AI allows the development of a second brain while ignoring the first

Posted on October 21, 2025 by admin

Like many educators, I have begun to question the impact of AI tools on learners. It is not the potential of AI that concerns me; it is how individuals end up using AI as an easy substitute for what are intended to be ways to develop essential skills and personal knowledge. Many who read my comments and tutorials are interested in Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and the development of what is called a Second Brain. Therefore, I thought I would describe how the challenges facing university and K12 educators also seem to be creeping into the PKM and Second Brain space.

Those captivated by concepts and strategies emphasized by PKM and Second Brain advocates are typically adult, independent learners who believe these ideas can contribute to personal understanding and productivity. I tend to translate specific practices using the concept of generative processing, which comes from my background as an educational psychologist. From this perspective, individuals learn from what might be called thinking, but how to do this is often not understood. Generative activities encourage and involve external tasks that tend to engage productive internal (cognitive) processes. So, for example, if the understanding and usefulness of new information is enhanced by relating new information to existing knowledge, such connections could happen without external encouragement or could be encouraged and given direction by asking a simple question: what is an example from your personal experience that seems to be an example of the concept XXX? Questions are an example of an external task heavily used in education. Other examples of common learning tactics include taking notes and writing in response to a prompt related to content to be learned.

PKM and Second Brain strategies emphasize similar generative processes. There is a heavy emphasis on notetaking, summarization using a personal perspective, revisiting and reworking existing notes, and physically linking personal notes immediately as recorded and over time. The Second Brain perspective emphasizes the external storage and delayed use of the products of such activities. The argument for a second brain identifies the limitations of human memory and cognitive processes. It proposes that external storage systems can be developed to support cognition and augment the limitations of the human information processing system. Each component (the human brain and the second brain) are intended to partner in ways that each functions in what that component does best.

The observation that led to this post and its title was my recognition that new digital AI tools offered me ways to develop a second brain with little use of my own cognition. For example, I can use Recall to provide a detailed summary of complex documents, I can use TwinMinds to create a complete transcription of an audio presentation and store both the presentation and a detailed summary, I can use Smart Connections to identify links among the ideas appearing in summaries, and I can collect all of these products using a tool such as Obsidian or Recall. I can then ask the AI within one of these collection tools to write a blog post. All of this processing has involved very little of my own thinking or analysis. I can be from input to second brain to output with very little participation from my own brain. Of course, I can simply ask an AI to write something using a prompt without even identifying specific inputs to the example tools I have identified.

What is lost in classrooms and in the potential options now available to independent learners is the development of specific skills (e.g., writing, note-taking, critical analysis) and the products the engagement of these skills produces (notes or extended written documents). It is easy enough to avoid the downsides through personal decisions, but ask educators how well trusting personal learner decision-making works. I can commit to reading the inputs that influence what I write, taking notes, and finding interesting connections among the notes I have stored over time. I do not operate under time pressures that require a product, and I am not rewarded for meeting such deadlines. I have developed insights into the challenges of our present circumstances and admit to being concerned about what learners will lose, impacting their futures and the collective future we all face.

I welcome your comments in response to my observations.

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Where do you find good college teachers?

Posted on October 14, 2025 by admin

I have been reading Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, and Grant referred to a research study about teacher effectiveness in introductory college courses that sent me off on a deep dive into what type of college teacher is most effective. Grant’s topic was really about whether one should connect with the most expert person possible as a mentor, but his example and conclusions were based on a study focused on higher education, which raised an issue and possible stereotype I am sensitive to as a retired professor. In a section titled “What those who can do can’t teach”, Grant highlighted a research study that suggested contingent faculty (full-time, nontenure track faculty) are more effective with beginning students than tenure-track faculty. Right away, I worry that his argument suggests researchers don’t care or can’t teach. This was not really his intent, but just his way of framing the issue (the section title) was sufficient to motivate my investigation.

Grant’s position on expertise and guidance was based on a research study I will describe in greater detail after I explain his conclusion. The study (Figlio and colleagues, 2015) showed that students in Introduction to Economics performed better with full-time teachers than with tenure-track teacher/researchers, as demonstrated by higher performance in the subsequent related course. Grant explained that greater expertise results in greater difficulty communicating about the basics. Experts sometimes lack insight into their own skills, which makes it challenging to communicate effectively. They may ignore important information they assume others have or no longer recognize as present in their own thinking. Their explanations jump around with side examples that lack connections novices need to understand and put the ideas they are receiving together. I admit that some of this hit a nerve, as I sometimes received criticism in my own “intro course” teaching for spending time telling stories that some students thought were off target. To me, the stories were concrete examples I used to illustrate the concepts and principles I presented in practice. I was trying to demonstrate relevance. 

So, off I went to read the original study responsible for this argument. Figlio and colleagues, who are economists, studied the students of contingent and tenure-track instructors enrolled in the first economics course. Their dependent variable, which I found strange, was the performance of these students in the following relevant course. This was argued to reflect the “value added” of the quality of instruction in the preceding course. My explanation for this approach was that this was archival data. Without equivalent performance instruments to evaluate performance in the initial course, the grade in the next course was a better dependent variable. These researchers didn’t speculate about their results in the same way as Grant. It is easiest to explain their speculation without reference to their statistical data. They produced a figure charting the distribution of the value-added variable for the contingent and tenure-track faculty and the distributions were nearly identical over the top 75% of both groups, but were different with fewer lower-performing contingent faculty with smaller value-added scores. These authors speculated that over time, more contingent faculty members who were less effective were rehired. I don’t know whether this explains why they were less effective so perhaps both sources are compatible.

How might administrators respond to these findings? Should they at this point? I guess my thought is that much more work is needed before decisions are made about staffing. First, just which institutions should be informed by these findings? The study was performed in one department of one institution. The institution, Northwestern, has a mixed mission including both research and instruction. The issue of tenure is likely heavily influenced by research and grant activity at this institution, but tenure as a practice is also what happens at many institutions with a primary instructional mission. The tenure vs. ongoing reappointment difference is a different issue.

Second, the economic focus on estimating value, as demonstrated by future benefit, is interesting but I think unusual when it comes to evaluating instructional skill. Most educational research focused on the impact of a practice examines achievement in the course where the manipulation or observed assumed causal variable is studied. The gold standard for such research (e.g. see Stroebe, 2020) would involve multiple sections of the same course, using a common method of evaluation, taught by different instructors, with students assigned to a section at random. This methodology is difficult to arrange, but it has been used often in addressing another critical question for administrators – whether student ratings predict instructional quality (the answer is no). When it comes to student achievement and whether instruction is provided by tenure track or contingent faculty using this method, I found one example (Carrell and West, 2010) that demonstrated better immediate achievement, but lower future performance associated with contingent faculty. So, there is more to be learned from additional studies. 

Personal comment: I commonly taught the Introduction to Psychology course and I have considered the Grant argument about expertise as it applies to my experience. Introduction to Psychology is a survey course offered to both majors and nonmajors. Suppose you want to understand the content of such courses. In that case, you might imagine a typical textbook that contains chapters on such subjects as Research Methods in Psychology, Biological Bases of Behaviors, Learning, Memory, Sensation and Perception, Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology, Abnormal Behavior, Therapies and Treatments. These chapter titles could also be used for full courses available to students later in their studies. My expertise and the advanced courses I taught were in Educational Psychology, so Learning, Memory, Developmental, and Motivation were areas in which I propose I had some expertise. Despite the typical reaction when I am introduced to others as a psychologist, that I must be a clinician treating those with mental disorders, I did not study these areas and knew far less about them than graduate students with that focus in our own department. What would Grant’s argument suggest about my instruction in various topics covered in Intro, given the great variability in my actual expertise? I would suggest that pedagogical skills and content knowledge are both critical, yet somewhat independent, in impacting student learning. I have no data to evaluate my own contributions, but I would bet I provided a superior experience in explaining human learning compared to human pathology. 

These are interesting issues with real consequences. Some suggest that administrators seriously consider hiring for two categories of faculty members in multi-mission institutions. I think there are related problems with this approach such as prestige and whether those focused exclusively on teachers are actually prepared for this role. 

Why do I present this information? I suppose I assume some are just interested. I also propose that public perceptions of higher education are often poorly informed and I hope that indicating those involved are committed to exploring multiple productivity issues will help. 

References:

Carrell, S. and West, J.(2010). Does professor quality matter? Evidence from random assignment of students to professors.” Journal of Political Economy.  118(3), 409-432.

Figlio,D., Schapiro, M. and Soter, K. (2015). Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers? The Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(4), 715–724.

Stroebe, W. (2020). Student evaluations of teaching encourages poor teaching and contributes to grade inflation: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Basic and applied social psychology, 42(4), 276-294.

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Google Adds AI to Google Photos

Posted on September 21, 2025 by admin

These are the photos I was looking for, and this is the story of how I used the new AI feature in Google Photos to find them.

My wife and I are about to set out on a month-long adventure that will take us to Alaska and then Japan. The strange combination is due to what is called a boat “repositioning” by the cruise industry. This is the fifth trip we have made to Alaska starting with driving the ALCAN highway when some of it was still gravel, several ferry trips through the inside passage, and now a cruise ship.  

As I prepared for this trip, I tried to locate images from past visits. I have always taken photos and written about our trips. Still, this content was collected over nearly fifty years and was created with multiple cameras and phones and scattered across online storage, numerous computers, and various types of storage media. When I retired, I undertook a project to collect as many images as possible in one location. I chose Google Photos, mainly because the images would automatically upload as I found them. 

My situation is not unusual for someone of my age. If you are an older individual, you already probably know that your kids don’t want your stuff. They also are not that interested in your pictures. Even those in which they appear. This does not mean that you won’t appreciate the opportunity to review past experiences. I find that selecting a few and generating the stories that go with them is more likely to generate interest in others.

Back to the bears.

During one of our Alaska trips, we visited our daughter and her future husband, who were spending the summer exploring and working on a whale watching boat. The daughter was in a phase where she took a lot of photos and even blogged about her experiences. We were walking on the shore and she was using my camera when we saw several bears, one of which was out in the water. She captured a series of images as the bear moved through the water and at one point, climbed and posed on a rock before moving on. The bear on the rock picture garnered significant attention and appeared on the front page of the Ketchikan paper. I had the famous photo, but not the sequence, and that is what I wanted to see if I could find.

Here is the challenge. My collection includes thousands and thousands of photos. Over the years, I have paid for and maintained a collection in Flickr that is made up of more than 7000. The issue with Flickr was that I had used it for many years to showcase my high-quality shots. I was not using the service to collect the large number of images I deemed of lesser interest to others. The other images accumulated in iPhoto on several machines and perhaps as slides or digital photos stored on CDs or whatever happened to be the external media of the day. As I rediscovered these images, they ended up in Google Photos in no particular order. Note, few of these images had geolocation data, and many not even the EXIF data that would indicate the date the images were taken. Cameras, an SLR in this case, do not have the means to record the geolocation data we expect from cellphones. 

Here is the feature Google has added to photos that seems added just for my situation. You can now ask Gemini (AI), available within Photos, to perform a wide range of tasks based on your photo collection.  First, the Ask feature does not presently work on a Macintosh, but does work with the Google Photos app on the iPhone or iPad. Ask appears at the bottom of the screen instead of the search icon, which may be confusing if you are used to the traditional search method. Entering the prompt “Find images of bears in my photo collection” creates a long list of hits – bears in zoos, a photo of a black bear carved from a tree stump, teddy bears being held by our kids, and all of the bear images taken in Alaska. I was able to locate one of the missing bear images as the bear approached the rock I could not find in any other way. 

I tried one more search that also produced some very surprising results. I knew that we had fished for salmon on one of our Alaska trips and searched for salmon. I found photos I had taken of salmon in restaurants, pictures of smoked salmon within a display case I took while visiting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and pictures of salmon taken while fishing in Alaska. The interesting thing about the fishing pictures was that these images appeared not as photos, but within videos. No tags, no meaningful file labels – AI found the salmon within the videos. 

How can this work? The only approach that seems reasonable is that Google “processes” stored content assigning what I might called tags to things and actions associated with blocks in files and frames within videos. A prompt then uses these existing tags to generate a response. So, I am speculating that Google preprocesses the content you give it for storage much like say the content you upload for use in NotebookLM.

Summary

Google has added AI to specific implementations of Google Photos. The AI allows intelligent search that is not dependent on stored text, dates, or geolocation data. The AI can use these sources, but can also identify imagery directly. This capability is not presently available on all devices, but works via a device that makes use of apps (iOS or Android). 

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The Efficacy of K-12 Tutoring: A Look at Recent Research and COVID-19 Era Challenges

Posted on September 2, 2025 by admin

Tutoring has long been recognized as a powerful intervention for improving learning outcomes in K-12 education. I have written about tutoring in several recent posts because a) tutoring provides the basis for my promotion of mastery learning, which is now often implemented with the individualization of progress implemented by the use of technology, and b) because of what I believe is a legitimate but yet untested use of AI tools to provide an alternative to the use of expensive and difficult to arrange human tutoring.

This post was prompted when I encountered a disappointing evaluation of efforts to fund some version of tutoring in response to student struggles during COVID. For those of us interested in the applications of technology in education, the COVID-19 pandemic forced all educators to use technology. Of course, the overall results were problematic with high student absenteeism and lowered rates of educational progress. There is still plenty to explore for academic researchers and historians. Moving on, although typically too expensive, tutoring was supported as a means of compensation. Tutoring, a form of one-on-one instruction, has even been touted as the ideal form of instruction against which the success of other methods can be measured (Bloom, 1984). Again, the expected results did not meet expectations, at least to the extent that past research would have led supporters to expect. 

Perhaps COVID and the aftermath, much of which seems political, have resulted in circumstances we must contemplate more broadly. Both educators and researchers must have a tough skin to deal with unrealistic expectations. They can control only what they can control. The best I can do is to focus on the data describing what has proven effective in the past and what experts have to say about what makes present circumstances different and hopefully transitory. The following is my effort to present this case. This post will explore the impressive effects of tutoring, delve into the mechanisms behind its success, and critically examine the factors that may have hindered its effectiveness during the pandemic.

The Impressive Impact of Tutoring

One of the best summaries of tutoring research I have encountered is not a traditional journal article and is therefore written in a less formal style. It is lengthy and does include an analysis of what it calls large-scale tutoring, which represents a way to differentiate the tutoring efforts following COVID and why such efforts are more difficult. The lengthier approach is written more like a book chapter, offering the opportunity to provide readers with a broader understanding rather than relying on what is assumed researchers already know. An analysis of the characteristics that make tutoring effective is useful. The identification of such factors can guide the development other strategies.  Another advantage of this source for some is that it is not behind a pay wall. 

The meta-analysis by Nickow and colleagues analyzed dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments, revealing an overall effect size of 0.37 standard deviations on learning outcomes. Effect size might be understood as the degree to which an intervention shifts the average performance of a group relative to what that average would have been without the intervention. Bloom suggested that the tutoring represented a two-sigma advantage, which is far greater than that shown in actual implementations, but still a moderate advantage. Bloom’s more idealized claim is based to long-term applications as would be implemented in mastery or personalized learning, which partly has a long-term benefit because learners move ahead at an optimal pace, which prevents the accumulation of gaps in understanding that have an accumulated impact on future learning. This significant tutoring effect does not meet all of these expectations. Still, it underscores the potential of tutoring to bridge achievement gaps and enhance student comprehension across various subjects and grade levels.

The study found that the effectiveness of tutoring varies depending on the tutor’s qualifications and the student’s grade level. Teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs generally yield stronger impacts compared to nonprofessional and parent tutoring. This suggests that specialized training and pedagogical expertise play a crucial role in maximizing the benefits of tutoring. This factor is important in the challenge of tutoring following COVID, as the magnitude of the challenge could not be addressed by qualified individuals. Furthermore, tutoring tends to be most effective in earlier grades, with reading tutoring showing higher effect sizes in these foundational years, while math tutoring demonstrates increasing impacts in later grades. The timing and structure of tutoring also matter; during-school programs were found to be nearly twice as effective as after-school programs.

Mechanisms of Impact: Why Tutoring Works

Several key mechanisms contribute to the impressive effects of tutoring:

  • Customization of Learning: Tutoring allows for individualized instruction, enabling tutors to “teach at the right level” for each student. This is particularly crucial for students who have missed foundational knowledge, as it prevents them from falling further behind and improves the productivity of classroom time.
  • Reduced Class Size: Tutoring can be viewed as an extreme form of class size reduction, where the student-to-teacher ratio is significantly lowered, often to one-on-one or small group settings. This allows for more focused attention and tailored support.
  • Enhanced Engagement and Feedback: The one-on-one or small group setting fosters greater student engagement and provides opportunities for rapid feedback, which are often not possible in a traditional classroom environment. This immediate feedback loop can significantly accelerate learning.
  • Human Connection and Mentorship: The human connection and mentorship relationship that develops between a tutor and student can be a powerful motivator and contribute to a positive learning experience. This aspect is often lacking in computer-assisted learning programs, which, despite their potential for customized instruction, may miss out on the benefits of human interaction.

Disappointing Results During COVID-19: What Went Wrong?

Despite the well-documented benefits of tutoring, the widespread implementation of tutoring programs during the COVID-19 pandemic often yielded disappointing results. While the specific reasons are complex and multifaceted, several factors may have contributed to these outcomes:

  • Rapid Scaling and Tutor Quality: The urgent need for tutoring during the pandemic led to a rapid expansion of programs, often relying on a large influx of new tutors. This may have compromised the quality and training of tutors. As the research indicates, highly educated, trained, and experienced tutors tend to have stronger impacts.
  • Shift to Remote Learning: The transition to remote learning presented significant challenges for tutoring. Building rapport and providing personalized support can be more difficult in a virtual environment, potentially impacting the mentorship aspect of tutoring.
  • Student Engagement and Access: The pandemic exacerbated issues of student engagement and access to resources. Students facing challenges with internet connectivity, suitable learning environments at home, or increased family responsibilities may not have been able to fully participate in or benefit from tutoring programs. The effectiveness of even the best tutoring program is limited if students cannot consistently engage with it.
  • Focus on Remediation vs. Foundational Skills: While tutoring is excellent for addressing foundational knowledge gaps, the sheer scale of learning loss during the pandemic may have overwhelmed some programs. If students were significantly behind, a limited number of tutoring sessions might not have been sufficient to address the depth of their needs.
  • Program Design and Implementation: The design and implementation of tutoring programs during the pandemic may have varied widely. Factors such as the duration and frequency of sessions, the curriculum used, and the integration with regular classroom instruction could have influenced outcomes. The research highlights the importance of during-school tutoring for greater impact, a model that may have been difficult to consistently implement during periods of remote or hybrid learning.
  • Mental Health and Well-being: The pandemic had a profound impact on the mental health and well-being of students. Stress, anxiety, and other emotional challenges could have affected students’ ability to focus, learn, and engage with tutoring, regardless of its quality.

Moving Forward

The disappointing results of some tutoring initiatives during COVID-19 do not diminish the overall effectiveness of tutoring as an educational intervention. Instead, they highlight the critical importance of careful program design, robust tutor training, and a holistic understanding of the factors that influence student learning. As we move forward, it is essential to leverage the insights from research on effective tutoring practices, ensuring that programs are implemented in ways that maximize their potential to support K-12 students. This includes prioritizing highly qualified tutors, fostering strong human connections, and adapting strategies to address the unique challenges and opportunities of diverse learning environments.

Sources

Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4-16. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.und.edu/10.3102/0013189X013006004 

The impressive effects of tutoring on PreK12 learning: A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental evidence

Tutoring was supposed to save American kids after the pandemic. The results? ‘Sobering’

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Recall: Flexible Tool for Content Collection and AI Processing

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

AI tools have now been around long enough that those of us who are primarily users rather than product recommenders have found practical and effective ways to make use of these tools. These priorities are based on productivity priorities and philosophical reactions to the capabilities of AI tools. I have settled on using AI tools to explore and write from the highlights and notes I have accumulated since I began reading books and academic journal articles on my computer or tablet. Academics in my field (educational psychology) now have access to more of the relevant resources in digital format than on paper. This is a function of how university libraries purchase access to academic content with more content available digitally.

I have explored a variety of tools for interacting with the content I have accumulated. Lately, I have been using Mem.AI, NotebookLM, and Smart Connections, and have spent many months with these tools. From time to time I describe my experiences, and you are welcome to review some of these descriptions. Here, I’d like to introduce an additional tool.

I purchased a subscription to Recall a few months ago at the recommendation of a friend. My initial reaction was one of disappointment, primarily because I had misread the tool’s capabilities at that time. Because I was interested in the AI capability, I had assumed it would be like the other tools I already used, and I could interact with the total body of content that I would load into Recall. At that time, the chat function was limited to the individual item you had open. Thinking back, this is not that unusual as chatting with the entirety of a pdf might be what many users want to do. Recall has recently added the opportunity to interact with all of the content you have added.

I have come to the conclusion that the designers of Recall had a different vision for how most users would apply the tool. There are both a browser extension and standalone apps, and many of the more interesting features for most utilize the browser extension. When a website is loaded into a browser with the extension active, you can summarize and collect the content from the website and terms in the web content that relate to “tags” you have already created in Recall will be highlighted. Tags is what I would call this identification of concepts by a user and the word recall may be based on the notion that existing content can be explored in reaction to the highlighted terms you see within the browser.

My interest is more focused on PDFs. You upload PDFs so that Recall can store and then work with the content. I read in attempting to broaden my understanding of the product that the company reserves the right to limit the amount of content a user can accumulate. The amount was not stated, but I wonder at what point this limitation might be applied. I have uploaded nearly 100 PDFs so I would guess most folks would not have to worry. Having both the PDF and related notes is not the way many of the other competing services work. Still, I see some value in having access to both the original and any content I have either derived from the original or added myself.

Here is a quick introduction based primarily on the way I use the system. The display you work with in Recall is multiple, vertical windows. Recall refers to these as tabs. The following image shows the Reader Tab and the Notebook tab. Along the left-most boundary of the display you see a type of outline of your tags and the titles of items of content with that tag. I have found that this display quickly gets out of hand, so I seldom use it. You can open and close the various tabs to create the display you want.

When you first upload or save content from the browser, Recall generates a summary and enters it in the Notebook. You control the amount of detail in the summary, and as you can see from the display, the extended version of the summary is quite long. The “pages” of the notebook are quite flexible, and you can copy and paste, highlight, or write within the Notebook. A feature I would like to see would allow me to highlight content I activate within the Reader, and the highlights would be saved to the Notebook. Recall does not work in this way, and highlighting is only available within content that appears in the Notebook. I have adapted my traditional workflow to compensate for this. I highlight and annotate as I write, using tools that allow me to export my highlights and annotations. I then upload the PDF to Recall, generate a summary that is stored in Notebook, and then copy my own highlights and annotations at the end. When I apply the AI tool, my prompts apply to this combination of material.

The AI chat capability I keep alluding to is available within a dedicated tab (see following image). The traditional prompt window appears at the bottom of this tab, and the content generated in response appears within the upper area of the window. The final image shows the response I generated, asking what my notes had to say about comparisons between taking notes by hand and using a digital device.

Some are interested in sharing the content they have accumulated, and Recall does allow this capability. I will likely write about it in a future post.

Summary

If you explore AI tools as I do, you’ll likely reach a point where you should focus your attention and money. However, you also find that the different tools offer different features, and you cannot find a single tool or a couple of tools with the perfect collection of features. Some features you find annoying, and some are very useful. Recall keeps adding tags and links to blank notes that I do not find useful. The following is a partial capture of what Recall generated for Adler’s classic, How to Read A Book. This collection would likely be helpful to some, but not to me. There is likely a way to control Recall, but I have yet to figure it out, and the results are simply messy. I simply ignore some of what Recall does at this point.

I find the summarization feature to be of value. I seldom create summarizations myself, but the addition of this content within the notebook entries increases the benefits I get from my use of AI across the entire collection.

Recall is new and developing (note the recent addition of the cumulative application of AI). I am halfway through my subscription year, so I have some time before deciding whether to review.

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Journaling Your Travels

Posted on August 11, 2025 by admin

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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