Sketchnoting in Philosophy #204 (P)

A better way of teaching?

Dear supporters of Daily Philosophy,

last week’s post comes a little later than usual because I discovered a new thing that I found so fascinating that I had to try it out immediately: sketchnoting.

If you have not heard of it, sketchnoting is about taking notes by sketching, that is, by producing a kind of graphical mind-map. On Youtube, a man called Doug Neill has created a thriving business explaining and promoting sketchnoting. You can get a taste right here:

Another one is here:

Doug Neill has dozens, if not hundreds more of these videos, describing every possible use of the sketchnote technique, from summarising books and talks to mindmapping a new podcast or teaching classes.

When I saw the method in action, I immediately felt that this would be something to try out with philosophy! Much of our work, in publications like Daily Philosophy or in the classroom, is about communicating concepts to others. Often these concepts are abstract and difficult, and if you have ever attended a philosophy conference, you know that most presentations prepared by philosophers are terminally boring and almost impossible to listen to with any degree of pleasure or excitement.

Since I have a few new classes beginning now (a summer course on the philosophy of happiness) and in September (classes on the philosophy of AI, on media ethics and on the history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant), I thought that it would be great to try this thing out myself. And to start exploring the technical side of it, without having to think too much of the content, I started with the previous newsletter, the one about the ethics of humanitarian intervention. This was a well-structured text that presented a number of clear and distinct arguments for and against a thesis — something that should be possible to bring into a mindmap-like, graphical shape and that is representative of many texts taught in philosophy classes.

And so I tried that. I took a video of the whole process of creating the sketchnote from the text. You can find it below.