Generic knowledge cross-informing

The right tool

Over the last few days, I spent all waking moments learning and using Logseq and it's great. The learning itself is joyful, and the process super meta: I learn about Logseq features and using Logseq while taking notes of YouTube videos and articles directly on Logseq. I feel Logseq is the right tool for this because my progress of learning and understanding something has never been so great. I figure Obsidian would do the job rather well too, but for now, Logseq's outliner capability and the granularity of blocks have won me over.

Cross informing

Another thing I just experienced: Yesterday, I started watching a video on Logseq properties and templates by Dario. While the first third of the video about page and block properties was easy to grasp, I began getting lost as he covered templates. I experienced the same frustration when I first tried to learn about Obsidian's templates and the Templater plugin a few months ago. I even tried using it to no avail. In the end I never picked up any skills and use of templates.

A day later, I stumbled on Bas's shorter video on templates. His little examples of a page template and a block template seemed to click for me. I finished the short video feeling onto something. In the process, I learned a bit more about page and block properties, and even certain kinds of dynamic variables, from Ramses' article.

Then I went back to tackle Dario's long video again. This time, I got it! In this second attempt, I finished the video understanding what he was talking about.

I feel that the general knowledge about metadata, properties, and eventually templates (and text expander as he illustrated) of one specific tool, can later inform learning on another tool, whether it starts with Logseq or Obsidian. The power to inform does manifest itself.

Is this the same thing as or at least similar to the "osmosis" and the "diffuse state" of learning that Barbara Oakley talks about in her "Learning how to learn" MOOC course (and books)?

Taking action

Now I'm hot on the trail of templates, I should try using it in Logseq (seems the easier choice than Obsidian) until I get the hang of it. How about building a mini template of, say, "audio book summary" capturing book title, optional publication year, author, app (an enumeration type)? This feels like the perfect and simple structured data to start with.

Anki templates?

This brings me to question whether Anki has concepts of templates? Intuitively I think of course it does. It's called Notetype. That thing with CSS style really left me cold and my mind shut off on the sight of it.

I am curious, does one Anki note allow several instances of the same template/notetype stacked together in some order? This would be the next thing find out.