Sketchnoting Thoughts

Following my re-blog of Jackie Gerstein’s compilation of Visual Note Taking resources, I took some time today to do a little in-depth exploration of some of the concepts and thought-leaders in that area. Having previously seen Sunni Brown’s TEDTalk on the power of Doodling, I’m enjoying a growing fascination with these ideas.

I’m like many people who wound up taking text notes on lined paper, and years of tacit compliance with the social norms in formal education are proving difficult to re-work.  A number of the people engaged in this process note that this may well be the hardest thing for many to overcome.  One thing that does (should? might? possibly?) work to my advantage is my diploma in Graphic Design. Couple that with a love of drawing and sketching, and I might have the foundation for a (personal) informational revolution.

Tweeting as a personal backchannel

I tried something “new” this past week and I’m surprised I didn’t think of doing it sooner.

I sat in on one of the many workshops we run for our Instructor cadre. Because I have an interest in the coaching function I decided it might prove interesting.

Because I already had Twitter open, instead of using something like Evernote directly, i thought, ‘why not make use of Twitter?’ I could jot down a few notes and add a hashtag and keep going.

While not a quantum shift, it is a potentially disruptive innovation in note-taking. In the same way that conference note-taking has become a public-facing backchannel, my approach opened up a generic topic to outside query or sharing. I liked the fact that I was immediately forced into a concise summary mode with 140 characters and because I have the RSS feed for my Twitter account saving to my Google Reader, the tweets are auto-archived. If I had also added the @myEN tag, I could have also saved critical tweets to Evernote (something I do when I save critical Tweets in my regular feed)

The one challenge with using Twitter is, of course, the hashtags. Because they are unregulated, you have to take come care with selecting one for your own use. One risk you also run is the relatively new technique of hashtag spamming. Some popular tags (e.g. #lrnchat) are now flooded with spam, rendering them largely unusable.

The final consideration in this technique is the material being discussed. A personal backchannel is good but consider whether or not you’re potentially disclosing information that should remain behind company doors. If that’s the case, tools like Yammer may be more appropriate than Twitter.

As with any other backchannel, it’s only worthwhile if you actually do something with the information. In my case Ie put together an internal summary for my colleague who was facilitating.

I’d be interested to hear of anyone else has tried this approach and what they thought.