Neat trick I’ve just discovered: Begin a couple days a week by opening up your web browsing history from the previous few days, and and just quickly reminding yourself what all those things you read were about and why you looked at them in the first place.
Two things I’ve discovered: First, I wander of task much less than I thought. In general, although I sometimes feel as if I spiral off into too many tangents at work, by the next day I actually do have a sense of how my web activity fit into the bigger picture.
Secondly, the school of memory that says you lock memories in best if you refresh them just at the point they are becoming a bit more difficult to retrieve is right. Reviewing your web history at the beginning of the day is the perfect way to take advantage of this little peculiarity of memory.
I don’t click through anything in the history. I just mentally summarize what I learned (or didn’t learn) from each page in a sentence. That will usually be enough to generate a search and retrieve the full article if ever the details become pertinent.
This is really good Mike – I am doing a PLE talk in a few weeks, and one of the new ideas I’m adding to the talk is that, to balance out the effect of focusing in on the”latest”, learners need to incorporate techniques, practices and technologies that help them look back at what they’ve learned and where they’ve been, and forward, applying focus to the flow of the network. This is a great, simple practice that bootstraps what we are already doing (using the web) with a simple reflective step. Thanks, it really resonated for me. Cheers, Scott
Thanks Scott! I appreciate the feedback!