Using digital notes as a tool for learning
When I first started reading about PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) and watching Youtube videos of people showing their system, I was skeptical. How on earth can you "manage" your "personal knowledge"? It is not knowledge if it sits on a computer or in the cloud! Knowledge, to me, is information you have access to in your mind, not by looking something up on your computer. My initial thoughts about PKM was that it was just a laborious way of creating your own mini-internet where you could look things up that you once read but had forgotten.
I was all about retrieval practice at the time, using Anki to learn languages and geology. So I thought that the time spent creating a PKM system and feeding it with "knowledge" would be much better spent creating flashcards for those same concepts.
However, I soon came to see a major flaw in this: while flashcards do help you learn facts in a very efficient way, they lack the big-picture thinking needed to develop deep knowledge. Connecting all those little facts in a cohesive knowledge tree is what is missing. Yes, I was learning geology and Spanish, but it wasn't helping me think like a geologist or speak Spanish. It helped a bit, for sure. Facts are the foundation of knowledge, the little branches and leaves on the tree. But they need to be joined up to something bigger before they can be truly useful.
This is where PKM comes in, or a digital home as I like to think of it. It's where you can put your knowledge together, write about the bigger concepts, consider evidence and counterarguments, connect concepts together, and look at the deeper structure. I say you CAN do this, because it is not guaranteed you WILL do this just by installing an app. Each of these activities is a habit to develop. They all require some work, especially in the beginning when you are getting used to things.
The way I see it now is that writing notes on things you read and want to learn can often bypass the need to use spaced repetition flashcards. When learning about big, interconnected topics like how to connect with people, how we learn best, how the earth system is affected by feedback cycles, and how to develop new habits, there is no need to spend time separating the topics into bite-sized facts and practise those until you know them off by heart. Instead, we can learn these wider concepts by continuing to read and write, linking to related notes, using the information in our lives, and spending time in our digital home where we come across notes we wrote months or years ago.
This is in many ways a more organic way to learn - you experience new things and process them by thinking and writing about them. It can also be a more fun and colourful experience than going through flashcards. But some concepts will inevitably fall through the cracks since notes don't automatically resurface on a spaced repetition schedule (there may be plug-ins that adds this feature though).
This all results in a more random exposure to notes and sporadic, random retrieval practice (remembering a connection to another note, searching for that note and then opening the note is a bit of retrieval practice, but unless you try to retrieve the actual contents of the note before opening it, it doesn't help you remember those details better next time you need them). Because of this, I am not willing to switch completely from Anki to Obsidian but rather to experiment and find out when it is best to use which. My gut feeling (and the way I use it now) is that for cases where facts and categories are important, for example what the different types of volcano look like and how they form, spaced repetition wins the day, whereas for broader concepts like the impact of social media on teenagers' mental health, writing notes based on reading may be more appropriate.
So, if you want to try out using your digital home for learning, here are some ideas:
Treat it as a self-directed learning project. Even if you are taking a course with a set curriculum, your notes in your digital home should be written by you. Choose the most relevant concepts for you right now, and write about those. Skip over the less relevant parts.
Use Maps of content (MOCs) to stay organised. For a course or a book, use the table of contents to create one. For more unstructured learning on a topic, write some notes first and then try to group them according to categories that make sense to you to create your own MOC.
Reflect on your note-taking workflow and adjust as needed. Don't be perfectionist about the format - if you decide to make a change, just make it on future notes. Don't waste time going back and changing old notes for the sake of it. You will end up using some old notes again, and then you can change them as you come across them.
Drawing can be more useful than writing if the topic calls for a more visual approach. Use whichever method is most frictionless for you - drawing with a pen on paper is often the easiest, and then you can take a photo and add it to your digital note.
Use self-testing, either by writing questions and answers in bullet-point format, where the answers can be hidden by hiding sub-bullet points, or by looking through the MOC of the topic and trying to recall what the individual notes were about before opening them to check.
Ask new questions. Learning through digital notes can help you go deeper into topics. You think of questions as you write, and whether you find the answer immediately by looking it up or you continue to ponder for years (for big questions or those with a highly nuanced answer), you will have learned something.
Use your notes as a "second brain". Computers do have some advantages over biological brains, in that they can store information instantaneously and then "recall" the information precisely and accurately over long periods of time. Instead of lamenting the fact that our brains can't do the same, use it as a resource to support your own learning.
I don't have all the answers as I am still just experimenting with this approach, so if you try it and find out what works for you, please let me know.
Recommended resources
The Learning Scientists’ website for tips on how to learn effectively
Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain for more on the last bullet point
Aidan Helfant's website - I recently discovered Aidan Helfant’s work through his podcast. He writes and records podcasts about Obsidian, learning and related topics.