Personal knowledge mastery

Many people have told me how much they get out of the recommendations segment of Teaching in Higher Ed each week. I feel that way too, and candidly can even find those recommendations overwhelming with all of the delight they bring me. Like eating at a delightful buffet, while still realizing most things can best be taken in moderation. So many good books to read, just as one example.

On Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 616, Katarina Mårtensson recommended the Academic Imperfectionist podcast, hosted by Dr. Rebecca Roache. I have listened to a couple of episodes and am so excited that so many more are in store for me, given how late I am to this particular podcast-listening adventure.

I have talked for a long time, in both my leadership and my teaching, about the importance of naming things. It has come up across so many different dimensions of what we do as educators. So when I heard Rebecca address it directly in episode 122 of the Academic Imperfectionist podcast, “Write It Down, Make It Happen”, it stopped me in my tracks.

Here is what Rebecca said at that point in her episode:

Not knowing exactly what it is that's causing you distress makes things worse than they need to be. This is what led the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel to come up with the expression “name it to tame it,” to describe the effectiveness that noticing and naming strong negative emotions has on making them less intense. If you ever talked through your fears or anxieties or journaled about them and ended the process feeling a little bit more positive, then you've experienced this effect.

Naming it in my teaching

I am looking forward to sharing that episode of the Academic Imperfectionist the next time I teach an elective course I have been teaching for well over a decade: Personal Leadership and Productivity.

In Getting Things Done terminology, what Rebecca describes about making lists maps onto what is known as a mind sweep. Sometimes called, a little less formally, a brain dump. You can use a trigger list to help surface those open loops and get them out of your head. David Allen reminds us:

Our mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

I have had students who struggled with this process, and over the years I learned why: they were reluctant to begin exploring what had been causing them stress until they knew there was a plan for what came next. Once I started naming that for them (letting them know we were going to learn what to do with what landed on that metaphorical or literal page) everything shifted.

The naming creates the conditions for the mental work and enough trust to begin the process of unpacking the often-heavy burdens of all the stuff that is not yet done.

Naming it in our organizations

The other reason this section of Rebecca's episode 122 stood out to me is how much it matters in our leadership.

Speaking of recommendations, I do not want to spoil an upcoming episode's recommendation, but I cannot resist a small preview. I recently discovered Libib, a service for cataloging books, and have been cataloging a bunch of volumes I had not touched in years. Picking up books I had not looked at in a while has led me down a series of delightful rabbit trails, including one connected to this very topic.

Chris Argyris's On Organizational Learning describes something he calls skilled incompetence. Reading from chapter 7, Argyris writes:

In handling these problems, the executives use highly honed skills, yet create consequences they do not intend. Hence, their skillfulness is tightly coupled with incompetence. Moreover, this skilled incompetence not only operates at the individual level, it permeates the entire organizational culture as well.

He goes on to explain that skills are usually associated with accomplishing what we intend. Skilled incompetence is different: it is about unintended consequences we do not see (and may be actively working to avoid seeing).

Before I try to recap the entire book here, I will stop and just say how powerful Argyris's description of organizational defensive routines is. We can cover up our naming of problems in profound and precise ways. He also offers some paths toward unlearning those defensive habits, which I am looking forward to sitting with more, as I continue the process of revisiting all treasures my library cataloging has unearthed.

Naming things matters in our self-awareness, in our classrooms, and in our leadership. I am looking forward to continuing to learn from the Academic Imperfectionist podcast, and from all the wisdom shared by guests on Teaching in Higher Ed. If you have a few minutes, I suspect you'll find something worth exploring on the TiHE recommendations page.

I used to be among the people who thought that privacy wasn't really much of a thing to be overly concerned about. What did I have to hide anyway? What did “good” people have to hide if what they're doing is all on the up and up? I hope I don't lose potential readers with the naiveté of that mindset. I have very much changed my mind over many decades now and do what I can to help students, friends, family members, and anyone who might otherwise be persuaded by what I share through my podcast and writing to recognize the issues surrounding privacy that affect all of us and what it means to be a free nation.

I was listening to The Ezra Klein Show, as he discussed the “internet none of us asked for” with two experts matters of ethics. I'm teaching business ethics right now, so my ears were perked even more than they might have otherwise been. The episode is titled: We Didn't Ask for This Internet and features Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu. From the episode description:

Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.

What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?

Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.”  Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”

In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.

I thought that a claim made during this episode would be a good one to use in my continued efforts to grow my own information literacy, as well as to pass on what I can to the faculty and students I get to teach and learn alongside…

The Claim: Contract Nurses Are Discriminated Against, Based on Their Likely Desperation to Accept Lower Pay

When I teach Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework, one of the most challenging hurdles for students is to be able to assess the claim being made. They often think that the article's headline is the claim. In this example I'm using today, there's the claim that was made, combined with my feelings about what I was hearing (or what I interpreted being said, as I listened to the podcast, in the middle of doing other things).

Here's how I remember the claim:

Contract nurses are discriminated against, based on their likely desperation to accept lower pay. Their credit scores and other indicators of just how desperate they might be to take less compensation than someone else competing for the same job allow potential employers to discriminate against them or otherwise game the system toward a race to the bottom for pay.

While listening, I was in the middle of cleaning out our refrigerator and had my hands covered in muck, so wasn't able to capture the notes of this scholar and her work. Once I got back to my computer, I was able to find the name of the researcher they mentioned (Deborah Rhode). Tim shared an examples from her scholarship regarding the ways in which nurses' financial data is mined and analyzed to predict for how low a wage they will accept on an hourly contract type of arrangement.

Two Methods of Fact Checking

I thought it would be helpful to document the process I would go through of fact checking this in two ways:

1. Using the SIFT fact checking framework
2. Via Mike Caulfield's emerging “Critical Thinking/Doing with AI” experimentation

So two ways of assessing how likely it is that what I heard was true. I am going to start with SIFT and then move on to the AI tools that Mike Caulfield has been working on.

Fact Checking the Claim via SIFT

If you're not familiar with the name Mike Caulfield, he created the fact checking framework known as SIFT. Here's what that might look like in testing this claim:

• STOP // “S” stands for stop, as in we shouldn't immediately pass on what we hear when we're listening to the Ezra Klein show with our hands covered in food waste. We should hang on to a moment and wait to see if it is actually accurate.
• INVESTIGATE // The “I” stands for investigate the source. In this case, I would be thinking about Ezra Klein and his podcast and fact checking process done by the New York Times. They credit a fact checker for the podcast. I don't know much about that process, but I just know in the credits, they always list a person as well as the researcher themselves that was mentioned.
• FIND // “F” stands for find trusted coverage. So I would want to be looking at other news organizations and what they may have shared to support the claim of nurses being discriminated against in this way regarding their compensation.
• TRACE // And finally, T for trace back to the original source. In this case, I imagine the researcher would be fairly easy to find and would be likely to have done quite a bit of scholarship assessing this claim.

If you would like to see me walk through how I approached this fact checking using SIFT, watch the Using Mike Caulfield's SIFT Framework to Test a Claim About Wage Discrimination Against Nurses video on the Teaching in Higher Ed YouTube channel.

Watch: Using Mike Caulfield's SIFT Framework to Test a Claim About Wage Discrimination Against Nurses

• Mike Caulfield's Get it in, track it down, follow up: Critical thinking with AI YouTube Channel
• Play: Save Videos Watch Later app
• AdFontes Media Bias Chart
• Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app: “Uber for nurses” is even worse than it sounds, by Cory Doctorow
• Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care (2024), by Katie J. Wells & Funda Ustek Spilda
• Wikipedia: Ezra Klein
• Stanford Law School – In Memoriam: Deborah L. Rhode
• NYT: The Ezra Klein Show – We Didn't Ask for This Internet (gift article)

Fact Checking the Claim via Mike Caulfield's Critical Thinking/Doing with AI Experimentation

Some of you may know that Mike Caulfield has been experimenting with what artificial intelligence can and cannot currently do when it comes to our fact checking efforts. The short version is that the standard AI response that comes as a result of a Google search with a question mark after it, the AI summary, if you will, is not particularly good at an individual's fact checking efforts. However, he has built a custom GPT and other tools that put some parameters around the prompts and he also encourages us to have more of a back and forth as we consider our own pursuit of knowing if what we are looking at is what we think we're looking at and whether or not it is accurate.

This is the second of two videos exploring different approaches to fact-checking a claim I heard on The Ezra Klein Show (“We Didn’t Ask for This Internet,” featuring Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu). In the first video, I used Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework. In this one, I experiment with his emerging work on how artificial intelligence can — and cannot — support fact-checking.

Watch: Fact-Checking w/ AI: Testing Claims Using Mike Caulfield’s New Critical Thinking with AI Approach

Some of the resources and references mentioned include:

• Kagi
• Gig Economy in Nursing, by Riya Parth Shukal & Urmila Ravliya
• Algorithmic wage discrimination on Wikipedia
• The End(s) of Argument, by Mike Caulfield
• SIFT for AI: Introduction and Pedagogy, by Mike Caulfield
• NYT: The Ezra Klein Show – We Didn't Ask for This Internet (gift article)
• Mike Caulfield's Get it in, track it down, follow up: Critical thinking with AI YouTube Channel

Learning Out Loud

As I wrap up this post, I'm reminded of how challenging we can make it for ourselves when we commit to a life filled with learning out loud (or maybe that's just me?). I'll admit that part of why I went down a less-than-helpful rabbit trail not once but twice was because I am afraid of looking foolish (or dare I say outright wrong?) in my experimentation with this stuff.

Mike Caulfield reminds us that we should always remember what our aim is in our fact checking and overall information literacy efforts. In this case, I'm an average person who knows hardly anything about how nurses are paid (except for at the university where I work). I'm pretty much the perfect candidate to kick the tires on these tools and resources to see what it looks like when we check claims we see online (or, in this case, hear on a podcast).

My goal is to equip others to be better able to assess if what they're looking at is what they think it is and to determine the credibility of what's being shared. Given how quickly AI is changing the fact-checking landscape and the consequences of living in a society in which lies are so blatantly propagated, continuing to get better at this stuff and share with others seems an important and necessary thing to do.

My friend Kerry left me one of her infamous voice messages today. These are the fancy kinds that go beyond voice mail, but instead show up in my text messages app, only I get to hear her voice. Apple nicely transcribes these messages for me, too, though it cracks me up what it sometimes thinks Kerry says in these messages. This time, it thought that she called me “Fran,” but instead she was calling me, “friend.”

She's going to be on sabbatical next semester, so is wanting to get going with a note-taking application. In my over two decades in higher education, I've never had a sabbatical, but I imagine that if that time were to come, I would really want to get a jump on the organization side of things, as well. I've enjoyed following Robert Talbert's transparency around his sabbatical as he seeks to be intentional with his sabbatical, even subtitling one of his blogs: Or, how my inherent laziness has made me productive on a big project. He also suggests that we regularly carve out time to reflect on whether where we are spending our time and devoting our attention is in alignment with the things that are most important to us.

I like reading Robert's blogs in which he geeks out about the tools that he uses. Like me, he's evolved what applications he uses, most recently documenting the digital tools he is using for his own sabbatical project (part 1 and part 2).

Even though Kerry asked me about my suggestions for a note-taking tool, I can't help but zoom back out and make sure we both understand that bigger picture. I can't really answer the question as to giving my advice related to taking notes, unless I'm sure she's got the other vital pieces going that she will need to maximize her time. Not to mention, giving herself permission to wander and be entirely “unproductive” for at least some portions of this time away.

The Tools

For any sabbatical, I'm making an assumption that at least some portion of it will involve doing research and some writing.

References Manager

There are many good references managers out there. I haven't changed mine really ever, since landing on Zotero many years ago. I didn't have a references manager when doing my master's or doctorate, so when I talk about the power of one, I tend to sound like an old person talking about having to walk uphill to get to school, both ways, with a bit of “get off my lawn” sentiment, throughout.

Hands down, if you're going to research, or plan on doing some academic writing, it makes zero sense not to be capturing sources in a references manager. Off the top of my head, be sure you know how to:

1. Add sources using the Zotero extension installed on your preferred browser. Zotero must be running in the background as an application, at least for how I have things configured on my Mac, but it will nudge you, if you forget.
2. I choose to check each source, as I add it, though this isn't necessary. Zotero is great because much of the time, it will grab the metadata associated with the item you have saved, including the author's name, date of publication, URL, etc. However, sometimes websites don't have their information set up such that some of the information gets missed. I would always way rather just add it, manually, in the moment I'm already on that page. Others just figure they'll wait to see if they actually wind up citing that source.
3. Cite sources within your word processor, which for me is Microsoft Word. I use the toolbar for Zotero when I need to cite a source, as I'm writing, I easily search for it, and then press enter and away I go.
4. Create a bibliography using Zotero. This would have been a game changer, had I had this tool when I was in school. Some years back, they made this auto-update so each time you add a new source, your references list automatically updates, as you go. If you delete a sentence containing a citation, it is removed from your references. So cool.

Digital Bookmarks

For any other type of digital resource (ones I doubt I'll wind up citing in formal, academic writing), I save them to my preferred digital bookmarking tool: Raindrop.io. I can't even imaging doing any computing in any context without having a bookmarking tool available to save things to…

I've got collections (folders) for Teaching in Higher Ed, AI (this one is publicly viewable as a page, and as an RSS feed), Teaching, Technology, and ones for specific classes, just as an example. Take a look at my Raindrop blog post, which talks more about why I recommend it and how I have it set up to support my ongoing learning.

Note-Taking

Now we're finally getting around to Kerry's original question. I had to first talk about a references manager and digital bookmarks, since I wanted to ensure that she will have at least Zotero (or similar tool) for the formal, academic writing, including citing sources and doing the necessary sense-making required for academic writing.

Chicken Scratch (Quick Capture) Notes

There's a place in many people's lives for quick-capture notes. You're talking to someone and they mention something you want to remember. You don't first want to figure out where to put that information; you just want to grab it, like you might a sticky note in an analog world.

Hands down, for me, that app is Drafts.

At this exact moment, I would consider myself a “bad” Drafts user. I've got 172 “chicken scratch” notes sitting, unorganized. That said, I don't put anything there that it would be terrible if the notes got “lost” from my attention for a while. These past three months, I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Michigan, and did a pre-conference workshop for the POD Conference in San Diego. Being on the road means lots of opportunities for me to hear about something, or have an idea, that I just want to quickly capture in that moment, and get back to, later.

I submitted grades late last night, so today means getting back to a more regular GTD weekly review, at which point I'll be emptying my inboxes, including my Drafts inbox. If you're curious about the process I use to accomplish this, I couldn't recommend more another post by Robert Talbert: How and why to achieve inbox zero.

One other thing I'll mention about Drafts is that it is incredibly easy to get started with… and once you're up and running, there are a gazillion bells and whistles you could discover, should you want to get even more benefit out of it.

One fun thing I enjoy is using an app on my iPhone and Apple Watch (via a complication) called Whisper Memos, which lets me record a voice memo and then receive an email with my “ramblings turned into paragraphed articles.” However, instead of cluttering up my email inbox, I have it set up to send an email to my special Drafts email, which then sends the transcription (broken into paragraphs, which I find super handy) to my Drafts inbox, for later use.

I also keep a Drafts workspace (not in my inbox) dedicated just to my various checklists, such as packing lists, a school departure checklist (which we haven't had to use in a long while, since our kids keep getting older and more independent), password reset checklist (where are all of the different apps and services I need to visit, anytime I get forced to reset my password for work), and a checklist for all the places I have to change my profile photo, anytime in the future I get new headshots or otherwise want a change.

Primary Note Taking Tool

Now we're finally to the real question Kerry was asking: What app should she use to take notes? Well, as I mentioned, I actually have a fair amount of them, but since I'm at least attempting to stay focused on the sabbatical needs, I had better get back to it now.

My primary notetaking tool these days is Obsidian. Robert Talbert again does a great job of articulating how and why he uses Obsidian. A big driver for me is that if I ever want to switch things up down the road, I don't have to worry about how to get stuff out of Obsidian. As it is just a “wrapper” or a “view” of plain text files that are sitting on my computer. If they ever decided to jack their users around by significant increases to their pricing model, without the added value one might expect, I wouldn't be locked in at all. There are plenty of other note-taking apps that would know how to “talk” to and display the plain text files on my computer in a similar fashion as Obsidian.

That said, some people might be intimidated by becoming familiar with writing using Markdown, which is the formatting used in plain text files. Since the text is “plain,” that means you can only make something bold by using other indicators that a given word or phrase is meant to be bold. However, I find you could get up and running with the vast majority of Markdown in less than five minutes, such that this isn't as big a barrier as it might seem.

As an example, I don't have to type the formatting for bold, I can just high light those words and then press command-B on my keyboard, same as I would in any other writing context. Headings are just indicated by typing the number of pound signs at the start of a line. So the heading for this section of this post required four number signs, because it is a heading 4 (H4), and then I just press space and type the subheading, like normal.

That said, you couldn't go wrong with Bear, or Craft, if you aren't as concerned about being able to get stuff easily out of them, should you ever change note taking tools in the future.

Getting Started

The tool we select is important, yes. But more important is how we set them up to help us achieve the intended purpose of wanting a note taking tool in the first place.

Daily notes. I am not as disciplined about this as I once was, but hope to get back to doing daily notes. Carl Pullein talks about the history of the “daily note” and how to use them to keep yourself organized and focused.

Meeting notes. I am close to 100% disciplined about taking notes during meetings (really helps me stay focused, as otherwise my mind can wander quite a bit), or when attending conferences or webinars. I keep a consistent naming convention for these notes, as follows: yyyy-mm-dd-meeting-name and then move the note to a dedicated folder in Obsidian. I only move the note into the follow after I have reviewed it for any “open loops” and then captured those in my task manager.

Other writing. I've got folders for other types of writing that I do, as well. To me, the key is having a “home” for where things belong and to be super disciplined about consistent naming conventions, so I don't get overwhelmed with the messiness of the creative process.

That said, Kerry will first want to play around with any note taking tool she is considering just at the note level, before she worries about how she will organize things. Otherwise, it is way too easy to get overwhelmed and not cross over the finish line of getting started using a note taking tool, consistently.

The University of Virginia Library offers ideas for how to organize research data across all disciplines. Don't miss the part where they say to write down your organization system before you start, or in my experience, it is too easy to forget how I set things up in the first place.