UNIPÆD workshop: Creative memo-taking: How to make note taking more fun and effective
October 21st 2013 – 13-17.15 (in real terms: 13-15.40 and then opportunity for supervision afterwards)
From time to time everybody needs to take notes; they may be attending a seminar, a meeting or perhaps supervising groups of students.
Taking minutes can be a both incredibly boring and ineffective exercise and often when one goes back to the notes months later, making sense of them can sometimes be difficult. In recent years memory techniques, or mnemonics as they are also called, have become increasingly popular. One of the most famous is the memory palace. In essence, by creating a link to a positive memory of a physical place one organizes the new knowledge and information in recognizable locations. Mind-mapping is another, also well known, way of doing remembering differently.
In this workshop we are going to use similar, but completely different, techniques to make note-taking more effective, more memorable and hopefully more fun. The method uses creativity and naïvistic art to create notes that both grasp the essence of what is being talked about and visually illustrate and question the note-taker’s subjective take on the matter. The aim is not for the notes to be beautiful or even artistic in the aesthetical sense; the aim is to use recognizable and general symbols, objects and icons that will help trigger and re-trigger the meaning being captured in the notes – even after a long time.
Here are a couple of examples:
You can see more examples here:
http://conferenceillustrations.blogspot.co.uk/
The workshop is aimed at people who are visually oriented and/or those who would like to experiment. The technique can be used in many different contexts, classical lecture note-taking, meeting minutes, explaining and presenting to students and colleagues and so on. In the workshop we are going to work actively on finding your primary icons and develop a starter strategy for your creative note-taking. Every participant is asked to make a 2 minute pitch-presentation about one of the following subjects:
- Republican or royalist?
- Why the theory/practice gap in teaching is so great
- My worst ever journey to work
Coffee and tea is available, so is paper and pens, however, if you would like paints or felt pens feel free to bring them along.