I am part of a book club that often reads books about taking notes, personal knowledge management, and even historical topics that are related to early note-taking and the evolution leading to present ideas and practices. Our present read is Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
For those into the present fascination with the types of notes and concepts such as a second brain, which does include me, it is interesting to identify possible origins or parallels to present techniques and conceptions in the chapters of this history: e.g., commonplace books with categories of topics allowing the discovery of relationships among items first placed within categories; notebooks for quick immediate recording of observations (fleeting notes) later to receive further thoughtful analysis and important ideas copied in a more refined form to other notebooks (permanent notes) meant to be shared as evidence of personal eperiences and thinking with others and external storage for personal review (second brain).
The Travel Journal
Allen’s book tracing the history of notebooks devoted several chapters to early notebooks documenting travel experiences, and in addition to the connections to current topics in taking and thinking with notes, several of the descriptions of the motives and methods of early travel journals resonated with my personal experiences.
Chapter 13 describes the travels and notebooks of Heinrich Schickhardt, who received a commission to travel throughout Europe beginning in 1598, sketching and commenting on the marvels he encountered. His sketches and notes were of sufficient quality that when he returned to Venice, his sponsors were able to have master craftsmen recreate some of the engineering marvels Schickhardt had seen. Personal travel continues as an important source of personal discovery and understanding, even though we might now label Schickhardt’s discoveries as industrial espionage. Times change.
More to the point of this post, Chapter 14 considers some of the earliest travel blogs. Allen notes that the accounts of visitors are uniquely valuable to historians because outsiders are often more acute observers than natives and record details that would otherwise be very difficult to document. You learn a lot if you are open to the experiences of travel, and so do those with whom you share such experiences.
My wife and my travels have long been a source of content for our early blogs, and we eventually created some blogs exclusively to document our travels. We have had some unique experiences, often related to my wife’s extended stays in other countries. Cindy focused on classroom applications of technology early on, and her expertise brought attention from Fulbright, and eventually, just her reputation resulted in invitations to visit and interact with local educators to explore the uses of technology in classrooms. She spent an extended period in Japan and made several trips to Russia. Often, she developed a friendship with her interpreters for these trips, and many of these relationships persist to the present. Her connection in Russia resulted in a years-long friendship that saw her interpreter move to the United States and become a citizen. By chance, we were with this couple when Russia invaded Ukraine, and we listened as they received phone calls in real time from both Russia and Ukraine. Such extended trips differ from typical tourism, but she did take me along on one of her trips to Russia that included a good deal of time spent exploring the country.
I find my travel blogs more interesting to review than my photo collection. In the blogs which were originally written for family and friends, the photos are accompanied by a narrative that, after many years, is both interesting to me and, in some cases, because of the uniqueness of the experiences, informative for others. Some folks complain that tourists should live in the moment and not distract themselves by taking photos. I can see that point of view, but I wonder if such critics have an annotated collection of their adventures from decades ago.
The following are a few samples:
As I explained, I first incorporated travel posts into my existing blogs. Here are a couple of examples from our Russian trips.
Travel blogs:
Writing in general offers not just a means of communication, but a way to reflect and explore experiences. This is the basis for writing to learn activities demonstrated to be valuable in an educational setting, and it makes sense to me that it is a way to process the learning potential of travel experiences. I continue to write about our travels, but it was reading Allen’s book that prompted this post on reviewing and sharing travel experiences.
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