Concrete Book Club Idea

  • #[[E: Ad hoc book clubs]]
  • Goal
    • getting a deeper understanding of the book
    • generating artefacts and processes that help us retain that knowledge in the long-term
    • possibly generating public artefacts useful for others
    • getting much wider perspectives through the diversity of group members
  • Book
    • Thinking Fast and Slow
      • pro
        • interesting and relevant to many of us
        • Andy Matuschak specifically called it out as an example of a book that many of us have read, but few retain much understanding from
      • con
        • very long (is it possible to choose sections, or are there sections that are fluffy and can be quicky skimmed?)
    • could also be something like Knowledge Cartography edited volume
  • Participants
    • How much energy do we expect for how long?
      • do people have to commit to a certain cadence or drop-in/drop-out
      • enable peripheral participation - seeing our work and commenting, posting on Twitter etc?
    • How Roam-centric is it, how much familiarity with technical tools, or specific processes?
    • Initially people like Jon, Joel etc, but could be expanded to people at Minerva, CSCL people, big communities
  • Cadence
    • One chapter or more per time unit (two weeks?). Would be useful to be able to divide it into chunks of equal "idea density" - maybe someone who has read it could do that
    • Reading book, and then spending several weeks organizing ideas instead of just chapter by chapter and that's it... But hard to keep momentum going?
  • Synchronous ideas
    • silent meetings - how would that work focused more on exploration than taking decisions
      • the P2PU course on CSCL, with editing in Etherpad
    • can we use Minerva platform?
    • FROG?
  • Annotations
    • Hypothes.is on a pirate PDF?
    • Collecting Kindle highlights and overlaying them for a heatmap (doable, but useful?)
  • Automated emails
    • reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
    • JSON dumps of Roam pages, and a script that automatically merges comments to the same block
  • Roamex
    • Download JSON dump every day and have a script that uses updated-at and updated-email or other things to generate change logs, email diffs etc?
    • Importing JSON over existing JSON fails, because IDs are identical, if we were able to overwrite, would be able to update externally
  • Individual writing
    • Writing prompts, questions - write before you see anyone else's reactions
    • Are there study group questions for this book anywhere?
  • Note taking/summaries
    • useful to have some kind of summary, at least as a roadmap/collective thing to refer to (maybe there are good notes already we can use)
    • stimulate questions and connections, applications
      • somehow use Knowledge Building scaffolds?
    • epistemic fact checking - distributed looking into citations and seeing how well he represents them
    • collectively building an argument map of the points he makes, and the evidence?
      • then reading another book on mind/thinking etc (maybe from different perspective), and seeing how they contrast, the evidence maps mesh
        • could be distributed - one group reading Kahneman, another reading another book. could we generate questions for the other group?
          • flash mob - let's read 10 books on brain science in teams of four, and figure it all out...
  • Public artifacts
    • What would be useful for
      • people who are not planning to read the book
      • people who have not yet read the book, but plan to
      • people who have read the book
      • second cohort of book club members
  • Spaced repetition
    • reproducing Email-driven SRS by Quantum Country
    • collectively creating cards
    • sharing privately created cards
    • collecting SRS analytics, to determine which cards are more useful? But what is a good metric - retention? Understanding in five months? How to test, how to isolate?
  • Experiment
    • Are there hypotheses that we can formulate up front?
    • Is there data that we should be collecting during the process?
    • With a shorter book - we could iterate faster (run again, organized differently)
    • Lead to some kind of public write-up of the process
    • Second cohort?
  • Expert visitors
    • Could bring in someone from Minerva for example (faculty in neuroscience) once we have specific questions that stump us
  • Using our Zettelkasten
    • being able to bring in notes and comments from other books
    • but problem is that we can spend the rest of our lives discussing these issues, with the book as a thin alibi