Multi-modal learning

Posted on April 18th, 2007 by Sacha Chua

I’ve stepped up my reading in preparation for my paper, practically
inhaling research papers and books. It’s easy to copy and paste
quotations from PDFs of research papers, but dead-tree books are
harder to handle. I’m relatively happy with the way I’m doing things,
though. Here’s how it works.

When I start a book, I record the name of the book into my voice
recorder. As I read, I note interesting quotations by recording the
page number and the quotation as one file. In this way, I accumulate
dozens of notes. When I have time to encode all of these, I loop over
each file while transcribing whatever I can keep up with. I repeat
each file as many times as necessary.

This has the effect of usual several modes for the information: visual
when I read it for the first time, auditory when I hear myself read
it, and kinesthetic when I type it out.

It’s slower, but I hope it works well!

Random Emacs symbol: global-mark-ring-max – Variable: *Maximum size of global mark ring. Start discarding off end if gets this big.

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