Collaborative Lesson Notes

Thank you all who have contributed your ideas in our super engaging discussion: Collaborative note creation and way to proceed?. It is great to know all the enthusiasm out there for collaboratively creating the notes for our upcoming Part 2 courses. It is even more informative to know all the varying preference and experience in creating the course notes. After knowing all these differences, it would really be best to let the students decide whatever ways they would like to contribute to the collaborative notes.

Tentative Plan

Here is a tentative plan of the collaborative note-taking. For each lesson, any of you who are interested in coordinating and leading the note-taking effort can put your name in the list. It is perfectly okay to have multiple notes for one lesson, just like what we had for Part 1.

Here is what you need to put down in the sheet:

  • The Lesson you want to lead note-taking
  • @YOURSELF
  • The note-taking tool you choose
  • Link to your collaborative note-taking platform
    • If it is a forum wiki thread, then just put the thread link
    • If it is a Google Colab, then put the Colab’ link
    • You get the idea
  • Discussion Thread link
    • Create a separate thread for you and your collaborators to discuss

As the coordinator, you are perfectly justified to have your own preference for how the note should be taken. For example, some of you might prefer to have a very detailed transcription of the lecture while others want a high-level overview with bullet points and short sentences. As the coordinator, you are encouraged to briefly describe your note-taking methodology. You could choose to do it in a follow-up post, or in where your link points to, let it be Google Colab Notebook, Google Docs, Forum post, etc.

For Contributors

It is super simple. Just pick the coordinator you want to work with and note-taking platform you like, and then contribute. If you have anything to discuss about the specific group you are in, simply go to the specific discussion thread. Enjoy note-taking! It is seriously fun!

Idea List

Here is a list of note-taking platforms people find interesting:

  • Google Colab: Google Docs’ level collaborative editing + Jupyter Notebook
  • Google Docs
  • Forum Wiki Thread
  • Github Markdown

For more details on the pros and cons of each, please refer to Collaborative note creation and way to proceed?

Sheet

Lesson 8: Mon 18 March 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@timlee Discourse Forum
@Lankinen @YOURSELF, @YOURSELF Google Docs

Lesson 9: Mon 25 March 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@YOURSELF N/A N/A
@YOURSELF N/A N/A

Lesson 10: Wed 03 April 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@YOURSELF N/A N/A
@YOURSELF N/A N/A

Lesson 11: Wed 10 April 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@jcatanza @YOURSELF, @YOURSELF N/A
@YOURSELF @YOURSELF, @YOURSELF N/A

Lesson 12: Wed 17 April 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@YOURSELF N/A N/A
@YOURSELF N/A N/A

Lesson 13: Tues 23 April 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@jcatanza N/A N/A
@YOURSELF N/A N/A

Lesson 14: Tues 30 April 2019, 6:30 PM Pacific

Coordinator Note-taking Platform Note Link
@YOURSELF N/A N/A
@YOURSELF N/A N/A

Appreciation

All of us have benefited from the wonderful collaborative note-taking projects led by @hiromi, @PoonamV, and the amazing notes they both have produced. Thank you both for pioneering the effort! Let us also not forget all the people who have contributed to the notes behind the scene. These notes just make it so much easier to review the classes. We are forever grateful to you all. Thank you!


Note that this is a forum wiki thread, so you all can edit this post to add/change/organize info to help make it better! To edit, click on the little edit icon at the bottom of this post. Here’s a pic of what to look for:
discourse_edit_btn


8 Likes

@sgugger Need you superpower to wikify it.

Great, thx @PegasusWithoutWinds

We probably do not know yet, but if we have per lesson a very rough idea, what will be presented (e.g. NLP, Swift, Vision) we could add that here and then coordinators can make better picks.

Maybe add a column for Collaborators also? As I am in a different timezone and might not always stand up at 3h am in the night, I would where useful collaborate (but hence not coordinate) on Notes delayed.

1 Like

Thanks for heading the efforts for note creation.

I plan to share my personal notes this time. I’ll commit to sharing the lesson 1 notes (in time) and see if its a feasible excercise for me.

I’ll volunteer for sharing/co-ordinting my notes on medium (Using Unlisted settings, similar to YouTube), I’m not sure how we could collborate on that, maybe I could copy paste these on a google doc, share it here.

Why Medium?
I like the type fronts and layout options on there a lot and now they’ve recently made the unlisted option available. Also I might be biased since I’m most familiar with using medium :slight_smile: (compared to other options that were discussed)

Are there tools to capture transcript from video? will speed up making notes. probably will need correcting here and there but will be good start :slight_smile:

My pleasure!

Yeah, we are definitely waiting for the schedule to come out so people can pick the topics they want to take notes on.

Collaborators column added. Great call!

Cheers. We just got a wonderful coordinator!

There should be a way to download automatically generated subtitles from YouTube. I am not sure about the details involved. Definitely check it out.

There are tools, but then I would suggest we ask fast.ai what tool they used to transcribe the part 1 videos. Maybe that would be a good idea really to kind of professionalisse and streamline this syncing and worthwhile asking Sylvain how they did that?

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It’s done!

4 Likes

Yes! YouTube transcription is usually pretty good, but definitely require cleanup. When audio is bad, YouTube seems to give up on doing auto generating transcript (like the last lesson of part 1). So that’s also something that people can contribute to.

I’m very excited to see what kind of awesome notes this will be :slight_smile:

I started to transcribe what Jeremy talked about in the class so that I can search based on my vague recollection of what he said later down the road. I found summarized notes @timlee used to do on the forum helpful as well. I tried things like typing notes on the Jupyter Notebook, but sometimes Jeremy started at the bottom of the notebook, so it ended up being something really hard to read :sweat_smile:.

Anyway, I think it’s all personal preferences and I know whatever we end up with, people will find it useful :slight_smile: I honestly did not expect anybody would look at my notes when I started - it was just for myself. Oh, and I tend to fall behind because I tried to get as much coding in as well as typing up the notes, but I’ll continue with what I started and will contribute wherever I can.

Go team!

8 Likes

@hiromi I’m sure I speak for many who have come to fastai recently. Many thanks, your notes have paved the way. I salute you!

2 Likes

I like Medium, too. But I wish they would let us typeset in latex :wink:

what about this approach ? https://github.com/SwiftCommunityPodcast/podcast/issues/15 @PegasusWithoutWinds @miwojc

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I will leave the more experienced note takers to judge its merit.

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This looks great!

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Hi @PegasusWithoutWinds and @sgugger, thanks for setting up this wiki. Is there a way to make sure that the latest edited version is displayed here? I added my name in a few places, and though it shows when I go to edit the wiki, it doesn’t show here.

1 Like

@hiromi i was going to take notes for Part1-2019, but I saw you already did a lot of work, and didn’t want to duplicate anything. Notes look great!

In 2018, I used to replicate all of the lesson notebooks in the actual order that jeremy went through them, but was never really sure how effective or useful it was for other people. I also went through the videos minute-by-minute to transcribe, again, not sure how useful that was for people.

To Anyone in the channel, looking for effective notes feedback:

Any idea elements what works most effectively for people?

  • A. Descriptive paragraphs with high-level explanations
  • B. Minute-by -minute Annotated code blocks exactly from the lesson?
  • C. Powerpoint / Box Figure diagrams
  • D. Start with the main lesson “theme” and then just teach the topic independently (optimized for article reading) instead of how it was laid out in the live-3hr version
  • E. During 2018 part 2, I tried to collect conceptual information separately from the code blocks, but then you lose some continuity when reading through the notebooks.

Here’s my notes from last year, to get a feel:

Here are my old notes from last year
2018 - Part1 <- this was transcribing live
2018 - Part2 <- this was transcribing the lesson after the youtube version was available.

Also, happy to contribute to the note taking team if any way possible, let me know

Cheers

Tim

3 Likes

Hey chum, thanks a lot for your enthusiasm! This is either internet connection or concurrent editing issue. Try a few times and it should work. If it doesn’t, certainly let us know.

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Oh no! It wouldn’t have been a duplicate. Last year, I used your notes on the forum to quickly review each lecture to make sure I didn’t miss things. Some of the concepts you looked up and added to the notes were helpful as well. And I was totally impressed how quickly you put them out! So thank you!! :slight_smile:

Personally, I’d love to see D especially for part 2. That would be brilliant.

3 Likes