Second Brain Case Study: Building a Second Brain in Higher Education

This is a presentation and conversation with Professor Wess Daniels and a group of professors, college staff, and undergraduate students from the 6 classes that have learned Progressive Summarization at Guilford College in North Carolina.

It includes a slide presentation with key themes and learnings from their experience, a live demonstration of performing progressive summarization collaboratively in real time, and at the end a discussion of how and why digital note-taking should be taught as an essential skill for students.

The main points include:

The benefits of adapting Progressive Summarization to the classroom


Creating a life-long knowledge bank for use far beyond the classroom


Starting the class by showing students how to take notes, instead of just reviewing the syllabus


How to organize class notes using Google Docs


Guidelines for source citations and naming conventions


Using “12 favorite problems” to guide learning and class discussions


Designing notes to more deeply interact with the content and enable “glanceability”


Balancing context and compression in class notes


A Progressive Summarization checklist for students


Best practices and recommendations from student’s experiences


Teacher-student feedback using Google Docs


Details of Professor Daniels’ experience teaching P.S. to 6 cohorts of undergraduate students


Live demonstration of real-time collaborative progressive summarization and annotation

Here are some online resources on using Progressive Summarization in the classroom generously provided by Prof. Daniels:

Webpage summarizing the use of Progressive Summarization at Guilford
Slides used in the presentation
Shared Google Doc used in the demo
Student guide to Creating Reading Notes Using Progressive Summarization
Progressive Summarization checklist
Link to Guilford College homepage

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