Broader Learning in Slipbox
I understand how to use slip-box from a individual concept perspective, where as I go through a popular science or typical nonfiction book, I collect interesting ideas and integrate them into the slip-box.
Where I get confused is how to use slip-box for learning on a more broader level? For example, I am currently reading an Introduction to Psychology textbook. If I have to learn some 600 key terms by the end of the semester, do I incorporate all of them into my slip-box?
Or would it be a better strategy to only incorporate the most interesting terms while putting them all into a SRS like Anki?
Incorporating them all into slip-box seems like a bad idea because then you are just turning your slip-box into an encyclopedia like Wikipedia?
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At University, I coached a psychology student once who felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn for the annual tests. She started with pieces of paper, one for each concept, and wanted to learn the terms like you would learn for a vocabulary test through rote repetition. During our conversations, she revealed that the back sides of the cards contained a ton of information and context and didn't fit this approach very well. For some, we found ways to split up the cards into multiple cards, aka "atomize" the contents, and then "refactor" the original topic card to list the relevant subtopic like a table of contents only. Further down the road, she added cross-links and interspersed the A6 cards with mind maps and other visualizations: for this, se folded much larger A4 or A3 paper down to A6 and filed it next to the individual cards in her slip boxes.
She started with isolated notes that we atomized further, then she experimented with re-arranging and figuring out a fixed order (so she doesn't lose cards), then added what amounts to structure notes or hubs and visualizations later, aka higher-level notes.
So I'd say, yes, you could start with a collection of terms to learn and expand from there. If you want to stay in the field, I can imagine this to stay relevant for looking up information later in your life.
I don't know how useful a digital note collection is when you want to do rote repetition next to the higher-level, playful work of making sense of all the 600 items. There are tools like Anki for this, but since the student I told y'all about worked on paper, she could carry a couple dozen of cards with her for memorization practice as well.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
In my second (!) post of this forum thread I explain how I am using the zettelkasten both as a wiki (for my history-related knowledge) and as a typical Luhmann-zettelkasten. Maybe that helps you.
If you are not just about learning something for your own education but for a test at school/university, I want to add to what ctietze said about printed cards: they definitely make it easier to study for tests, because you can use them everywhere. Memorizing the content at different locations (on the sofa, while brushing your teeth, while taking a walk, sitting on a bus etc.) makes it much more easy to remember things because your body (thus also your brain) is more active and gets different "contact points" to which your memory can create links.
It's like learning vocabulary: when you learn a new language and a native speaker explains a particular word to you, you will probably remember it forever. If you start off by learning the word from a piece of paper (or a screen, even worse) you will need a lot of repetitions to remember the context because your memory has no actual real-life experience to relate it to.
Ya I thought of doing that, but I worry about it turning too much into a personal wiki that it dilutes the slip-box.
If you think about the slip-box as a giant box of special particles that tends to create value after enough collisions between special particles occur. Then I'm afraid turning it into a wiki would be like inserting a crap ton of "normal particles" into the box, which means the special particles don't collide as much and so you get less value overall.
When I was reading Sonke Ahren's answer to a question on Quora he said "it is not about storing knowledge, but about developing thoughts across a wide range of topics and building up long strings of interconnected notes that can be turned into manuscripts"(arguments).
The part that is throwing me for a loop in a sense, is I get the feeling that there is a two part system going on in a way. The slip-box is the top level higher quality idea collider while it is supported by a low level personal wiki.
The catch is that the personal wiki is not in the slip-box or on the computer but in the users brain. In the sense that none of us come to the slip-box without a base of knowledge. I got this sense when I was poking through Luhmann's slip-box online and didn't really see any of what I would call beginner knowledge, say the information you'd learn in a psych 101 class. That knowledge would have just been embedded in his own brain?
Anyways I realized this morning that this is what the slip-box is for in a sense and that I needed to start a "self conversation" within the slip-box about the slip-box and about what an idealized information processing system would look like.
I think we have all been there, trying to find the 'perfect' system for information management, as it were. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. For me, the co-existence of a wiki-style zettelkasten and a Luhmann-style zettelkasten in the same virtual slip box is no problem at all. Sure, the latter is about the interconnectedness in a bottom-up way (creating links while making new zettels on a flat hierarchy) while the former is about interconnectedness in a more top-down way (usually by first creating a structure note with an overview, then creating more detailed zettel). But these two approaches can happily coexist in a zettelkasten, in my view, as long as you do not neglect either side.
I second @lunario - I have both approaches buzzing along in parallel nicely and, using your metaphor of atomism and collisions, proactively make them bump into eachother.
I am a Zettler, ie 'one who zettles'
research: pragmatism, 4e cognitive science, metaphor | you can't be neutral on a moving train
I find this an interesting point and one I have not considered. Have you created a Zettel Notes as part of your system that is simply a question?
@Steve625 ya occasionally I will make a note into a question to inform my future self that this note or note chain is about developing an argument / exploring a question. For example I have one titled "why learn history?" and "what are the skills of the future?".
The second one could have easily been titled as "Future Skills" but by turning it into a question, when I stumble upon it later on I realize immediately that this is a question I'm actively researching.