From Self Made Scholar: Project: Start a Commonplace Book

What is a Commonplace Book?

A commonplace book is essentially a scrapbook / compilation of information that the creator deems relevant. Commonplace books became popular with thinkers in 15th century England and were eventually promoted as a scholarly tool by major universities such as Yale and Harvard.

Creating a commonplace book can help you keep track of your educational journey. It’s a place to record favorite quotes from the books you read, ideas you have, and questions that arise from your studies.

In my attempts at blogging, I've been bookmarking tons of stuff that gets lost around the various methods of doing so. I rarely get down to blogging or even posting links.

I have the cop out of the list of "things I want to blog about" in the sidebar, but that's only for items I've marked using del.icio.us. Not ideal and still a cop out.

Inspired by the blog post linked above, I've created a text file version of the commonplace notebook (though I am using a journal as a paper version for when I don't have access to my computer.)

In this book there are links and excerpts form stuff that strikes my fancy, wether or not I blog about it, as it allows me to review my thoughts. I'm using the commonplace book as more than just a scrapbook. It's also a place I put down random notes and crude writing. Sort of a first draft for nothing in particular, or to use comic book issue numbering as a metaphor, one could call it the 0th draft.

The key is to actually review things once in a while and convert notes into projects for writing, research, or just to jog my memory about what I've done in the past.

So far it's been a good repository for random ideas, but I've yet to keep up with using it consistently, and even less so in reviewing it.