People wanting to learn a new subject or extend their knowledge often find that it helps to restructure information from books, articles, Internet, etc. into an organization that makes sense to them.
This process has three main benefits:
- Promotes extra attention on the information.
- Relates new information to the existing understanding.
- Develops the skill of creating summaries.
All of these are known to help people remember more information than simply reading.
WhizFolders directly supports this enhanced learning by:
- The transformation from an information source into WhizFolders forces you to focus more attention on the material to be studied. The mental process is one of trying to summarize or pick out the main points from the information source in order to translate it into Topics. As the reading and study continues, the Topic structure is often revised to conform to the latest understanding. WhizFolders is ideal to support this 2-way process of information summarizing and structuring. All this extra focus on the new information, although taxing at the time, is actually helping you remember it!
- Developing the WhizFolders Topic List (and Jump hyperlinks) maps the new material into a structure which conforms to your existing way of thinking. Since you create the WhizFolders structure, it is your attempt at understanding the subject. As more material and Topics are created, new ways of structuring the Topic List (and linking it using the Jumps) occurs. Once again, as you struggle to organize and reorganize the material, it is actually increasing your understanding of the subject area.
- Since it is tedious to simply copy complete sections from books and printed materials into large word processor documents, or just blindly save the web pages into different files; the WhizFolders Topics concept encourages you to summarize the key information into a short note form. The challenge of deciding if the key information should be a Topic in the List or a note in a Topic is also good discipline and a useful part of developing the skill of summarizing information. The notes you write should be as short, clear and information rich as possible. This is a skill which can be reused time and again in many other written forms, e.g. report writing, important e-mail, giving written instructions, meeting notes and summaries, etc.
Some may recognize this process as similar to an exam revision. To a large extent this is true. Although this may not evoke pleasant memories for some, it was probably a time when you felt that you learned a great deal.
Use WhizFolders as a Learning Tool for any subject that requires reference to more than one information source (or even a single source, if required). Create Topics for each important aspect using outlining techniques and your current understanding of the subject. Also create Topics for each of your information sources, using links to the web, files on disk, or short summary notes of the books and articles you read.
Encourage yourself to create many types of Topics if you are unsure how to structure the information (e.g. Subject Areas, Key Themes, References, Test Structures), but do not invest vast amounts of time linking them all with Jumps until you have a structure you feel comfortable with (but do put in the ‘obvious’ Jumps – i.e. the Jumps that you think are important, these usually stay in anyway).
Experiment with the Topic List structure whilst trying to focus on organizing the subject in your mind. What are the main subject areas, in your opinion? If the book/article/information you are looking at uses a different organization, reorganize it into your way by taking notes from the source and writing them as Topics into your structure.
If you create many Topics as short notes from books and articles, make sure you keep some text with the Topic of where it came from (e.g. a Jump to the reference Topic). If you rely only on the Topic List structure to show where it came from and then re-order the Topics, the source may easily be lost.
Encourage yourself to summarize the key points from your different sources, even though this is quite a demanding task. It will force you to really focus on the important points and ignore less relevant material. Write the reference page number or exact point where the information came from in your note text so that you can go back to it later during your reviews. If you read away from the computer, take some manual summary notes with paper and pencil and rewrite them into WhizFolders later (this 2-step process is excellent for concentrating on the content first – paper – and the structure second – into WhizFolders).
The WhizFolders development of your subject can be as short as 1 day or may take many years. Using WhizFolders allows you to naturally organize information in the way that makes sense to you. Sometimes we feel the need to be given a structure for a subject (because we may be new to it, for example), rather than create it ourselves, but generally if you look at some of the subject overview information sources, the contents pages will suggest some likely key areas. WhizFolders makes it easy to reorganize anyway.
To conclude, these are just some initial thoughts to using WhizFolders as a Learning Tool, albeit based on using WhizFolders for several years. This may be a subject that can be developed over time as more people think about how they use WhizFolders to aid their learning and structuring of information and then contribute to this weblog.
— Peter Dodge
Peter works in IT and Telecoms and has interests in psychology and in music (piano playing).