00:11
Hey, Len.
Hi, Asami.
If I sounded tired, that's because Len has yet again, in a very entertaining manner,
distracted me from what I wanted to talk about initially, and spent 20 minutes doing so.
That's why.
I think I'm taking all the blame here, but all right, no, continue.
It was a fun distraction, you know, I can say that. It was an entertaining distraction.
Let's go back to what we initially set out to talk about.
How do you take notes now, Len?
Right, okay. Well, I can definitely take this one. I promised that I would take this one.
And I will not divert it into anything out of the ordinary,
even though everything is connected.
Don't try. Don't try, Len. Just go ahead.
Yeah, we'll just go right through. We'll move forward with this.
So, note-taking. We've talked a little bit, right, just in general about notes and stuff.
Yeah. Do you take notes?
Yes. So the answer is yes, but the context matters, right?
So, you know, I was about to say, you know, ah, like in conversations with friends, right?
I don't really take notes.
Yes.
That is mostly true.
Mostly. I was gonna say, because I have seen you take notes of what I have said to you.
Right. So I had a feeling you would call me out on that.
And it is only when the conversation reaches a point that it's not necessarily the importance
level. So the importance level might affect, right, whether I'm taking notes or not.
But if the importance level requires me simply to be present, and I'm engaging with
my friend in that way, different. If it's, I think what we're doing right now is trying to
untangle all of these things, then I need to also hold them. And so notes, right?
And I will very often use handwritten notes for that. Because, as we hinted at in,
not even hinted at, we spoke for a long time about in the notes, Kakepodkastl,
we are more likely to, you know, shorthand and perhaps write the things that we understand
down in longhand. Or at least that is the assumption. And, you know, so I write it out,
right? It's the quickest, fastest thing instead of having like a laptop on hand or something.
Very rare, though. Again, very rare in that space. But it is a possibility.
So taking notes in general, when I'm like, learning something new, and or kind of nowadays,
03:01
the example might be, you know, listening to podcasts where, you know, people are interviewing
each other. And then, you know, for example, for, you know, maybe a couple of weeks,
I was going through a variety of inside higher education podcasts.
Interesting.
They were touching on the topics of AI and education. They were also touching on diversity
in education. They were talking on...
Which is like 90% of what you think about these days anyway.
Things that I think about, right, are like making sure that people are engaged within
the educational space we have from wherever they happen to be coming from, which is hard.
And also, the other hard thing, which is, you know, trying to discuss the ideas of AI within
education without immediately triggering everyone in the room. And, you know, I mean that not as a,
you must use the thing, but in the, we must at least discuss the pink elephant in the room.
Right, you want to talk about it in a way that doesn't make other people feel defensive.
Yeah, which is hard, because I know what defensiveness feels like. And when you have
defensiveness over something, it takes a lot of time and a lot of therapy to be aware of it.
So yeah, like, yeah, you want to, you want to ideally not want to wait for years of therapy
for that discussion to happen.
Exactly. So I tend to be a little bit more engaged on how I deliver my points, which nicely connects
to the last absolutely redirected conversation we had about presentation and performance.
Yeah, yeah.
However, I promised I wouldn't derail this conversation. So let me drag us back to the
note-taking here. And say...
How do you use note-taking to help you in that situation?
One thing we didn't talk about in the notes situation was voice.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, we didn't talk about this. And it was something that I kind of touched into in a
little bit of my researching around, which we didn't, we didn't have to touch on that,
because you had some brilliant papers and stories here. And the voice version helps me because
in my case, I often find that typing is in fact, still too slow for me.
I see.
Like, and I, on a computer, I can type pretty fast. Like, you know, I've surprised a number
of people here, for example, with like, the speed at which I type, because it's just something
that we, you know, perhaps both of us, right, are very accustomed to, with the amount of writing
that has to get done.
However, right, probably less so, maybe my typing speed has improved of late, because I do use a
lot of voice to text, which is challenging to use, and does not work for everyone due to the,
06:01
you know, training that these sort of voice recordings go through. But the way that I
enunciate words and such usually gets me the targeted words I want. And it can let me talk
out my thoughts instead of writing them. And then I can sort of look back and maybe edit if needed.
Okay, so yeah, I noticed that you do that too. You are one of the few of my friends
who I think prefer, or at least use in a regular way, this voice functioning, whether it's voicing
to text, or, you know, text people, message people, or, you know, voicing maybe for yourself
to look at later on. I think it's really interesting, because, you know, as far as
sort of speaking and enunciating words in the way that these trained models can understand
and pick up, I also don't think I have a huge problem with that. And yet, I somehow
don't use, or I don't have a huge aversion, but I don't like using voice for
note-taking. Probably also because I don't like, and this might be ironic as a podcaster,
I don't like talking, like listening to my own voice.
Most people probably relate to this, right? Myself included.
Although, do you have any idea how much compliments you're getting on the interweb
about your voice? Have I been getting more? I haven't actually been paying attention.
You have been getting a lot. How buttery and, like, calming your voices.
I need some of these, I mean, okay, I need some of these reviews to show up,
and maybe I should, like, collect them or gather them. Maybe I need to start a—
I should set up, like, a little automated messaging tool to you to, like,
share your, like, any random compliments that you receive for your voice on your rainy day,
so that you can be like, yeah, I have some good things going on for me.
What if we request— Wow, that's so nice. Oh man, I feel so cared for right there. That is
such a sweet thing. I don't think we should design this, but if the listeners feel up to
the challenge of designing a hashtag, or as we talked about that in one of our inbox episodes
recently, you know, a hashtag of some kind for the voice, if that's— if everybody's talking
09:03
about it so much, please feel free to whack your creative freedom on that. I'd be curious.
I don't want to say anything about what I might come up with, because I feel like I'll—
I don't want to influence the creative freedom of the listeners.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they want to do that—
We'll drop that note, and see where it goes. But yeah, anyway, so it's interesting that you use
voice to convert your text, and I think we both have similar levels of, you know,
possible availability of the voice tools, and yet you prefer— at least you seem to use it a lot
more often than I do, and I actually enjoy jotting down notes of what goes in my head.
Yes, and I think I can actually connect these further. You mentioned also writing,
just to be clear, right? You're talking about writing it by hand.
Yeah, by hand, actually, yeah, yeah.
So to add a little bit of context, I'm aware of both
friends, and that this is a common practice, that it's written by hand. People will open email
accounts to generate notes to themselves. People will have separate note-taking apps that they do,
and those can be done via, you know, typing, texting, or voice-to-text, right?
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of this is about getting out the types of thoughts that occur inside of your head in order
to not necessarily solve them, not even necessarily sometimes to free up space,
but as a consequence of putting the writing down, one of the consequences, and perhaps
the wanted consequence, is a bit of a lessening of the pressure that those many, many, many thoughts
and feelings, usually associated with them, can take, right?
Yeah, like there's some level of finality, at least temporarily, when you put that full
stop at the end and close the notebook, or when you finish writing the emails to yourself.
Sure, and actually, you just hit another part that I hadn't been thinking about, which is the
essentially a bit of behavioral, I guess, where you have associated the finishing and the closing
as a bit of a putting away, a bit of a, like, that is, I have given myself something,
I've given myself time or effort or exertion outwards, and now it's going away, right?
So now I'm going to turn back to the thing that I was doing before.
Yeah.
All of this definitely has, at least, definitely anecdotal support.
I'm willing to put substantial money in that saying something,
seeing as I'm still running off expenses that I don't want to be running off
due to a broken laptop, at least.
12:02
But I would put money on the fact that there is evidence within the research communities
about the effects that this has.
And I'm actually more aware of that, so don't bet against me,
because I'm pretty sure colleagues have this evidence for me.
So like, this is, but this, yeah, this type of getting it out is there.
And to connect your sort of writing into the journal frame to the voice one that I do,
I didn't always do voice, but I found myself using it more,
and I use it more in situations where either I am perhaps frustrated or worried
that the typing will not give me the speed or the fluidity that I need,
like I might get too hung up on it if I were to, say, type it,
or I don't have the physical notebook around, which I had.
There is one in here that I would also not want to drop on an office floor, for example,
but I don't know where it is, so maybe it is on an office floor.
But it's fine.
I don't really care at this point, right?
I'm like, yeah, whatever.
But that exists in a sense where sitting and writing it out
was a really wholesome, satisfying, fulfilling way to express
or simply to take a load off in some way.
And the voice now comes in as a new tool that perhaps came from this,
because I realized how useful it could be.
And also just the comfort with which sometimes talking to yourself can bring,
which perhaps says something more about me than others,
but the trying to actually hear yourself out
and not necessarily record and listen back to it either, right?
So I would say with you on that, it's not often about the reflection on them.
If it's something internal, it's just about kind of working through it for yourself
and then maybe having that a little bit softened.
And when it comes to maybe trying to learn things,
you might reflect on them or learn from them,
but it could be for different purposes, right?
Right, right, right.
Like, I mean, synthesizing your opinion or perspective,
trying to sort of put words to it,
that is like a wholly different cognitive process
than like just putting the data out there.
Yeah.
And yeah, I think it's really fascinating that voice tools are now available
as ubiquitously as the writing tool.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm sure many and more people are sort of leaning into it.
I might become a voice gang at some point.
Join the gang, we have jackets.
No, I don't, I'm lying, we don't have jackets.
15:01
What do you mean you don't?
Well, somebody probably has them, but I don't have them yet.
They haven't given me my jacket.
But yeah, so this is interesting.
I like, you know, not exactly how I thought this note-taking episode would go,
but yeah, different tools, different modalities of
not just taking notes to learn new things,
but like taking notes to generate data, you know?
Yep, yep.
Which also, it's a good sort of wrapping point
because I have heard, I want to say,
F.A. Radio-san's episode for the Kaguya Podcast,
which you can also find in a playlist,
where they're kind of discussing about
what it means to take notes in this age of gen AI and other things.
And like, you know, will we be taking notes
with a mindset of one day feeding this into the model, you know?
So like, that means it needs to be somehow digitized.
And it means it needs to come in a way that is, you know,
easier for the AIs to take a chunk at.
And those were not the concerns we had, like, not even a few years ago.
And I think now, when you're thinking about archiving some of your information,
whether it's personal or, you know, professional,
being able to, like, thinking about what does it mean for this information to stay in the future
and, you know, to get the most out of your information,
it may be you want it to be readily available for AIs to be chewed at.
These are concerns that we as humanities never had to think about up until very recently.
And they had a very interesting discussion around that topic.
So that was really cool.
That has brought so many thoughts to my head
that we definitely shouldn't try to nail down in this particular episode.
Not right now.
And also your Japanese might need to get better.
To be able to talk about it or to be able to understand it.
Maybe both.
To be able to listen to them.
I will add to a connective piece between our voice and the AI things.
It doesn't necessarily have to be AI in terms of the generative AI.
It can be some of the older slash updating versions of AI tools,
of which there are examples in that Insider Higher Ed podcast stream.
I can't remember which one exactly, but it's on one of the ones that talks about, I think, AI
18:02
or teaching pedagogy.
That might be too broad.
But the usage of this one individual is an online tool that takes your voice recordings,
transcribes them as a voice to text,
and will also actually format them a little bit better
than you trying to do it just with your voice.
So they'll attempt to break things up into paragraphs and things
and then kind of email it off to you or something.
Which really helps for those that tend to do a lot of their...
Some people will write a lot of their stuff via speaking,
which is a whole other world that I'm not quite directly in on,
but I'm aware of.
Voice dictation now has an entirely different,
like, sort of a new level of sophistication that we didn't have before.
But yeah, there's a little link between your closing on the AI and the...
Who was that podcast by again, in case the listeners want to jump over?
Efe Radio-san.
Efe Radio-san.
Okay.
And they can probably find these...
Was this also in the Kagakukei no Otto?
It's in the playlist.
Yes, in the Go-Gatsu no Kagakukei podcast playlist.
Great.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What a wonder.
Oh, wow.
Take your notes, folks.
I'm just amazed at how much we can talk about AIs with everything else, but...
Man, but I can talk about anything forever, so I mean...
That's true, yeah.
He says with my boy confidence.
Let's shut up.
All right.
Bye.
Thanks for listening.
Bye, Efe.
Come back.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
