Is it possible to build a second brain? Tools such as Obsidian and Notion promise exactly that - and they've sparked a wave of self-optimization content online. This seminar takes a different approach which is not about time but about ideas.
Imagine your study notes as living pages in your own personal wikipedia, where each note links to others, revealing hidden connections between ideas. Rather than promising the ultimate efficiency hack, in "Connected Thinking" you will experimentally build your own long-lasting knowledge base to uncover associations within your knowledge that you already forgot existed.
Interdisciplinarity // Every student has their own approach to studying and each discipline shapes what and how students learn with their notes. The seminar accounts for this and actively connects students from different disciplines with their approaches.
Centered around the individual task of building a personal knowledge database, students are enabled to apply the class content to their individual learning situation supported through peer feedback.
Learning Objectives // At the end of the seminar, participants should be able to
- develop a personal knowledge base and reflect on its limitations and benefits for their own learning process
- explain the learning theory of connectivism and how it impacts learning in the digital age
- reflect on the social influence of personal knowledge systems such as the phenomenon of digital gardening
- apply tools from graph theory and computational linguistics to analyze knowledge bases
Didactic Setting // Students actively prepare micro teachings for selected topics for the seminar. Iterative rounds of peer feedback guides students to develop their knowledge bases together. To accommodate for different skill levels, some basic technical foundations are taught in a flipped classroom setting. |
