Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 235 posts

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#31

Post by sotojuan »

lvoudour wrote: post #16
cjsuk wrote: post #2

I 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…

Agree 100%. I went to college before tablets and affordable laptops became ubiquitous, but the same problem applied to handwritten notes. After a few tries to keep notes and re-read them at my leisure I gave up, it was exhausting to take them and in the end I was missing too much. The best solution is audio/video recording. I think every lecturer can record their lectures and publish them online later in the college'…

Yeah I stopped taking notes after I realized I never looked at them. Even when studying for an exam, I'd always make new notes from scratch rather than rewrite or read old ones.

It doesn't work for all classes, but I found that listening closely to the lecture and maybe writing down some main points and then reviewing or studying later worked for me.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#32

Post by regularfry »

retrac98 wrote: post #4

To 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…

My experience at university was the reverse. Despite having very good slides and speaker notes, there were intuitions for how the material hung together which I just wouldn't have got without hearing how the lecturers spoke about it.

Meetings, on the other hand...

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#33

Post by dmartinez »

cjsuk wrote: post #2

I 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…

I wonder if the answer to meetings is making participation more meaningful? In some MBA programs, the purpose of the class is the discussion of some case that everyone has read. In this way, you get more out of participation by listening to other people’s thoughts and combining them with yours.

There is also a strong case to be made for the “radical transparency” that has made Bridgewater so successful [0]. This system has the capacity to accelerate learning if it were implemented more widely.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#34

Post by regularfry »

betterunix2 wrote: post #3

I 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 touchscre…

Research on disfluency implies that you might be better off with longhand after all. Increasing the mental effort in taking the notes has a positive effect on how well people absorb material (subject to a few caveats).

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#35

Post by chrisper »

cjsuk wrote: post #2

I 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…

When I was in college I preferred laptops for this reason. I can type way faster than I can write by hand. So it was way easier to keep up and write everything down. I read my notes on some other day to learn, but during the lecture it was all about writing down enough to be able to recall the lecture from my notes on some later day.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#36

Post by beavis2 »

retrac98 wrote: post #4

To 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…

Everyone knows meetings are "stealth breaks"

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#37

Post by simion314 »

Interesting how many people prefer videos, my experience is that some professors are bad but the others are good, you can skip writing notes and just listen and later xerox the notes from others or get the book from the library. The advantages or the lectures is that you can ask questions, the professor gets feedback and provide more examples then needed, the professors will tell some interesting side story that you will remember it forever and it will help you remember the concepts. I am wondering if the people that hate lectures are more likely to have paid for the university studies so maybe they resent the entire institution and prefer learning from internet.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#38

Post by mseebach »

cjsuk wrote: post #25
Joe-Z wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I'd say you _can_ pause a lecture. Simply lift up your hand and ask a question: That's the great thing about person-to-person teaching. Painting all lectures and meetings as 'broken' because one would prefer to have video for everything (that's how I understood it) is pretty hyperbolic.

I don't want a video. I want the material written down in a formal tutorial style that can be reviewed and updated and consumed at a suitable pace. That pace can be faster for the bits I understand and slower for the bits I don't.

That's basically a textbook, and lectures are supposed to augment the book, not replace it. From personal experience, and anecdotal supporting evidence, lectures are the hardest when you haven't actually prepared for them (at the other end of the scale are the lectures you did prepare for, but enough others did, and the lecturer decides to indulge them by re-stating what's already covered in the book instead of, well, lecturing).

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#39

Post by markussss »

I don't think taking notes is the most important part of learning from a lecture. For me, throughout the years, actively participating in lectures through asking questions or discussing the concept being talked about, either with the lecturer or the person I'm sitting beside. Compared to taking notes, this has lead to me gaining a deeper understanding than when writing or typing everything that is being said during the meeting or the lecture. Usually, the only things I write down in meetings and lectures are words or concepts I don't already understand so I can research those later, or specific tasks that I am going to do as a result of the meeting or lecture.

Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting

#40

Post by cjsuk »

mseebach wrote: post #38
cjsuk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a video. I want the material written down in a formal tutorial style that can be reviewed and updated and consumed at a suitable pace. That pace can be faster for the bits I understand and slower for the bits I don't.

That's basically a textbook, and lectures are supposed to augment the book, not replace it. From personal experience, and anecdotal supporting evidence, lectures are the hardest when you haven't actually prepared for them (at the other end of the scale are the lectures you did prepare for, but enough others did, and the lecturer decides to indulge them by re-stating what's already covered in the book instead of, well…

Yes and no. The textbooks we were given were reference structured. Ergo the path through them was defined by the lectures and the course which was mostly undocumented. There needs to be a course guide that spans the entire material with independent guidance.

A good modern example of this is The Art of Electronics which is a textbook format. There is a companion book which is Learning the Art of Electronics which contains exactly the structure I want to see, which is your lectures, tutorials and labs in a structured format on paper. You can complete these with guidance, without guidance, with or without lectures and tutorials.

The lectures should be more interactive and be a result of the above. Build your knowledge on more than one pillar and some structure so to speak.

Some of the course ecosystems you see are very closed with respect to structure and you are carried through without being permitted to see the path.

Post reply on HN