Where did I read that again? Turning papers into knowledge that's easy to find with Obsidian+Zotero

Where did I read that again? Turning papers into knowledge that’s easy to find with Obsidian+Zotero

📅 Friday 22/05 16:00-19:00h

📍 Workshop Space A

🔎 Needs Analysis

PhD candidates need to read a lot. Especially in TEL, PhD students often engage with a rapidly expanding literature across different fields. But reading alone is not enough. You also need to be able to organise the insights you gain so you can find them again quickly when writing your next paper. To do this efficiently, it is essential to have a strategy for creating and structuring your literature notes, something often overlooked, particularly at the start of a PhD, which can lead to lost insights and wasted time later. This workshop presents a structured method that uses powerful tools (Obsidian + Zotero) to help you do exactly that, without spending tons of time.

📒 Session Description

In the session, we will setup Zotero and Obsidian on your laptop and start working with this system so that you will be able to directly continue working with it when you return from the summer school. There will be time to address questions coming up while using this system and you will get written support materials (e.g. step-by-step instructions) that you can take home to look back into if needed. So by the end of the workshop, you will have a set-up Zotero library, a first set of highlighted papers in Obsidian, and sample point and topic notes linked to your research interests.

The session is planned to be structured as following:

2. Overview and introduction to the idea of the system
3. Installing and setting up the software
4. Highlighting and tagging a first paper together
5. Looking at how you could easily find that paper again in a few months
6. Doing the same with papers relevant for you, practising the system and asking questions

💡 Learning Objectives

Have you ever started writing the background section of your paper and thought something like “Where again did I read that learners need to be guided in order to self reflect effectively on this specific skill?” (replace that in your mind with something related to your research). This workshop has you covered. You will learn how you can take notes on your literature easily and quickly but in a way that you will find exactly this paper even years later by just typing in e.g. “self reflection” and the specific skill. Do you wonder how? See you at the workshop!