Browsers are wonderful tools for surfing the web, but they are not especially good at saving more than a few dozen links. All they can do is save your links in a stack, maybe allow you to move things around a bit later, but in order to do anything with browser links you pretty much have to look at all your links organized in limited ways: not good for complex work.
Once you start collecting dozens and then hundreds of links, you’ll want to store them thoughtfully, and you’ll be able to do that when you can move them around to meaningful categories and organize those categories.
But that’s only for starters. To manage complexity even further you’ll want to be able to search and add notes and tags.
Let me suggest that you start slowly and cheaply by learning how to use the Outline feature in Word, which you probably already have installed, or play with a lighter, more flexible application like Treepad (cost-free, works on any platform). Using these applications will give you important lessons in hierarchical organization — as I discuss in my notes on binary tree structures.
When you have a free moment, or feel a pressing need, you might go further and learn how to use applications that offer faster, single keystroke methods to save save web links, sorting in folders with simple drag and drop, and and keyword and tag searches, such as Evernote and Zotero, which plug into your browsers, or more powerful (and more expensive) stand-alone applications like Zoot (Windows), Circus Ponies Notebook(Mac), and Devonthink (Mac).
Whatever technologies you might use, the problem here is to save links, clippings, images, and your thoughts in meaningful, findable ways, so that when you sit down to write you have both everything you might need and prompts to help you remember what you have learned along the way.
A Note on the B-Tree
The Solution. To keep track, we are first going to learn how to use the Outline feature already installed on your computer. To understand the outline feature, please first spend one minute visiting the following animated example and observing how tree structures are used to sort the addition of new information and offer logical guides for information retrieval.
B-Tree Example. Even just 15 seconds viewing this fascinating animation will illuminate what you basically already know: the “tree structure” looks like a tree. But unlike the tree which distributes resources evenly from one end to the other, our tree structures are designed to help us sort things into categories, and categories of categories, and categories of categories, etc., so we might better think about relationships and findwhat we need. In addition to helping you keep track of notes, learning how tree structures work and gaining practice by using Outlines will help you understand the hierarchical structures we will be using with our websites and which are used everywhere on the web.
Tree Structure. This is from Wikipedia, and if you skim this article you will begin to learn about the principles of tree structures. It is named a “tree structure” because the classic representation resembles a tree, even though the chart is generally upside down compared to an actual tree, with the “root” at the top and the “leaves” at the bottom. You will find here a number of examples and a discussion that introduces you to the deeper logical dimension of this very important, useful structure and, as we are learning it, method.
I would suggest that you create a limited number (seven, max) general categories for things like class notes, group work, and your reflections. Assign them the top-most level of your outline, which Word has identified as “Heading 1.” Nested with each “Heading 1”, on the next level, you can assign “Heading 2”, and so on.
What I often do is list all the items in my class notes, for example, which are often best remembered chronologically, by headings that begin with the date and in an order that is easily sorted, like this: “10.04.14 Topic X”. In this way, all of the dates line up, you can move them up and down by selecting a line and, while holding down the shift-ctrl keys, and hitting an up or down arrow: outlines where you can move things around easily can be VERY useful when composing!
Under each class heading I use the next level, “Heading 3”, for the basic topics, which in our class would be our three major projects: data analysis, group work, and reflections. The text for each section I assign to Heading 4.
When I am all done, I can “collapse” all of the levels and end up with just the three or four major headings for my class, then expand one of them to see all the dates, for example, then open up a date to see what we did on that day. With just 3-4 clicks I can find anything, and if you think about it, you might now be able to see how structuring data in such logical hierarchies would increase a computer’s efficiency tremendously. In this class you will learn about other ways data is organized to reduce the operations needed to read or write things.
Creating Speech Outlines. The Outline feature is used for sophisticated data management in many fields. In this a fascinating explanation of the use of the Outline feature in Word for the design of scripts to be read into speech recognition software. In addition to explaining how to structure presentations in the outline format, it offers advice on writing coherent, effective sentences that might be of special interest for those of you interested in developing your language skills. As we will discuss later in this course, advanced language learning is often less about grammar and vocabulary and more about discovering, adapting, and using the phrases one finds in professional literatures or, as we teachers say, “we read in order to write” and “we speak in order to write”: we encourage students to grasp whole phrases and ways of speaking as we ourselves study the peculiar ways our languages are used. I often put it this way in class: “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck; if you learn how to walk like a marketing person (for example) and talk like a marketing person, you will become a marketing (or whatever) person.
Collecting, Storing & Retrieving
Browsers are wonderful tools for surfing the web, but they are not especially good at saving more than a few dozen links. All they can do is save your links in a stack, maybe allow you to move things around a bit later, but in order to do anything with browser links you pretty much have to look at all your links organized in limited ways: not good for complex work.
Once you start collecting dozens and then hundreds of links, you’ll want to store them thoughtfully, and you’ll be able to do that when you can move them around to meaningful categories and organize those categories.
But that’s only for starters. To manage complexity even further you’ll want to be able to search and add notes and tags.
Let me suggest that you start slowly and cheaply by learning how to use the Outline feature in Word, which you probably already have installed, or play with a lighter, more flexible application like Treepad (cost-free, works on any platform). Using these applications will give you important lessons in hierarchical organization — as I discuss in my notes on binary tree structures.
When you have a free moment, or feel a pressing need, you might go further and learn how to use applications that offer faster, single keystroke methods to save save web links, sorting in folders with simple drag and drop, and and keyword and tag searches, such as Evernote and Zotero, which plug into your browsers, or more powerful (and more expensive) stand-alone applications like Zoot (Windows), Circus Ponies Notebook(Mac), and Devonthink (Mac).
Whatever technologies you might use, the problem here is to save links, clippings, images, and your thoughts in meaningful, findable ways, so that when you sit down to write you have both everything you might need and prompts to help you remember what you have learned along the way.
A Note on the B-Tree
The Solution. To keep track, we are first going to learn how to use the Outline feature already installed on your computer. To understand the outline feature, please first spend one minute visiting the following animated example and observing how tree structures are used to sort the addition of new information and offer logical guides for information retrieval.
B-Tree Example. Even just 15 seconds viewing this fascinating animation will illuminate what you basically already know: the “tree structure” looks like a tree. But unlike the tree which distributes resources evenly from one end to the other, our tree structures are designed to help us sort things into categories, and categories of categories, and categories of categories, etc., so we might better think about relationships and findwhat we need. In addition to helping you keep track of notes, learning how tree structures work and gaining practice by using Outlines will help you understand the hierarchical structures we will be using with our websites and which are used everywhere on the web.
Tree Structure. This is from Wikipedia, and if you skim this article you will begin to learn about the principles of tree structures. It is named a “tree structure” because the classic representation resembles a tree, even though the chart is generally upside down compared to an actual tree, with the “root” at the top and the “leaves” at the bottom. You will find here a number of examples and a discussion that introduces you to the deeper logical dimension of this very important, useful structure and, as we are learning it, method.
I would suggest that you create a limited number (seven, max) general categories for things like class notes, group work, and your reflections. Assign them the top-most level of your outline, which Word has identified as “Heading 1.” Nested with each “Heading 1”, on the next level, you can assign “Heading 2”, and so on.
What I often do is list all the items in my class notes, for example, which are often best remembered chronologically, by headings that begin with the date and in an order that is easily sorted, like this: “10.04.14 Topic X”. In this way, all of the dates line up, you can move them up and down by selecting a line and, while holding down the shift-ctrl keys, and hitting an up or down arrow: outlines where you can move things around easily can be VERY useful when composing!
Under each class heading I use the next level, “Heading 3”, for the basic topics, which in our class would be our three major projects: data analysis, group work, and reflections. The text for each section I assign to Heading 4.
When I am all done, I can “collapse” all of the levels and end up with just the three or four major headings for my class, then expand one of them to see all the dates, for example, then open up a date to see what we did on that day. With just 3-4 clicks I can find anything, and if you think about it, you might now be able to see how structuring data in such logical hierarchies would increase a computer’s efficiency tremendously. In this class you will learn about other ways data is organized to reduce the operations needed to read or write things.
Creating Speech Outlines. The Outline feature is used for sophisticated data management in many fields. In this a fascinating explanation of the use of the Outline feature in Word for the design of scripts to be read into speech recognition software. In addition to explaining how to structure presentations in the outline format, it offers advice on writing coherent, effective sentences that might be of special interest for those of you interested in developing your language skills. As we will discuss later in this course, advanced language learning is often less about grammar and vocabulary and more about discovering, adapting, and using the phrases one finds in professional literatures or, as we teachers say, “we read in order to write” and “we speak in order to write”: we encourage students to grasp whole phrases and ways of speaking as we ourselves study the peculiar ways our languages are used. I often put it this way in class: “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck; if you learn how to walk like a marketing person (for example) and talk like a marketing person, you will become a marketing (or whatever) person.