Note Taking & List Making in a Digital World

I’ll bet some of you are ahead of me in using the cloud to keep your resources, lists, and notes accessible 24 x 7.  Yes, I’m behind  — 34 million people are already using Evernote (available for Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Androids). Their slogan really fits our tips about acquiring knowledge and drilling: “Evernote: Remember Everything.”

The basic app is free on their website.  If you want to have a group edit notebooks, there is a user fee, but few of you will really need that, as you can share your notebooks for free viewing by others.

To stimulate your thinking about how to use this tool in HCASC, here are some links from their website:

• 10 Great Ways Students Can Use Evernote
• Evernote for Students: The Ultimate Research Tool
• Search results for Evernote in Education

So how can this help players and coaches.  Here are some good ways to use it:

1. Capture an article or list from the Internet (using the Web Clipper).
2. Create topic-specific notebooks in which to store your finds.
3. Go paperless!
4. Sync your notebooks across all your devices.
5. Keep topic research notes (as suggested by Dr. Michael P. Decker and Mark Dawson in their blog posts).
6. Write your drills in notebooks and use them at HCASC Club meetings.

Evernote is not the only such app.  Google Notebook has been discontinued, but there are other services to consider including:

• Jjot (online web app)
• Springnote (online web app + iPhone app; group notebooks)
• Ubernote (online + iPhone/Android app; sharing; free version carries advertising)

This last is not exhaustive as new services are emerging.  And as some are consolidating, be sure that you keep track of your data.

10 Tips for Effective Group Drills

Preparing for HCASC involves a combination of knowledge acquisition and game skill development.  Here are my tips to make the most of the time you have and to keep the drill sessions lively.

1. Focus on increasing players’ knowledge base.  Read the blogs in this series for strategies and tips as to how knowledge is/can be acquired and what areas and topics are most important.
2. Use the drills in the Game Play Database. Use drills for Face-Off/Bonuses and Ultimate Challenges.  You can select random categories or drill in specific content areas.
3. Have members of your HCASC Club write drills for practice.  They learn:
   – how to research & verify the accuracy of content;
   – what information is important vs. unimportant or too easy or too tough to be used in questions;
   – vertical information and superlatives in topics (i.e.: 1^st, last, longest, tallest, etc.).
4. Drill with topics likely to be used as clues or answers in HCASC questions. If you’ve attended a Pre-NCT or NCT, you have a sense of what topics we’re likely to ask about.  Don’t waste your (or your players’ time) on obscure or overly complex topics that won’t come up in the game.
5. Collect drill lists and enter them in a word processing or spreadsheet document.  You’ll be able to re-use them year-in, year-out.  Use the templates supplied on the HCASC.com website.
6. Vary the types of drill.  Types include ordered lists (Presidents of the US, atomic numbers and chemical symbols, etc.) and unordered lists (books by specific author, leaders of the Civil Rights movement, etc.) and associative lists (Senators with the state they represent, capitals of foreign nations, etc.).
7. Vary the way drills are conducted.  Run some one-on-one (as Face-Offs are played in HCASC), others where all members are eligible (first one gets the worm).
8. Use time as a factor in drilling.  Set a pace and a time limit for each question (or list) in a drill.  This will help the players get used to the fast pace of the HCASC game.
9. Keep track of drill results.  Coaches learn about the players’ strengths and weaknesses and can use this information to direct the individuals to specific areas of study to round out or deepen their knowledge base.
10. Make drilling fun!  Most students dread taking tests.  Keep the content and the competition engaging.  Consider awarding badges for drill “wins” to reward the players.

Playing Games vs. Drilling

We often hear from players and coaches “we need more games for practice,” suggesting that playing the game is either the only or best way to prepare.  That’s simply not true!

Playing the game does have value:

• Game skills training – learning to pick players for the Face-Off rounds, teaching/practicing buzzer skills, teaching/training conferring on Bonuses & Ultimate Challenge questions, etc.
• Player performance – observing both individual performance and combinations of players.

Consider these parallels from other parts of your campus:

Your football team has regular practices, but they don’t play the game at every session.  Instead they drill on fundamentals of the game, strategies, teamwork, etc.  Take that lesson to heart as you plan HCASC Club sessions.

And in the classroom, professors don’t start with a test, they save that for later as a measure of the students’ knowledge acquisition.  The same is true of playing the HCASC game.

KNOWLEDGE IS THE KEY TO WINNING:

• If the players can’t answer the questions, they can’t win the game. 
• Playing game after game with players who have an insufficient knowledge base is not productive. 
• Bulking up your players’ knowledge base is the best investment of time.
• Drilling leads to knowledge retention which helps (later) quick recall.
• Knowing a medium amount in more topics is better than knowing the maximum in fewer areas.

As much as 75% of the time you spend with your HCASC Club (and ultimately your HCASC NCT team) should focus on knowledge acquisition.

Drills Using Rapid Response & More

A nice technique for two people is Rapid Response.  One person holds the material, perhaps a map of South America.  He or she reads off one piece of information, like a capital, “Asuncion,” and the other person gives the answer.  Then, as rapidly as is comfortable, the driller continues reading off the capitals to the other person, who replies with country names as quickly as possible.  If that person misses or pauses, the driller gives the answer, and then reads off another capital. A few capitals later, the driller returns to the missed one, and returns again and again as often as he or she likes, both to ones the person being quizzed missed and to ones she or he got, but much more often to the ones missed until the drillee knows them all.

Other Techniques:

1. License Plates – After I learned all of the Chemical Elements using the Numbered Lists method, I reviewed every time I went anywhere in a car.  If I saw a license plate that read PT 1379, I’d  think Pt = platinum, 13 = Aluminum and 79 = Gold.  Same thing for any highway markers or any other numbers I saw.
2. Slideshow – A fellow competitor in the 2003 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions (Alan Bailey) boned up on his geography knowledge by collecting hundreds (maybe thousands) of photos of maps, famous buildings, landmarks, etc. He would run them as a slideshow until he knew them all.  It had to be time consuming to put that together, but it was effective.
3. Mnemonics – You’ve probably learned some along the way, Roy G. Biv for the colors of the rainbow for instance, but you can also make up your own for any small, associated group of items. If you have problems remembering the five platonic solids (or, perhaps, the Jackson Five), then a mnemonic can be a big help.
4. Blank Diagrams – For highly visual subjects like country maps, the skeleton, and flags, a good technique is to print out blank diagrams of the subject at hand and label every item.  As with other drills, repetition is key.  Taking it a step further, when I was refreshing my anatomy knowledge before teaching college A&P labs, I caught a lot of good-natured flak from my friends for coloring in an anatomy coloring book.  There was no denying, though, that the technique was effective.

Drills Using Numbered Lists

Anything that is ranked or has a numerical designation, such as Most-Populous Nations, can best be tackled with a legal pad and a pencil.

First, for a list of items you’d like to learn, take a little time to review the list, even reading a bit about each item in it.  Then, sometime later (hours or even days), take out a legal pad.  Along the left side, number each line of a column as appropriate.  For 21^st-Century Best Picture Oscars, start with 2001.  Then, in no particular order, begin filling in your best guesses.  After making all the guesses you can, have a look at the actual winners, and correct your mistakes/fill in any blanks.

Next, make another column, numbered from 2001 to 2011 as before, just to the right of the previous column, cover the old answers and start filling in the blanks again.  Repeat this process until you know them all.  After a few days (and as often as necessary), repeat the drill to see how much you’ve learned.

For any long list, like Chemical Elements by Atomic Number (if you decide it’s worth the effort – my colleagues vote “no”), break the list into manageable sections of 20 or so, then combine the sections for final and subsequent reviews.

The point to learning in this fashion is that it’s quick and it gives you a mental visualization of the relative order of the items.  Even if you forget that Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President, you will know that he came between Grover Cleveland and, um, Grover Cleveland.

Here are some examples of lists:
Any Top 10/20 List: Most Populous Nations, Largest Islands
NBA, NFL or MLB Winners by Year
Nobel Peace Prize Winners by Year
States by Order of Admission to the Union

Beware however that not every member of every list is important to know.  Put down the years for the ones you judge to be pertinent, skipping the others.  For Pulitzer Novels, a portion of the list might be:

1952 – The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
1953 – The Old Man and The Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
1960 – Advise and Consent (Allen Drury)
1958 – A Death in the Family (James Agee)
1961 – To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
1968 – The Confessions of Nat Turner (William Styron)
1982 – Rabbit is Rich (John Updike)
1986 – Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
1991 – Rabbit at Rest (John Updike)
2007 – The Road, (Cormac McCarthy)

To do this, make a list template for drilling, based on that first review of the information at hand.

Drills Using Flash Cards

Use 3×5 index cards; I have shoeboxes full of these.  They are best used for one-to-one correspondence factoids, like Title/Author.  The technique is to take all of the information for a particular category (up to 1 shoebox) at a time.  Pull out a stack of cards, as much as 1-inch thick, but no more.  Then read aloud (very important!) the first title, “The Bluest Eye.”  Say aloud (even more important), “Morrison.”

Then, with a pen or pencil, make a mark in the upper left-hand corner of the card, and move that card to the bottom of the pile you are holding in your hand.  Repeat the process with all of the cards in your 1-inch packet.  When you don’t know one, don’t put a mark on the card.  When “The Bluest Eye” comes back around again, treat it exactly as you did before.  Why repeat titles you already know?  Because the reinforcement is important.  And how sure were you of your answer, even if it was correct?

Once “The Bluest Eye” has 3 marks on it, set it aside.  Do the same with each title once it gets three marks.  After a while, the stack will dwindle until only a few are left.  They will come up over and over again until you answer correctly.  This process allows you to get reinforcement for all items in your list, and additional reinforcement for those that you didn’t know or couldn’t remember.  You might see the really tough titles a dozen times or more.

One additional technique – for those cards you got right the first 3 times (no misses!), you can put them in a separate box of those you already knew, so that when you revisit this drill, you can choose not to include these (this year).

Once you get done with 1 stack, then pick up another and repeat until the entire shoebox is gone, or the subject is exhausted. (This may take several days, depending).

Basic Rules for Drills

Rule number 1:
Good drills are repeated, rapid reviews of very small units of knowledge.
Good drills are repeated, rapid reviews of very small units of knowledge.
Do I need to say that again?

Rule number 2:
Good drills cover a defined amount of knowledge that you learn completely.

Let’s start with other people’s drills:

• HCASC has a growing list of quiz sites at:
  http://www.hcasc.com/pub/onlinequizzes.asp
  . Use those quizzes to build drills.
• Many of the quizzes at Sporcle (
  http://www.sporcle.com
  ) can be used for drilling.

You and or your fellow HCASC players may have already taken quizzes at Sporcle or other such sites.  The mistake that many players make is that they use these quizzes as affirmation of their current knowledge and/or for occasional review, but they never properly drill – drilling is a learning technique and a recall builder. Sure, the 1st time you take a quiz (or retake it after an extended break), your score is an affirmation of what you know.  But your score is of little importance, as no matter what it is, you need to retake the test over and over until you answer ALL of the answers correctly.

One caveat: If the test is a particularly long one, then, at some point, you may need to set that quiz aside for an hour or two, or even a day or two, then attack it again, until you have learned ALL of, for example, the world’s national capitals (
http://www.sporcle.com/games/g/worldcapitals
).

No, it’s not particularly important to know that Castries is the capital of St. Lucia. The chances of ever hearing a question on either is pretty remote.  The reason that you learn them all has to do with having the confidence to know that you know ALL of the options and in building good learning habits.  More about the importance of those points another day. Suffice it to say that if you wish to eliminate some of the possibilities, then write your own drills, like the “Important Nobel Peace Prize Winners,” so you can exclude, for example, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences (1995) (I can just see him waiting in line at the entrance to a trendy nightclub. He tells the doorman in a defeated voice, “but I won the Nobel Peace Prize,” as the doorman opens the velvet rope, not for him, but to let Snooki pass through.)

Besides online quizzes, I recommend 3 primary types of drills: flash cards, numbered lists, and call and response.

Making Recall Automatic (Part 3)

Why?
Your brain, in some ways, can be thought of as a big green field of grass, with the stuff you know at one end and your mouth at the other.  The problem is that the information cannot get to your mouth without there being a path from the information to your mouth.  So, for facts you talk about all the time, there is a well-worn dirt road allowing you to recall them with ease.  For those you haven’t talked about in a while, the grass will begin to grow in the pathway and retrieving those facts becomes more of a struggle.

As I said in my first blog entry, winning at HCASC is not simply a question of who knows more; they are won by those who can better and more rapidly access the information that they do know.  In fact, knowing too much (without drilling) can reduce one’s ability to be first on the buzzer, because one can get caught up in thinking about superfluous detail.

You drill in particular areas and, when possible, over the entirety of that area, in order to build confidence that if, for example, the category is “The 13 Colonies,”  you can be sure that you will know all of the possible answers and that Vermont and Maine are not among the possibilities.  Not only will there be a high likelihood that you will know the answers to the questions asked, but you will be ready for them, quicker to the buzzer, and, if you don’t know an answer, you will be better prepared to make a good guess from among the possible choices.

Returning to the green field analogy, my experience has been that drilling in particular areas (let’s say literature and geography) improves your ability to recall information in areas far removed from the areas you’ve drilled (like movies and anatomy).  I don’t know the neurophysiology involved, but to me, good drilling is like building an information superhighway (thank you Al Gore) across that grass field for all of the stuff you have practiced, but, as an added benefit, you’ve created an alternate route for information you have hidden in the recesses of your brain.  Instead of having to make the entire trek from the boondocks to your mouth, these facts need only make the short trip to the highway you’ve built.  Whenever someone answers a question and says, “I have no idea how I knew that,” I credit this alternate access to information recall highway.

We’ve covered the 5 W’s of Drilling, but there’s still one more topic and it’s essential: Basic Rules for Drills

Making Recall Automatic (Part 2)

Continuing with journalism’s five W’s:

When?
It’s good to do some drilling throughout the year, for things like author and title, things that are from a huge body of possibilities and that you want to be continually familiar with is essential.

If you start drilling these topics only a few weeks before the big tourney, you will become overwhelmed, and the exercise will not be particularly fruitful.

Remember, though, that for the first 6 or 7 months after the National Championship tournament, drills take a back seat to reading books, travelling, watching TV (Yes, you gotta know pop culture too, so tell your folks I said it was okay), etc.

Drilling comes to the fore in the last three months before the National Championship, when the emphasis is on synthesizing your notes from earlier in the year, writing questions, competing in local & Pre-NCT games, and building up your speed for the Big Game.

Where?
Most drills you create yourself, but you can also find good resources online.  First and foremost, you should avail yourself of all online game and drill material provided by HCASC.  These materials will be the most directly relevant to game play:

http://www.hcasc.com/onlinegames/gamelogin.asp


http://www.hcasc.com/pub/drills.asp


http://www.hcasc.com/pub/onlinequizzes.asp


http://www.hcasc.com/pub/practice.asp

I also highly recommend www.sporcle.com as an excellent source of timed quizzes that you can search to target specific subject matter and styles of tests that are easy to do over and over again.

Playing some other computer games, such as the online Jeopardy! Facebook game is worth the effort as reinforcement, but is not a replacement for true drilling, because: a. these games don’t repeat the same questions over and over, b. the material is not targeted, and c. too much time is wasted between questions.

Remember repeated, rapid review of very small units of knowledge.

Next: Drills – Making Recall Automatic (Part 3).

Making Recall Automatic (Part 1)

In order to provide some structure, let’s utilize journalism’s five W’s: who, what, when, where and why.

Who?
With a few exceptions, drills work best with just a driller and 1-2 “drillees,” who wish to target a specific area or areas in which to build competency and confidence.

What?
What are drills?
Drills are any form of repeated, rapid review of very small units of knowledge.  Again: repeated, rapid, review, and of very small units of knowledge.  All 4 of these points are important to proper drilling.

What material is well-suited to learning through drills?
That depends upon your particular strengths, weaknesses and goals, the material that you anticipate encountering in competition, and how well you can structure the drill itself for the topic. Common examples include:

-      Capitals (World and State)
-      Authors of Works
-      Chemical Symbols
-      US Presidents by Number
-      Constitutional Amendments
-      Nobel Prize Winners by Year/Country (Selected Ones)
-      Important Events by Year
-      Inventors and Inventions
-      Notable People and Accomplishments

For the last of these examples it is especially important to remember to limit the information to very small units of knowledge unique to that person that can be written in no more than 3 or 4 words. For instance:

BAD: Explained how light can act both as a particle and as a wave = Albert Einstein
TOO LONG!
GOOD: Explained photoelectric effect = Albert Einstein

(n.b. “Photoelectric effect” by itself could be Einstein, Hertz or Tesla, among others, so be careful with your word choice.)

BAD: Hair care millionaire = Madam C.J. Walker
NOT UNIQUE! (But rather catchy.)
GOOD: First African American female self-made millionaire = Madam C.J. Walker

The Walker example shows that some factoids are difficult to frame into drill-worthy clues.  The trick is to devise a drill so as to limit the possible answers.  For example, if the topic of the drill was “Female Firsts,” or “African American Firsts,” then “Hair care millionaire” would be unique.

Next: Drills – Making Recall Automatic (Part 2).