The six sessions 🎯 · one talk, six captures
The running situation is Daybreak's autumn roast talk: the founder of the coffee-subscription company from the SQL, dataviz, visual-storytelling and mind-mapping courses gives the roastery team nine minutes on where the launch stands. Twelve things are worth keeping. Every session captures the same nine minutes a different way, so the only thing that ever changes is what you kept and where it sits on the page.
Ideas, not art
Listening with a pen. The four moves, the drawing objection answered with Rohde's own scale, and three separate literatures read past their headlines: doodling, the drawing effect, pen versus keyboard.
🔺 Session 2 · easyFive shapes, one vocabulary
Circle, square, triangle, line, dot. Every icon is a recipe of two or three, and the twenty icons for your own work are built before the meeting so the mark is already in the hand.
📏 Session 3 · bench nightThe selection bench
The talk plays one word at a time at 150 words per minute. You capture. The bench counts ideas kept of twelve, verbatim overlap by the research's own definition, and what each idea cost. Four presets and one trap.
🗂️ Session 4 · mediumSeven layouts, one page
Rohde's seven patterns drawn small, and how to pick one from the agenda before the speaker starts. The same twelve ideas on a grid and on a path, and which page a colleague can find something in.
🔍 Session 5 · mediumReadable by someone else
Three weights and one accent. Hierarchy, one rung of the lettering ladder, containers and connectors, and the thirty-second scan: hand the page to a colleague and count.
📨 Session 6 · hands-onLive, then shared
One real twenty-minute talk captured live with everything so far, then the one-page recap that leaves your desk. Final scorecard on a page somebody else will actually read.
Your passport 🎫
Clear all three quiz questions in a session and it gets stamped. Six stamps means your notes stop being a transcript with gaps. Stamps live in this browser only.
What this course is not, so you land in the right place 🧭
| If your question is | Go here instead |
|---|---|
| How do I give my notes a radial shape with one centre and keyword branches, after the meeting? | learn-mind-mapping-with-phoebe |
| Which chart does this question need, and is it honest? | learn-dataviz-with-phoebe |
| The notes are good; how do I turn them into a deck that changes a decision? | learn-visual-storytelling-with-phoebe |
| How do I letter in serif, slab, script and 3D, or draw people well? | Rohde's Sketchnote Handbook and Workbook; named here, taught there |
| How do I capture a live talk as a page somebody else can read, without being able to draw? | you are in the right place |
Mind mapping is a shape you give notes afterwards. Sketchnoting is what you do while the speaker is still talking. Two courses owning one grammar disagree with each other eventually, so each owns its half.
Choose your path 🗺️
Three doors into the same conviction: the page is the talk reduced to what you will need, made while the talk is still happening, and the reducing is the work.
What is honest here 🧾
The bench in session 3 computes its numbers from what you typed against the transcript. The one-line verdict is a rule of thumb and is labelled as one on the widget. There is no recall model, because the evidence does not support one, and there is no drawing score, because a browser cannot see a pen.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Ideas captured, words, lines, words per idea, own words | Really counted in the capture box against the twelve keyed ideas; the chips show which registered |
| Verbatim overlap, longest run | Really computed with the definition from Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014, the one finding of theirs that Urry et al. 2021 reproduced |
| The talk at speaking pace | Really timed: one word per interval at 130, 150 or 175 words per minute, checked headlessly (ten words in four seconds at 150) |
| The verdict line | A heuristic, labelled as one on the widget |
| "Sketchnoting improves recall by X" | Not claimed anywhere. Three literatures are quoted with both halves of every abstract, and the sketchnoting studies that exist measured emotions and satisfaction, not recall |
| Drawing quality | Not measured. Its cost in ideas is, via the anti-preset |
| Daybreak's talk | A teaching situation. The measurement code is real |
The knowledge map 🧠
The whole course at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.