that was covered in this lecture was very much common sense. While I did enjoy taking these notes, I do not think that I will use this technique often, especially for normal class lectures. I do think that this skill may be incredible helpful for exam prep though. For classes that are concept based, it seems as though taking visual notes on the material covered could be a great way to study and enforce the information before the exam!

 

Sunday Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking


Visual notes 1visual notes 2I decided to take visual notes for my Anthropology 101 class this week. In this particularly class, our teacher lectured on “The Darwinian Revolution”. In particular, we learned about natural selection and evolution. During the class I used my regular style of note taking and then after class I transformed my notes into visual notes.

The process of taking visual notes was very enjoyable for me because I am very creative and love to draw/doodle. Taking visual notes forced me to understand and think about the course content in a different light. Drawing the content I learned in class helped me visualize the process of natural s election and evolution more clearly. Visual note taking forced me to analyze the material instead of aimlessly repeating my teacher’s words verbatim into my notebook. Tow problems I faced during this assignment where that it took me a considerably longer time to draw out my notes and it was difficult for me to organize them. Although I cannot see myself continuing to take visual notes in the future, I enjoyed trying it out!