Advice for Students: Use a Wiki for Better Note-Taking
It’s back to school time, and it’s time to make good on the promises you made yourself last year to be more organized this time around! One of the stumbling blocks I see most often in my students is taking — and keeping — good notes for their classes. Ideally, you’d like to have notes on all your reading, as well as notes from lectures, and you’d like to have both available when you need the to study for an exam or write a paper.
Enter the wiki. While wikis are generally seen as part of the trendy “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, they are actually one of the older technologies on the Web. Named after a Hawaiian phrase meaning “quick”, wikis are easily-edited, automatically interlinked sets of documents. Pages can be created and edited on the fly, and most track changes and additions, allowing for effective collaboration between multiple writers.
Wikis have been especially popular with students, and a number of specialized wikis have been developed specifically with students’ needs in mind, including NoteMesh, stud.icio.us, and PBwiki. Wikis are a great way to keep, organize, and instantly access class notes and other school-related information. Wikis offer students:
- Legibility: No more squinting over class notes taken while half-asleep, bored stiff, or hung over!
- Durability: Wikis can be developed over the entire 4 (or 5, or 6, or…) years of a student’s education, allowing him or her to access notes taken years earlier if necessary.
- Searching: Wikis can be searched, in the page and across the entire collection of pages, allowing immediate access to their contents.
- Links: Students can link to other pages within their wikis as well as to other sites on the Web, bringing new bodies of information together in one place.
- Collaboration: Several people can collaborate on the same wiki, allowing you to benefit from the strengths of your classmates.
- Affordability: Wikis are still closely tied to the open-source movement, so many wiki programs and services are free.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of wikis out there — the wiki matrix lists dozens of wikis, all with a different approach to the basic problem of storing and editing information. I recommend the hosted services offered by PBWiki and WikiDot, both of which offer free, highly-configurable wiki sites oriented towards education. NoteMesh and stud.icio.us both offer good services, though they encompass much more than just note-taking. TiddlyWiki’s all-in-one wiki is run from your local computer, and can be stored on and run from a thumb-drive, making it a good portable solution.
Using a wiki
Once your wiki is set up, you can begin to add your notes. Most wikis have an “edit page” button placed somewhere prominently on the page (a handful allow changes to be made directly to the page); click the button and a text box appears to make your changes in. Wikis use a special set of text cues called markup for formatting and manipulating text, though most also have a command bar at the top or bottom of the text box. Learn at least the basic markup syntax your choice uses — although this will likely slow you down at first, it will save a great deal of time in the long run.
For this article, I set up a wiki at dwax.wikidot.com and entered notes from a few of my class’s readings. Wikidot uses a simple markup syntax for formatting: putting text inside double slashes, like //this// makes the text italic; using double asterisks like **this** makes it bold. There’s also a toolbar above the text editing box in case you forget a command or prefer to click buttons instead of typing formatting symbols.
The real strength of wikis, though, is the ability to create links on the fly to other pages on the wiki. On Wikidot, you put the text you want to become a link in triple brackets, [[[like this]]]. If the text inside the brackets is the same as the title of a page already created, the new link will automatically link to that page. If not, clicking on the link will allow you to create a new page. So while you’re working, you can link to other pages, tying for instance theories and their creators in a science class, or dates and events in a history class.
In many wikis, pages can also be tagged with keywords describing the content, allowing you to quickly see related pages (and often to bring out otherwise hidden relationships between different readings). So, for instance, in my admittedly scanty sample wiki, I can call up all the pages tagged “race” — useful in my case for creating a syllabus.
Another very useful feature wikis offer is the ability to collaborate with others and to track changes and revert to earlier versions when needed. If you ever accidentally erase something you wrote or “miscorrect” an entry and later realize you were right the first time, you can easily find your earlier thoughts and restore deleted text. This is especially useful if you share a wiki among several other students — you can pool your collective wisdom, correcting others’ mistakes and counting on them to help catch yours.
Some suggestions for your wiki
The collaboration features of wikis make organizing study groups easy and very effective. Gather up a few students in your class and divide your topic up into pieces for each person. As you work, you can link to your co-students’ pages, and vice versa. As new material is covered, you can go back and edit each other’s pages or correct each other’s mistakes.
Whether you create your wiki with a group of on your own, the ability to link topics and ideas creates a very effective review tool. Before a test or while preparing a paper, browse through your wiki, following links from page to page to refresh your memory of how things fit together.
Wikis are also useful for making connections between topics in different classes. While this might not be relevant for every class you take, for classes in your major be especially diligent in creating links to existing pages. At the end of your studies, you will have a rich repository of ideas and work in your discipline to call on as a reference.
Wikis are incredibly flexible, and these are just a few ways to apply them to your studies. If you are already using wikis as a study tool, let us know your tips for getting the most out of them!
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Comments
Gary McLaughlin says on August 22nd, 2007 at 11:48 am
Nice find.
I notice they don’t mention VoodooPad (mac-only) in its various free/sw/pro forms.
It’s perfect for taking notes, does auto-linking/embedding and I find it great for organizing thoughts (using it as a container for a story idea right now).
I think the Pro version comes with a built-in web server, but I think that’s overkill for notes.
VoodooPad:
http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/
Dustin Wax says on August 22nd, 2007 at 11:58 am
Gary,
For the most part I avoided desktop-based wikis (except TiddlyWiki, ’cause it’s jsut so cool!). And, of course, as a non-Apple user, I’m hardly qualified to talk about Mac-only software…
Eugene says on August 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Are most teachers still anti technology, my wife just graduated a couple years ago and still had teachers who would forbid the use of computers in the classroom. I had the same experience and ended up scanning some and re-typing some notes afterward.
Ian says on August 22nd, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Another choice students may want to check out is http://www.notesake.com Very simple yet, very powerful.
-ian smith
co-founder of notesake
drudmann says on August 22nd, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Some teachers went from being pro-computers in the classroom to being anti after discovering that most students with computers IM and surf the web during class and lecture, not take notes. If they were taking notes, virtually no one should mind. It’s a problem of focusing attention on the work that needs to be done. I would hope that a professor with an anti-computer policy could be approached and be persuaded if the student made an earnest and clear argument for what he or she would do with the computer, and would not be doing with the computer.
Jamie T. says on August 22nd, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Are there any wikis which also aid in the production of visual diagrams? Often In my notes I need to draw, and it would be nice to see a wiki that incorporated this functionality.
Ian – does notesake allow UK users? I tried entering a UK university and it wasn’t found.
By the way – great stuff, i’m hooked to this feed.
Chris says on August 22nd, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Wikis will never catch on as notebook replacements for a couple of reasons:
1) Mathematical symbols are a pain in the ass to represent in wikis. By the time you get the appropriate symbols and formatting in, you’re three equations behind the professor.
2) Assuming you don’t have a fancy-pants tablet PC, there’s no way to copy diagrams off of the board. I suppose you could use a digicam or something if you were really dedicated, but syncing all the pictures up with the appropriate pages of the wiki would be more hassle that it’s worth.
3) Formatting is a pain in the ass to do in a wiki. When I’m taking notes, and there’s a REALLY important point, I might write it larger, underline it three times, or put a big star next to it. How do I do that quickly in a wiki? How do I connect concepts with an arrow, or write an aside in the margins?
In my experience, wikis and other electronic note-taking tools have far too many disadvantages to make them viable alternatives to paper and a pencil. Sure, having a searchable archive of all my collegiate notes sounds great in principle, but ask students how often they really reference their notes from years ago, or even from the previous semester. (hint: it’s pretty close to never)
Wikis are great for doing some things, but note taking is not one of them.
Dustin Wax says on August 22nd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I actually wouldn’t recommend anyone take notes directly into a wiki. After allowing laptops (and whatever else) in my classroom for 4 years, this year I will disallow their use, for the reasons listed above. I move around the class a lot so I see what’s on students’ screens, and it’s never been notes. It’s been websites (usually MySpace or FaceBook), IM, Desktop Tower Defense, Snood, Tetris, and so on, but never notes.
As noted, taking notes on a PC is pretty inefficient, though anyone who isn’t in math or sciences probably won’t have most of the problems listed by Chris. Some people can manage to type notes directly, but for most, I’d recommend taking paper notes in class and typing them up later. This reinforces learning and allows for the refinement of notes. I wish I had done this when I was a student (we didn’t really have PCs yet, but I could have used my typewriter) because I actually do regularly use notes I took 10, 15, and almost 20 years ago.
Taking notes and then typing them into a PC later may not be the fastest way, but “fastest” does not necessarily equal “most productive” — learning isn’t something that can be easily sped up.
Jamie T says on August 22nd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Chris, I completely agree with you. But I think there’s a lot of space for change. I wish tablet pc’s were a bit cheaper. I think the big catch of wikis at the moment though is the ease of sharing with coursemates.
And as for browsing the internet.. That really isn’t good, but surely it can’t be too hard for university tech teams to disable connections within the lecture rooms? (something emitting signals at the same frequencies would make do..)
I’m on a course which requires 20-30 hours a week lecture time, and i often don’t make it in to all or even many of these. Being able to share notes with friends would be great as a cheeky way to get past this probelm. However, it does beg the question as to whether I would go in even less, should i be able to get the notes from everyone else…
Todd Baxter says on August 23rd, 2007 at 7:25 am
I personally like OneNote for taking notes. I dont think there is a Mac version but if you have a PC this program is the best. I take alot of notes for both work and Home. I use to carry around about 10-15 different note books. Now I just do everything in OneNote.
The big problem with Notebooks was one the amount I carried around and two where was the information I needed. No search ability. Also with OneNote it allows you to drag sentence and pictures around in your notes. So its great for making list fast , then going back and putting them in some logical order.
Really great for making grocery lists. Me and my wife have a shared notebook on a network drive at home. Durning the week she and I can just add things at random that me we need. When it comes time to do the shopping , I can then drag things around and place them in catagories to make the shopping experience alittle quicker.
Alot of the wiki are free but if you got the cash for this program I highly suggest it. And I am not someone that loves microsoft. But they made a dang good program here..
Eugene says on August 23rd, 2007 at 10:19 am
I was usually pretty good with diagrams but couldn’t keep up with the professor so I ended up doing them on paper and drawing them out later.
The problem with banning computers completely in classis those few of us who would want to use one get punished. Happened to my wife’s school, she was typing her notes in one day where someone elses game made a noise so the teacher punished everyone instead of just the one person.
Chanio says on August 24th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Nice article,
I guess that studying by having local wikis to write notes, implies that we are not taking others opinion into acount when studying something new. (4 ex. collaborative wikies). We yet study better (faster) alone…
Here is a pair of local and fully working wikies:
* For LINUX users (and also Windows in a near future) Zim
that, while studying, lets you train in writting web wikies at the same time since it uses the same syntax and is the best finished local version (yes, without a server). It also works by joining separate files, so you always have the option of making a copy of any piece of the wiki. A new link is built using the hot-key Ctrl+L after writting any word. If the link exists, it just takes you there.
* Another real multiplatform is WikiPad although it has a little chaotic structure. This time, the LINUX version is said to have some issues. This application keeps every wiki in an sqlLite file.
I imagine that studying with a wiki structure is going to create a new way of thinking because it allows us to build graphically what before was done only virtually in our heads :).
frank Pirrone says on August 26th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Dustin,
Excellent posting and excellent replies, but here’s a comment or two I didn’t note in quickly scanning the responses:
If relevant, an entire server stack can be set up with little more than a click and an account name – MAMP in OS X, LAMP in Linux. For those who aren’t familiar with this the A=Apache Web server, M=MySQL database back-end, and P=PHP (usually) scripting language.
Then, installing one of the free Wikis using this infrastructure gives you complete control as well as potential security and desired access.
I’ve got all this running on my MacBook Pro, and it’s screaming fast, and easily able to handle a class of students. Internally it’s a private IP, external access is possible with NAT.
I recognize the radical nature of this option, and understand it will apply or even appeal to few, but I have made a personal mission of not exactly reinventing Web wheels, but rather creating my own copy. I’ve got Blogs, Wikis, mailers, listserves, etc. running on two Linux machines and this Mac.
One other thing regarding the limitation of Wiki entries for technical items: If you or your readers haven’t checked out LyX yet – it’s a document processor as opposed to a word processor – at least peek at its Web site. This is a long-standing LaTeX application using that standard markup language, actually still required for some publications – mathematics in particular.
It has a wonderful equation editor, and EVERYthing done in LyX look like it came from one of the better publishing houses.
My point being, it’s simple to have LyX, Dia, Draw from NeoOffice, etc. open at the same time, create the “technical” component of your notes, and link that document to the notes in the Wiki.
Final disclaimer, I recognize the radical nature of this further option and how it will apply and appeal to a few, but it’s just so cool…
Frank
Ian says on August 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Jamie T – if the autofill function doesn’t find your school you are more then welcome to just type it in manually.
Thank you,
Ian
http://notesake.com
Joerg says on August 28th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I’m one of those students who has to write math formulas quite often. I’ve tried some of the free wikis so far, and NoteSake seems to be suited best for me. Other wikis I signed up for either lack latex support completely or you need to use your mouse to insert a formula which gets really annoying if you have more than a few expressions to write.
I’ll also give lyx a try as suggested by Frank.
Using my computer as a wiki server is not a real option in my case because unfortunately I don’t have a laptop.
Dan says on April 9th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
You should also check out Luminotes, a free web-based personal wiki. It’s great for note taking because you can easily make links between different notes, so you can keep each concept in its own note. Because it’s web-based, you can also share your notes with friends and colleagues.
Anyway, check it out at http://luminotes.com/
Jake says on April 30th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I’d like to recommend a non-web based note taking software called NoteScribe. It’s very cheap, and very easy to use. Being non-web based it is easily transportable, and with the ability to export and import notes, sharing between fellow students and co-workers remains easy.
Jake
http://www.notescribe.net