Taking notes in HTML
Arts courses are different. They let you experiment a bit with different learning techniques. This term in CLAS202 I took notes on my ThinkPad, in HTML of course! All told they weighed in at 226 kilobytes – almost 4900 lines of text. Of course everything is visible online, so if you're curious what a course worth of notes in HTML look like hop on over.
The overall goal was "less ugly"
And less ugly they are, as you can see from a screenshot of the PowerPoint slides. But they're also infinitely more extensible. The entire document (indeed the entire course) is instantly searchable and shareable. I've wanted this for so long.
Above and beyond
I attended BarCamp Waterloo a while back and saw Michael Fagan's presentation on Quizify. This is a jewel of a web-app.
It parses a page of HTML looking for definition lists (<dl>) and automatically creates a cue-card style test for you! Instant value added. Best of all is how Michael's strong UI skills shine through. The progress sparkline is pure genius.
I look forward to taking another course like this soon, just to try it all again.
Aug 6, 2007
4:29 pm
I really like the idea. I was thinking of doing something similar for future courses. PowerPoint slides are definitely painful to read. It could also be a good way to study throughout the term by reiterating through all your notes. Definitely will make studying for finals much easier.
Aug 9, 2007
10:10 am
It only worked well for me because I did it after each lecture. Leaving it all to the end will just make you go insane.
Oct 19, 2007
1:51 pm
hey. cool for posting a screenshot of your results on Quizify. I found myself emailing my dad a screenshot once to show him how my graph improved. doesn't look like you improved that much lol, unless there's that many questions... which there probably areactually the first thing on my quizify to-do list is to redo the question picker function. right now it just picks a random question other than the one it just asked. it needs to be smarter than that.your htmlized notes are extremely well done by the way. I made notes in html in a couple high school courses, but that was all at the end of the course, not while I sat in class. I finally tried that a few years ago but gave up after about two weeks, mostly because my laptop at the time wasn't really suited to. it also didn't help that some of those courses had various functions that work best in mathml which wasn't well supported (nor did I know how to author any)glad you like the UI. I probably tweaked it 100 times before it got to look like that
Oct 19, 2007
1:52 pm
by the way you need to imply paragraph breaks in comments. or at least say 'html comments' or something
Nov 26, 2007
6:30 pm
Hey, I just saw your article on Ace.If you're on campus next term, I'd really like to talk to you. I've been complaining about Ace's many design flaws w/ my roommates for a while. No auto-save is something that it really needs and wasn't on your list..Anyway,If you want to talk notes in a cooler way, I've been writing a note-taking application that will probably save you a lot of headache. Noter.ca. It's not nearly ready for prime-time yet, but it's got some cool features like... auto-save. Neat search stuff too and an implicit tagging feature that uses a Yahoo API. See if you like it.
Nov 26, 2007
6:33 pm
Um, you can't really respond because I didn't write my email: aCameronhuff@gmail.com.Nice blog btw. If you're interested, I found it while looking for how much ACE costs the school.