Annotated bibliography
Note Taking as an Art of Transmission by Ann Blair (2004)
The author creates a note taking timeline starting with this sentence: “The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience (…) after used in articulating a thought”. I feel like this point is particularly important for my research as it talks about note taking as an individual’s experience, notes show the insights of an individual expressing freely.
The history of note taking moves from adversaria to common books (that will help for my glossary) and to “kinds of notes”: by field, intended audience, general purpose. This part is particularly important because I think I need to create some limits or instructions of what I am discussing about. It talks about collective annotating (Kant’s students) or “writing chorus” (A. H. Francke).
The author analyses the short-term use of notes and what would happen to them in the past, as well as how to conserve them for future transmission. “Forgetting is also an important aspect of remembering” (Harald Weinrich, 1996). The texts moves on with the history of notes and the impact of early modern note taking, how many scholars studied different ways of note taking and it gives new or additional definitions to the words that regard note taking like lemmata, adversaria, historic, etc..).
The bookbinding workshop: making as collaborative pedagogic practice by Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (2015)
In this text, Kealy-Morris is considering student engagement through collaborative teaching and learning practices. In this case, the purpose is creating a learning space for art and design students to understand and develop their creative identity and self; the connection to my research arrives when the author discusses how the learning experience becomes part of the process of creation.The text touches the importance of craft and how the act of creating is an important step to learn about ourselves: it reconnects to the idea of developing a consciousness in the needs for a learning space made by participants for themselves.
The author discusses the different type of learning and knowledge, experiential, or deductive or constructive learning. This opens a new window on the topic of personalised learning and how every individual has different approaches and methods to reach some kind of knowledge. The purpose of the “Bookbinding Club” proposed in this article reconnects to the purpose of my CES (Collaborative Explorative Sessions): to offer participants experiences where to think about their learning brain and how the act of creation can participate in the act of discovery. How the act of making their own tool can help them better understand what they need from the tool.
Towards the end, Kealy-Morris describes the term ”communities of practice”: workshops based on active engagement with specific experiences that support learning through social participation (Wenger 1998). Learning is a social experience.
Crafting communities of practice: the relationship between making and learning by Miriam Gibson (2018).
This text analyses the impact of craft on learning and the development of the personhood. As the text above, it analyses the learning types, quoting different educators and philosophers, and the impact of the Art and Craft Movement as well as the Industrial Revolution. The author discusses how craft is a cultural and social expression and how collective and individual development are interconnected.
Gibson researches on the impact of industrialisation and mass production on the development of self and how the current interest in making shouldn’t be seen as anti-modern and nostalgic but instead, focussing on how, even through the use of the Internet, makers are always trying to gather, whatever the medium. Another point that I feel like touches my practice is how making and learning are subversive practices that make us able to control the narrative ourselves, undermining the dominant social operating system we live in: “through experimentation and experience, an individual edits amplifies and amends the socially prescribed world” says Korn (2013). In a way, they describe “how to change the world through craft”.
At the end, the author describes how learning is a “transformative learning process” and how developing communities of practice encourages social and cognitive transformation. A way to reconnect process and product, to make learning a moment of sharing and not only taking something from someone else’s knowledge.
All the problems will be solved by the masses By Simon Yuill (2008)
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses
The part of this article that interests me is the one regarding Nature Study Notes (1969), a text made out of instructional pieces written by the Scratch Orchestra. Some of them talks about ways of making sound but most of them focus on social interactions and games between the performers: “many of the scores in Nature Study Notes set up small scale ‘operating systems', simple organisational structures that enable other works to be produced within them.”.
This is something I would like to include in my work, in a way or another. I would like to create a set of instructions that can be used to go through the discovery of self, through the act of making notebooks for individual or collective use.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, (2008)
“Making is a basic human instinct”
“Making is thinking”
A discussion on craftsmanship. Still haven’t found a part that interests me.
The use of personalized notebook among first semester students of UITM (2016)
Describes how the use of personalised notebooks among students can improve learning process. The authors describe how “The quality of students’ satisfaction and experience depend on the effectiveness of using notebook.”. This paper is basically for educators, but it can be applied also from the point of view of the student itself: students have different learning styles and intelligence strengths that a personalised notebook could accommodate. Notebooks are the place where to insert the information and where to analyse it, helping the “brain making connections between what is experienced (learned) and what that experience (information) means to the learner” (Caine & Klimek, 2005).
The text then analyses student-entered learning approach, already present in Malaysian Education since more than 20 years. Personalised notebooks offer similar characteristics and purposes: to promote self-learning process.
The authors conclude saying that “Creating a personalised notebook with students could improve students’ note-taking skills as well as help them to organise, review, and reflect on the information in the classroom”. This reconnects to my research as this is what I am discussing about: how personalised notebooks can improve learning. The difference is that they talk from the point of view of the educators and my approach would be even more “self-learning”: students or participants would physically and concretely create their own personalised notebooks.
Introduction to communities of practice by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015)
In this text, the authors give a general description of the term “communities of practice”. “Communities of practice” are a useful approach to knowing and learning, formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared environment. I am reading about this because I find really fascinating the idea of “learning” together, discovering and sharing each other’s knowledge.
“Communities of practice” are composed by the shared domain of interest, the community that engages in discussions and activities, and the practice. Members share experiences, tools, stories, recurring problems etc and try to go through them together. This concept is part of a research on learning theory and learning models, that can reconnect with my own research on how we can shape our learning methodologies. After reading, I understood that “communities of practice” are not something that casually appears because one person is interested, but there is the need of a mutual connection between the participants. I found it interesting and I hope in some way collective learning will be part of my discussion.
This text also brought me to know the authors that research about social learning and practice, something that sounds like what I am interested about.
Why We Make Things and Why it Matters by Peter Korn (2015)
The author gives an outline of his connection with the manual activity and profession of wood furniture maker, but this is not why the book is important to my research.
What matters is the way the author discusses craftsmanship as engagement with the actions, objects and relationships of ordinary experience, caring about what you do. In the sense that, if you choose to use a notebook for example, you should take care of making it yourself, to repair it yourself and feed it yourself, as you would do with a bike or your last night’s dinner. He provides definitions of the term craft, born thanks to Morris and Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement. He underlines how “The increase in sophistication has not resulted from any biological evolution of our species; instead, it illustrates the evolution of culture. “.
The authors at some point says that “work has been stripped of its potential to provide meaning and fulfillment” and I feel the same happened to learning: I feel like this could be changed with social and collective learning, with self-learning and a research inside our heads to understand and listen inside a bit more.
Then, the author describes that his “experience has been that the effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world – whether in the arts, the kitchen, or the marketplace – is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply. “ This tells me how much and why the act of making gives the user that sense of meaning that sometimes we lack in contemporary society.
The author argues how the power to provide spiritual sustenance resides in the object itself, not in its ownership, how it becomes a memory device where the process of creation is inscribed and how objects are important for humans as they “confirm the owners’ narratives of personal identity”: “objects ultimately possess meaning to the extent that they affect or confirm the stories through which a respondent constructs his identity and orders his world. The more central those narratives are, the more meaning the object has. “. I am wondering how much meaning objects can have if the owner creates the object by themselves, so that not only the part of the discovery and acquisition of the object becomes important to the owner and has a reconnection to their life, but also the evolving ideas and beliefs that come along during the process of creation of the object.
To conclude, the author believes that “making is a lifelong project of self-construction and self-determination“ and that objects “are conduits through which we construct our selves and our world.”