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Notion

made-with-Markdown

As expected, my process is evolving. As a PhD student in Educational Technology, I think it is important to be messing around with tools as they show up in the market. Obviously, I can't try everything because new edtech tools proliferate and grow like weeds. And like weeds, which are invasive plants growing in places they don't belong, many edtech tools are invasive (in more ways than one) and they don't belong in education. I digress.

Usually I will find a tool because I am trying to do something that isn't supported in a current tool that I'm using. An example is my Lit Workflow which I wrote about here. I really dig being able to compose stuff in Markdown and have everything backed up to GitHub and multiple hard drives. One thing that was inconvenient about that workflow is that visualizing connections between ideas was challenging because Grav is a flat-file system. Also, I didn't have a good tool to build a synthesis matrix for my lit review. If you search the Googles for 'synthesis matrix', you will get a whole boatload of examples of matrices built in spreadsheets, which is the tool that enabled the process in the first place, so it is understandable to see a bunch of spreadsheets.

So, I started looking for a tool that was Markdown based, allowed me to back up to git and could make the synthesis matrix process smoother than a truly massive spreadsheet. I found Notion.so. Notion bills itself as an 'all-in-one workspace' for collaboration; it allows me to compose in Markdown, or not; it has a free upgrade for higher ed users; I can export to MD and CSV; I can share on my terms; and it is super flexible. One of the distinct advantages for the synthesis matrix is that Notion allows me to build relational databases super easily, in contrast with Grav and in many ways with spreadsheet software.

Landing Page

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Here is how I have Notion structured right now. My landing page starts with a kanban board of tasks for the week. These tasks are just like you would see in other kanban systems like Asana, Trello, etc. in that they can be assigned to people, can host conversations, and be manually dragged from one column to another.

The items representing the first three chapters of my dissertation, Introduction, Lit review, and Methods, are examples of how Notion is integrated. The little arrow indicates that they are linked, in this case to a separate database I've created called Timeline. Not only are those items showing up in my kanban board as 'ToDo', but they are also where I do the doing. So each of those items is a weekly todo, an item on a Gantt chart, and a page where I actually draft my writing.

You can also see that there are other items linked, but those ones are linked to another database called Articles.

Links

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Immediately below the kanban view, I have created collections of links to various components of the task before me.

Moving clockwise from the top left...

2-Pagers

My most recent writing has been to construct then distill to 2 pages a research overview to help clarify the Problem, Purpose, Methods, and Questions that I am interested in. As you can see, I went through a number of ideas and drafts before getting to v0.1, where I am now. With this 2-pager in hand, I can now speak intelligently to potential internal and external committee members to gauge their interest in being on the committee and also their fit with my questions.

Lit Review

This is another series of integrated databases that merit their own post. The Articles database is a link to all of the articles I have to read, am reading, or have read. While I read, I write. I take notes, pull quotes, note page numbers, add tags, and create hyperlinks. I also create Key Idea metadata, which feeds into the Synthesis Matrix database.

Logistics

Under the logistics link is the Timeline database which outlines all of the major milestones along the way to graduation. It is currently set to a Gantt chart view, giving me an overview of the whole project.

Docs

The Docs section is a list of links to the timeline items (which are also in the weekly todo list). Each of these items is a page where I will compose my drafts.

Links, Random, and Archive

These spots are a little bare right now, and it's likely you can figure out what they are for.

Articles

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Each article or chapter I read gets an entry into my Articles database. The main view is a list of all articles, sorted alphabetically by author. I also have tremendous flexibility to create other views as well.

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Each view is the same database, but sorted, filtered, and displayed differently. For example, the view below is the database displayed on a kanban board grouped by the Method tag.

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Metadata

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You can see the metadata that I create around each article as a way to help organize things. I suspect that if I were trying to do a PhD before digital technologies, I would be significantly less organized.

Many people use Zotero or other citation management tools, and those are indispensable and a key part of my workflow. However, I find the interface for metadata to be clunky, and searching and sorting are downright awful.

The most important part of this process is extracting Key Ideas from each article, which get entered into another database, called Synthesis Matrix. BTW, these databases are all connected, so when Ivcreate a Key Idea entry in the metadata of an article, that also creates that same item in the Synthesis Matrix database. So a full item in one database, say Synthesis Matrix is a property in another database like Articles.

You can also see yet another database called Future Research, set up the same way.

Synthesis Matrix

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Clicking the purpose of assessment item in the Key Ideas section of the article metadata takes me to an item in the Synthesis Matrix database, where I gather all my notes about that key idea.

You can see in the Sources property, links back to the article database corresponding to each article that references the purpose of assessment key idea.

Below that, you can see several toggles, each opening up to all my notes, pull quotes (with page numbers, which are highlighted in the PDF stored in Zotero). The titles of the toggles are also hyperlinked to the article items in the Articles database.

There is also a taxonomy of tags in the Synthesis Matrix allowing me to search on keywords in that database. The keywords property in the Articles database is drawn from published keywords in the journals.

And so in summary...

So that is my quick overview of my lit review workflow and knowledge management system. I do recommend Notion with the following caveats:

  1. Notion right now is 'online only'. There is no offline editing mode like you can get with a git/grav/atom workflow. This means that you need to ensure that you have a system where you regularly export your workspace and keep a backup in multiple physical and online locations.
  2. The export options are limited to Markdown and CSV, which is great for keeping backups and such, BUT those exports cannot be used to recreate your workspace. Importing an export would just get you a disconnected set of text files with hyperlinks to notion. You can also export to HTML or PDF, but those are non-starters for editing.
  3. It does take some time to sort through Notion and the workflow is very different from previous options (spreadsheets, google docs, task manager). If you already have a system in those tools and you are well into your research, think very carefully about how much effort and time you can put into learning Notion and reorganizing your entire workflow. However, if you are just starting out and are looking for a system and don't mind the time it takes to get sorted, it is a great option.

One big plus is that Notion, while it is a Markdown editor in the background, you do not need to know or learn any markdown to use it. It is very much a WYSIWYG block-based editor.

I'd be happy to hear from you about your workflow! Drop a link to your post in Twitter and tag me @colinmadland.