Stephen Downes

This is one of several items picked up today from Mike Taylor's excellent weekly newsletter. It summarizes Mortimer Adler's seminal How to Read a Book. The irony is that the people who need this advice won't be able to extract it from the book in which it is contained. This article is a case in point; the description of 'inspectional reading' only lists the four questions a reader should ask, and completely elides the actual process, which includes (for Adler) things like underlining or writing in the margins, as well as three types of note-taking: structural, conceptual and dialectical.  Here's an example of how I take notes, at least at the structural level. Here is an example of my notes at the conceptual level, merging many sources.