#PKMChat 2017 How to identify Key Takeaways from a Course

Identify Key Takeaways

A good PKM practice includes doing the most of the courses we follow. Many courses are available. Many are free or very cheap. It’s my conviction (Bruno speaking) that to retain we should keep a short list of takeaways we can go through several times. This list is not what we keep as notes or using various tools like screenshots, bookmarks or saving documents. It has to stay simple and minimal.

I faced again the same questioning this week and I started again to engage in several courses. Two to enhance my English writing. Grammarly is great but I can’t just write everything wrong and wait for it to fix my writing. It’s more efficient to write correctly first. I also took a course on UXD. So here I am, after a week with a stash of notes. Too many to review them quickly.

Last week I had a short exchange on Twitter about spaced repetitions and what to include in them.

@ChadSLowry @LisaAGoldstein in fact I though value of spaced repetition is mostly retrieval, so short practice is great but not necessary, better 3x small than 1x big

— Bruno Winck (@brunowinck) May 5, 2017

The need to keep takeways outside from courses becomes even more obvious with microlearning delivered via emails. They become lost in the haystack of our mailboxes. Because they are short we tend to think that refering back to the mail is optimum, it’s not.

I came across two readings today that confirmed my idea about the benefit of spending time to articulate takeaways.

• This article describes how Wozniak (cofounder of Apple) arranged a program to practice space repetitions of his takeways. Cool but read this: “The process of increasing the size of my databases gradually progressed at the cost of knowledge retention.”. So keeping bloated takeaways is not the way to go.
• I was delighted that Patti Shank wrote a new book. And it’s on a topic dear to my heart: “Deeper Learning”. I took a sneak peek. She wrote “Summarize each section in your own words. Research shows …

Now what sounds conflicting here is that to keep takeaways short we have to adapt them to the jargon we use, skip what is well-known. If we don this our takeaways have little value for others.

Take the simple example of collecting tweets from a chat. If I want to allow others to make sense of it, I need to include significant tweets I would have skipped for my sole benefit.

PKMChat being about Personal Knowledge Management encompass Knowledge lifecycle in general. Our first chat was about learning, acquiring Knowledge. Our second is about sharing it. Week after weeks we will switch from one end of the lifecycle to another while exploring all the channels that could be used: social, formal, writing, videos. Feel free to suggest topics by tweeting to @pkmchat.

Identify Key Takeaways