I've been thinking about setting up a platform to write about the things I have been learning about for a while. I am not sure how long I will keep it up, it sometimes feels that these platforms favour content over quality. Regardless I thought I would give it a go, though I can't promise either content or quality.

I work in the film and TV industry as a digital imaging technician, that is DIT for short. My work revolves around digital imaging technology and helping the cinematographer ensure that they are getting the best image out of the camera(s). Topics of interest are colour / computer science. I am studying part time for a computer science masters, mostly out of interest, but to also help me become more knowledgeable in my field. My writing here will mostly be used as a tool to reinforce my learning.

I have discovered that the best way to learn anything is to drill down to the core concepts of the topic.

When reading a text about something that you wish to learn, it is important that as a reader you are constantly asking questions about the text. As you hold these questions in your mind, it is also your responsibility as a reader to answer them. C. Van Doren & M. J. Adler Discuss how to be a demanding reader in their book How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.

Whilst asking these questions, It is important that we make the book our own. By writing notes, underlining and highlighting on the page. Digital books are great for this, I love reading papers and chapters on my iPad using GoodNotes to highlight and scribble down ideas.

Once we have isolated the concepts of the topic that we are wanting to study, we can the write our notes.

By writing your notes based around the concepts of the topic that you have read about. It frees you from the constraints of grouping your notes by book title or author.

The benefit from this, is that your notes are much more open and inclusive to other ideas from different writers. As you study a topic you will extract another authors concepts and different ideas will interconnect. As your notes grow you will start to see a bigger picture of the subject you are studying.

This does make note-taking and studying harder, but the rewards are greater. When writing our notes, we have to think deeply about how they fit with what we have already written. We are forced to look back over our writing and explore the connections.

By making the connections in our notes, we are creating connections in our mind. The repetition involved when doing this helps to cement the ideas into our memory, and we feel like we are truly understanding a topic. By connecting the unexpected we are also planting the seeds to grow new ideas, that could expand our levels of understanding even further.