Second Brain Case Study: Building a Second Brain in Higher Education

This is a presentation and conversation with Professor Wess Daniels and a group of professors, college staff, and undergraduate students from the 6 classes that have learned Progressive Summarization at Guilford College in North Carolina.

It includes a slide presentation with key themes and learnings from their experience, a live demonstration of performing progressive summarization collaboratively in real time, and at the end a discussion of how and why digital note-taking should be taught as an essential skill for students.

The main points include:

• The benefits of adapting Progressive Summarization to the classroom
• Creating a life-long knowledge bank for use far beyond the classroom
• Starting the class by showing students how to take notes, instead of just reviewing the syllabus
• How to organize class notes using Google Docs
• Guidelines for source citations and naming conventions
• Using “12 favorite problems” to guide learning and class discussions
• Designing notes to more deeply interact with the content and enable “glanceability”
• Balancing context and compression in class notes
• A Progressive Summarization checklist for students
• Best practices and recommendations from student’s experiences
• Teacher-student feedback using Google Docs
• Details of Professor Daniels’ experience teaching P.S. to 6 cohorts of undergraduate students
• Live demonstration of real-time collaborative progressive summarization and annotation

Here are some online resources on using Progressive Summarization in the classroom generously provided by Prof. Daniels:

• Webpage summarizing the use of Progressive Summarization at Guilford
• Slides used in the presentation
• Shared Google Doc used in the demo
• Student guide to Creating Reading Notes Using Progressive Summarization
• Progressive Summarization checklist
• Link to Guilford College homepage