Using OPML to do a Cornell Notes style outline

I've written about Cornell Notes here before - it's a technique for writing that lets you get your notes for the day, commentary about those notes, and some refresher summary information all on the same page. It makes good use of ample amounts of white space on your writing page so that there's always another blank spot to write something down during the process of taking things in or afterwards when you are reflecting on it.

One of the things Cornell Notes teaches you to do is to build a rapid outline of what you are listening to or thinking about and then use that structure to build on. As such I find OPML editing tools like Dave Winer's OPML Editor or Omnioutliner to be very handy in doing that capture state, and then when it comes back to fill in the detail part I can go back and slot things in and shuffle things around.

What I don't have, though, for any OPML based tool that I have handy to me, is a way to do an outline in two different columns - one main outline for the notes themselves, and a sidebar on the side to capture review questions, summaries, or other things. When I write on paper sometimes there are three or four sidebars on the same page and the page goes wide at least as fast as it goes long. Capturing this all on a computer is really hard.

The best I manage to be able to do right now is to open two or three outlines in two or three windows in OPML Editor and hand-arrange them to be next to each other, then let one play off against the other window as I write. This works OK for composition but I don't really have a good way to turn it into presentation.

Note that this could be an indigenous feature within OPML, or something derived from that spec! The text of each outline entry is kept inside each outline node. It would not be a stretch to have the commentary for that entry stay with the text in a separate attribute, so that the marginalia is tied to the text at the paragraph level. It might not be precisely right if you had lots of footnotes, but I could see a lot of uses of a system where you could keep marginal notes and the running text in the same structure, edit them both within the same editor, and leave it until display time to figure out whether the notes go at the bottom or the side or are just hidden.

Technorati Tags: marginalia, opml

Comments

[JoshD]

I'm a bit confused about what you're asking, here: Are you asking for multiple columns, or the ability to outline in two columns?

Obviously (since you've used kGTD) you know that OO does multiple columns, which I could see being used to do cornell notes. So I assume you want something other than that.

[Edward]

Yeah, it's not so much about multiple columns like OO does where the columns are like spreadsheets. It's more like being able to write in the margins next to the paragraphs and have the two things be linked to each other.

I should just stick to paper and not pretend that the computers can get the job done.

[JoshD]

So what you want is more of a structured text editor for note taking, but with storage in something like OPML (for outliner/hierarchy/nesting), and the ability to add margin notes. (?)

Hm.

If you find that, I'd like one, too. ;)