Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
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Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#2I will sit there in a meeting (or retrospectively in a university lecture) and regularly derive nothing of value at all from my notes, be they written or typed. It's the media that is wrong, not the note taking medium. You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle. Everything is immediate, transient. If you lose the pace, then everything after that point is wasted.
Lectures and meetings are broken, not the notes.
Now I will tend to write up my own notes in my own time on matters (in Pages for lack of any motivation to try anything else).
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#3I have long known this to be the case for myself, and switched back to pen and paper for taking notes. I also learned shorthand to reduce the amount of time and mental effort I spend on taking notes, though I sometimes revert to longhand when I need something to be more readable. It is also great for diagrams, math notation, etc. Touchscreens may someday get there, but so far I have found that even the best touchscreens/tablets (yes, even the iPad Pro) still wind up slowing me down.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#4To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework.
I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures.
I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking I could have just paid to take the exams and self-taught the rest of the material. In hindsight, I was really taking out huge loans for a few years of drinking, socialising and playing video games.
In the working world, I've found meetings to be similarly pointless. 95% of the time I'd rather hash out a problem on an email thread where thoughts are expressed clearly, re-read and understood by others in their own time.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#5To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework. I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures. I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking…
Agreed, I would on occasion skip class and read the text for an hour in grad school. It was amazing how much more I learned by reading and processing the ideas at my own pace instead of the lecture. The issue was you never knew when the professor would say something not in the text yet on the exam. I was in applied mathematics.
Meetings are equally pointless. Usually the most verbal people dominate the meeting. I've noticed how outspoken one is rarely correlated with critical thinking ability.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#6NY times makes an amazing discovery: being distracted from whatever it is you're trying to do isn't good for productivity.
The idea of 'multitasking' is a foolish thing, and I think most people have discovered now that to be successful at any task you need to focus without distractions. Singletasking is much more productive than multitasking. I might even argue that multitasking isn't possible, since humans can't switch context as fast as computers.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#7Laptops are tools that can be used to help you with your tasks, or to waste time. I'm sure the article is correct that many people use them poorly, but that doesn't mean banning the tool is the right answer. Maybe training better usage of them would be wise.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#8To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework. I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures. I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking…
I found the discussion sections to be the real value proposition of university - after reading the lecture material, got to spend time with a grad student and ask questions about the material.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#9I will sit there in a meeting (or retrospectively in a university lecture) and regularly derive nothing of value at all from my notes, be they written or typed. It's the media that is wrong, not the note taking medium. You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle. Everything is immediate, transient. If you lose the pace, then everything after that point is…
Sounds like ADHD.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#10To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework. I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures. I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking…
I found that the usefulness of lectures depends very strongly on how good the lecturer is, as well as the topic being discussed. When studying physics I found that the lectures were incredibly useful, because it's quite hard to get in the "zone" of understanding the derivation being discussed when at home. However, with mathematics subjects the textbook was almost always a much better learning tool, because the derivation did not require a discussion of the physics that justified said derivation. Computer Science lectures were almost unilaterally a waste of time.