The game of Bullshit Bingo which you describe is explained in greater detail in its political version, along with a sample bingo card, in Bertell Ollman's _How to Take an Exam... And Remake the World_. Ollman suggests that students actually stand up and shout "Bullshit!" at the top of their lungs when completing a row from the professor's remarks. I never did have the balls for that, but maybe someday we can all compare our scorecards in secret.

I bet I know someone with the balls to play that game... sadly, she's in classes with professors she mostly respects this semester. Jen?

Response to yesterday's comments:

[Kellan: snip]I'm addicted to the authorial voice, the cadence, and narrative an author is weaving. ... This has actually been problematic over the years as I can get so caught up in the story I forget to keep track of the facts, logical arguments grow fuzzy in my memory, the backdrop and local color of our story.[snip]

I had this problem with cadence so profoundly in the years leading up to college that I used to get in trouble for it. I routinely repeated nice-sounding passages from books in an attempt to communicate with my peers, which they teased me for. I mystified my social worker in the year following my parents' divorce by trying to describe my mood by repeating a particularly apt nickname for Klingons. Once when I discovered a whole string of rhymes for the name of my kindergarten teacher, Mr. Rich, I was swiftly sent to sit in the corner.

It's true that an underline doesn't have enough metadata in it. It's also impossible to index for later use! Print media are so difficult to use. I found the experience of researching papers when I was a kid traumatic for that reason -- writing down passages from books was time consuming, and I was never able to identify what was and wasn't going to be useful in advance. Actually, I found some notecards from my Div III the other day and thought oh my god, why did I even bother to write that down? It was completely peripheral to my thesis! So much easier to snip passages from online works. Thank god I have access to a higher proportion of high-quality ones in grad school.

Itamar, when you say you memorized thirty books, do you mean Jewish religious texts? That's really interesting if so -- that method of study predates the printing press, and emphasizes committing information to memory, rather than concepts, which I guess is the focus of post-printing-press study. And now I hear more and more educators emphasizing study of how to use and evaluate information, rather than just sticking it in your head. That makes rote memorization two paradigms old?

Why do you ask why I'm reading? At this point I'm reading what I want to, more or less, with some guidance from professors, except during paper times, when I read more or less everything they tell me to. What I'm reading right now, voluntarily, is What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. It's brand new and I think it's pretty incredible so far.

Two recent remarks make me think you have a very different relationship to books from mine:

"...syllabi have the potential to be totally arbitrary, personal creations. (Best line this year, from a professor teaching a course on media impact: "I'm not assigning any books in this class. There aren't any on the subject.")"

Now I'm not sure if it's just juxtaposition, or if the parenthetical remark is intended to be an illustration. But it looks like you're saying they're related, and I don't really understand how personal arbitrariness is connected to the absence of books in a field. For what it's worth, I've heard, and believed, this line in undergrad and graduate classes, when their subject matter was abstruse (critical writing on Louis Zukofsky), novel (genetic programming), or just different from the mainstream approach to a topic (the concept of ideology in Marxist theory). I don't think of the nonexistence of textbooks as a hallmark of professorial self-indulgence, I think of it as a good indicator that there is still interesting work to be done on a topic. The academic version of the owl of Minerva may well be the publication of anthologies and textbooks designed for undergraduates.

"...an underline doesn't have enough metadata in it. It's also impossible to index for later use! Print media are so difficult to use....writing down passages from books was time consuming, and I was never able to identify what was and wasn't going to be useful in advance....why did I even bother to write that down? It was completely peripheral to my thesis! So much easier to snip passages from online works."

Wow, I could not feel more differently than you about this. My feeling is that bound piles of paper are a random-access interface of tremendously high information density and flexibility, much better than anything the computer world has yet come up with. I'd love to be able to grep books, but they provide better access and annotation for long, complicated text than anything electronic I've ever seen (including Xanadu, the long-dead but revolutionary text technology developed by Ted Nelson). Think about the capabilities of books: readable, annotatable text for a whole book is available almost instantaneously, rather than sequentially presented -- you don't have to scroll all the way to Chapter 5, subheading 3. You can permanently annotate them anywhere; provide a precise citation to any reader in the world; remember the location of passages you're interested visually and positionally. Even in a world of Starfire/Minority Report-type computers (http://www.asktog.com/starfire/starfireHome.html) I think paper books would continue to be used alongside the computer.

I guess this is really a non sequitur, though, since the question was about note-taking strategies and how to index your way into all that information -- a question which remains interesting no matter what the format of the text you're studying is. I use post-its and little bronze page-pointers, peppering them throughout books when I want to remember passages. The metadata question is interesting; I've also recently been looking back at some of these and wishing I had written more on the post-its, since I now want to ask myself "what was interesting here?" But they have some advantages over underlining anyway -- the chief one being removability. You can read a book once and mark certain passages, come back to it and add a different color or reposition the existing ones. So you're never faced with the question "will this be directly useful to me right now?" and you'll always be able to annotate now, ask questions later.

Tell me about the Gee book when you're done with it -- it's too bad he isn't coming to my video-game conference, because that book has garnered a lot of media attention.

You should read the book yourself! I recommend to everyone!

OK, let me be a little clearer about "there are no books on this": yes, it was an illustration of arbitrariness. The title of the course is The Uses and Effects of Media. Even *I* know where to find about five books on the effects of media right off the top of my head, and I've never taken a class on the subject before! I'm not talking about left- or right-wing screeds about media effects on democracy or the moral character of Our Children, I'm talking books with a grounding in experimental research of media effects on children's learning (most of it on Sesame Street). That's where this guy's background lies -- he did research for a major cable network for years. He's arbitrarily ignoring a great deal of literature.

One last thing about books and "access:" how is scrolling appreciably more "difficult" than flipping pages? There's a measure of inaccuracy to each. As for the visual and positional notation argument, which I agree with... c'mon now. You just told us that you don't *like* annotating books permanently :)

And a question that's not rhetorical, out of curiosity: How old were you when you started using computers? For that matter, how old were you when you started reading?

Was that a question for me, or the whole audience? I started reading at three-and-a-half, or so my parents claim. The first computer, an Osborne I (which is now exhibited in my closet and the Smithsonian: http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html ), around the age of five? -- I can't remember (but a quick web check puts the release date of the Osborne I in 1981, when I was 3, so this seems reasonable; maybe we got ours in mid-'82 and I started learning BASIC and playing Hunt the Wumpus sometime in the next couple of years, maybe '84 or so).

On the paper-vs.-screen question, there are some good discussions of this in print. I think Tenner's _Why Things Bite Back_ has a chapter on this, but I might be confusing it with something by Don Norman, like _The Invisible Computer_. Or possibly even _The Social Life of Information_. It looks like there's a whole book called _The Myth of the Paperless Office_ which might be worth a look.

My point on the merits of scrolling vs. page-flipping was just that page-turning lets us use physical, positional memory to locate passages, whereas scrolling is fairly disorienting by comparison (the text moves within the scrolling viewer, rather than our view moving over text which stays in one physical place). There's also a lot to be said for the two-dimensional access that books afford, which allows us to find larger chunks (pages) rather than specific words/lines in the text. I saw an interesting talk a while back at Hamp from a book historian, who suggested that the way we interact with text on computers is actually a bit of a step back toward pre-codex, pre-medieval ways of using text in the form of *scrolls*.

Memorizing was mostly for e.g. history, nothing different I assume than a mediocre school in US would be. That is, memorizing the facts, not the actual text.

For religious studies you always get the text when taking a test. Our finals in Talmud involved explaining a small segment of discussion, the arguments and so on (two paragraphs at most). This is not as easy as it sounds, the text is a mixture of Aramaic and 1500-year old Hebrew, and the Talmud being a shorthand summary of mostly legalistic discussions taking place over a number of decades doesn't really help. And you never get asked about the bits where the Rabbis are comparing how big their penis is or arguing how many times King David could have sex in a night (13 IIRC). You also get commentaries, mostly medieval European ones. Bible studies are similar (you get text with commentaries, and question might be "explain the differences between commentator A and B's explanations").

The original method of passing on this information was verbal. There were people whose task (job perhaps?) was memorizing and repeating these discussions. The Talmud and related texts are known as "The Spoken Torah", as opposed to the Bible which is "The Written Torah". The fact that the original sources were verbal leads to many of the issues discussed, e.g. "Rabbi A says X here, but Y according to this tradition, how do we resolve this?". Over a number of centuries these discussions were edited into book form (and the choice of texts to some degree determined what the actual religous law was. Editors are powerful people.)

The textual form eventually (post printing press) evolved into a standardized format, with the text in the middle and comments and footnotes around it. The standard form even includes a specific font for the commentators, shaped somewhat differently from standard Hebrew glyphs ("Rashi writing", named after one of the included commentators). IIRC there are also cross-references included throughout in the margins. I was told by Gus' professor who I met and whose name I cannot recall at this hour this form was used at some point for many other texts that had commentaries. The form embraces footnotes.

I agree with Roger about the advantages of the physical shape of books. Physical books create a shape in your head. It's far easier to get lost when scrolling. There are technological solutions to getting text into computerized form (scanner+OCR, or better yet one of these - http://www.wizcomtech.com/products2/quicklink.php3 - get your local well-funded university library to buy some. Assuming I am not invoking a mythical creature.)

I asked why you were reading since that reflects on how you study, take notes and so on. "It's got cool ideas", "I need to know this for the next three weeks and then I can obliterate this knowledge from my mind" or the ever popular "this book will tell me the real reason for unexplained pains, negative emotions and unhappy relationships in my life, and tell me about the precise technology that'll blow away the barriers in my life - forever." In the last case one assumes you underline everything. Twice.

Forgot to post this earlier, but it still seems on-target:

"In true prose, everything has to be underlined." (Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 395, ca. 1798-1800)

Free bonus Schlegelism, on the subject of textbooks:

"Surveys of entire subjects of the sort that are now fashionable are the result of somebody surveying the individual items, and then summarizing them." (Athenaeum Fragment 72)