19/ What does this have to do with note-taking?
Well, now that we have the four big ideas, we can invert CFT's claims to get the pedagogical recommendations:
1. Expand the cases you know, so you have a larger set of fragments to draw from.
2. Inculcate the adaptive worldview.
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20/ And how do the researchers recommend doing this?
The researchers note that you cannot reduce cases, and real world cases tend to be rich with many concepts. So ... the researchers recommend using a hypermedia system to store cases.
That is: a backlinked note taking system!
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21/ Here's what you do: you get the student to store cases, and highlight concepts within the text of each case. Concepts are backlinked. They go to other cases.
There are many variations. Some systems come preloaded with cases, marked up by expert practitioners.
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22/ The initial presentation to the student is also chosen carefully. When presenting a concept for the first time, you want to give a student a case, and then give them a different case that is VERY different from the first.
So the student internalises that cases are variable!
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23/ Eventually, as the student does concept searches in the CFT system, they begin to overlearn the 'crossroad' cases — that is, the central cases that are the most conceptually rich and therefore the most connected.
These cases begin to be evoked from even small fragments.
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24/ Once this happens, the student enters something called 'epitome mode', where case comparisons happen at the speed of thought.
In other words, they have a set of representative cases in their heads, available for on-the-fly schema assembly in the real world.
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25/ Ok, I'll wrap up. A couple of days ago, I said that it's probably worth it to dig for cognitive science results in the tools for thought space.
CFT is an example of what I was talking about.
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Increasingly curious as to why the tools-for-thought folk talk a lot about note-taking tool features and plugins and not at all about the cognitive science of better externalised thinking.
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26/ If you enjoyed this thread, you should read the full essay, which goes into way more detail on how to create a CFT system for yourself:
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Replying to
I'm particularly interested in even less structured domains than medicine, like product management. :)
Do you have a cluster of pages/claims around that you'd like to share?
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Is "ill-structured problems" well distinguished from "wicked problems"?
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Yes. (The authors actually talk about how CFT is a theory of ordinary novelty and they have little to say /little work done on wicked problems).