Advice for Students: Use a Wiki for Better Note-Taking

It's back to school time, and it's fourth dimension to brand good on the promises you lot fabricated yourself last year to be more organized this time effectually! One of the stumbling blocks I see most frequently in my students is taking — and keeping — adept notes for their classes. Ideally, you'd similar to have notes on all your reading, as well as notes from lectures, and you'd like to have both available when you need the to study for an exam or write a paper.

Enter the wiki. While wikis are generally seen as part of the trendy "Spider web 2.0" phenomenon, they are actually i of the older technologies on the Web. Named after a Hawaiian phrase meaning "quick", wikis are easily-edited, automatically interlinked sets of documents. Pages can be created and edited on the fly, and most track changes and additions, allowing for effective collaboration between multiple writers.

Wikis have been particularly pop with students, and a number of specialized wikis accept been adult specifically with students' needs in listen, including NoteMesh, stud.icio.u.s.a., and PBwiki. Wikis are a great way to keep, organize, and instantly access class notes and other school-related information. Wikis offering students:

• Legibility: No more than squinting over class notes taken while half-asleep, bored stiff, or hung over!
• Immovability: Wikis can exist developed over the unabridged 4 (or 5, or half dozen, or…) years of a pupil's instruction, allowing him or her to admission notes taken years earlier if necessary.
• Searching: Wikis can be searched, in the folio and across the entire collection of pages, allowing immediate access to their contents.
• Links: Students can link to other pages inside their wikis besides equally to other sites on the Web, bringing new bodies of information together in one identify.
• Collaboration: Several people can collaborate on the aforementioned wiki, allowing you to do good from the strengths of your classmates.
• Affordability: Wikis are still closely tied to the open up-source movement, and then many wiki programs and services are free.

It'south like shooting fish in a barrel to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of wikis out there — the wiki matrix lists dozens of wikis, all with a different arroyo to the basic trouble of storing and editing information. I recommend the hosted services offered by PBWiki and WikiDot, both of which offer free, highly-configurable wiki sites oriented towards education. NoteMesh and stud.icio.us both offer good services, though they embrace much more than just note-taking. TiddlyWiki's all-in-one wiki is run from your local computer, and can exist stored on and run from a thumb-drive, making information technology a good portable solution.

Using a wiki

In one case your wiki is set up, you can begin to add your notes. Most wikis accept an "edit page" button placed somewhere prominently on the page (a handful allow changes to be made directly to the page); click the button and a text box appears to make your changes in. Wikis use a special set of text cues called markup for formatting and manipulating text, though most also have a command bar at the top or bottom of the text box. Acquire at least the basic markup syntax your choice uses — although this will likely slow you down at first, it will save a great bargain of time in the long run.

For this article, I fix a wiki at dwax.wikidot.com and entered notes from a few of my form'due south readings. Wikidot uses a simple markup syntax for formatting: putting text within double slashes, similar //this// makes the text italic; using double asterisks similar **this** makes it bold. There's also a toolbar above the text editing box in example you forget a control or adopt to click buttons instead of typing formatting symbols.

The real strength of wikis, though, is the ability to create links on the fly to other pages on the wiki. On Wikidot, you put the text you lot want to become a link in triple brackets, [[[like this]]]. If the text within the brackets is the same as the title of a folio already created, the new link will automatically link to that page. If non, clicking on the link will let you to create a new page. And then while you're working, you can link to other pages, tying for instance theories and their creators in a science form, or dates and events in a history class.

In many wikis, pages can also be tagged with keywords describing the content, assuasive you to apace see related pages (and often to bring out otherwise hidden relationships between different readings). And so, for instance, in my absolutely scanty sample wiki, I can call upward all the pages tagged "race" — useful in my case for creating a syllabus.

Another very useful characteristic wikis offer is the ability to collaborate with others and to track changes and revert to before versions when needed. If you ever accidentally erase something you wrote or "miscorrect" an entry and later realize you were correct the first fourth dimension, you lot can hands find your earlier thoughts and restore deleted text. This is especially useful if you share a wiki amid several other students — you can pool your commonage wisdom, correcting others' mistakes and counting on them to help grab yours.

Some suggestions for your wiki

The collaboration features of wikis make organizing study groups easy and very effective. Gather up a few students in your class and split your topic upwards into pieces for each person. Every bit you work, you can link to your co-students' pages, and vice versa. Every bit new fabric is covered, y'all tin get back and edit each other's pages or correct each other's mistakes.

Whether yous create your wiki with a group of on your own, the power to link topics and ideas creates a very effective review tool. Before a exam or while preparing a paper, browse through your wiki, following links from folio to page to refresh your memory of how things fit together.

Wikis are also useful for making connections between topics in different classes. While this might not be relevant for every class yous take, for classes in your major be specially diligent in creating links to existing pages. At the end of your studies, you will have a rich repository of ideas and work in your discipline to call on as a reference.

Wikis are incredibly flexible, and these are just a few ways to employ them to your studies. If you are already using wikis as a study tool, allow united states of america know your tips for getting the most out of them!

brownthoung.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/advice-for-students-use-a-wiki-for-better-note-taking.html

Share this post