I have always loved school. While I was in school, I loved that every time you learned something you were “supposed” to learn for your degree path, you learned 5 other things about something else. Learning was an endless forest of things to discover. I was not very good with notes, but I did at least have a notebook for each subject in which one could find fountains of notes about that topic and related ideas.
At the time I had the resources at my fingertips and within my workflows already to learn more about those branches of information. Although the majority of my time was kept by topics I needed to learn to “pass,” I still held onto those interests, some of which I read about after college and later.
As I grew up away from school, many of those habits and note-taking tactics fell off. I wasn’t in an academic context anymore and I didn’t work at a job or go to a school that provided access to research databases. Google wasn’t great back then so it’s not like you could search any idea and find someone’s website or blog post about it. I learned stuff, but mostly read fiction. When I read about Marie Antoinette or the history of reading, I wasn’t taking notes on what else I wanted to explore because I knew I wouldn’t do it.
Later (much later), I thought about going back to school. I was working at a college so I had the opportunity to take courses (in a degree or not). I took it, because why wouldn’t I? I took a Japanese culture and language course, one about the history of transformative technology, and then started a degree program in learning design which I eventually ended early due to life circumstances.
During my time there, I learned all about the different ways that people collect knowledge and keep learning logs. We had to open a Twitter account for our education and in one course, an assignment was to start a learning journal online, which I lovingly called “Class Introvert.” This was to track our learning and discovery throughout the degree program and create an artifact for the portfolio.
Class Introvert was a relatively easy and low effort way to keep track of learning. It was a reflection blog, not a database. Since I reflected on a timeline surrounding semesters and certain topics, I wasn’t fully capturing all that I was learning. At the time I craved more but didn’t have the time (with work and school and everything going on) to build or maintain one.
Now I’m not in school (I might go back now that I’m working at a university again, but not yet). I’m reading more books than ever as I move away from social media and using my phone 24/7. I’m embracing intellectual ideas and find myself motivated/excited about the idea of doing more with it.
Here’s an example: I’ve read 4+ social science books about the Black experience in America and keep finding threads between them that I want to connect, I know they’re connected. But I didn’t keep good notes while reading the first few, and though some anecdotes and perspectives seem familiar as something I’ve heard before, I wish I could tell you exactly where. I wish I had 1 page explaining this concept that connected those books. I wish I had a visual representation of this knowledge and connection, filled in with extra details given historical context and fact.
“That seems like a lot!” It sure does, but to me, it also sounds like a fun experiment in documenting, cataloguing, and connecting information.
So in that way: I’ve come to digital gardening and keeping a wiki not from having a “problem to solve,” but from being excited about the idea of tangibly connecting ideas and information.
Note on integrating workflows:
I already had workflows involving taking personal notes that eventually became articles or blog posts, but I didn’t have anywhere to put the articles. They immediately flowed into the digital garden and that helped me build out a workflow for those items too.
I think because I already had the foundational structure set for information to flow freely, the DG and Wiki were much easier to implement. The only struggle was finding the right tools.