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

nytimes.com

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

#41

Post by Cthulhu_ »

markussss wrote: post #39

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 t…

I've never understood the thing about taking notes myself (mind you I never did any higher education); what is the lecture explaining that isn't in the textbook? The textbook should be all the notes and information you need, maybe supplemented with online; not keeping notes will allow you to focus on the lecture itself, which should be an extra on top of the book.

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

#42

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

sotojuan wrote: post #31
lvoudour wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find this especially true for my STEM classes, I can't for the life of me derive anything of value from lectures in math or anything math based unless we're talking about the broad overarching concept (like what an integral represents or what cache memory is for). If its the details of what some code does or how to do some operation on a matrix, forget it, I'm not going to glean anything more in that time listening than I would be able to figure out on my own with google in that same timespan. I find trying to follow examples to be simultaneously too slow to keep my attention and too fast when something was not apparently obvious to me leading to this effect where I'm either lost because I got what we were doing and my attention wandered so now I'm lost or my attention wanders trying to figure out the part that was not readily apparent.

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

#43

Post by alistairSH »

sotojuan wrote: post #31
lvoudour wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll have to dig for a citation, but I thought the act of writing the notes was educational (helps with retention) in and of itself.

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

#44

Post by cjsuk »

lvoudour wrote: post #21
afarrell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> publish them online later Note that you also need to have someone add captions to them for accessibility.

Most professors are experts at delegating the menial tasks to others :)

They are however terrible at remembering to delegate them from experience!

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

#45

Post by ptero »

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…

People learn in different ways and my experience is completely different: note taking, on paper, was critical for me to learn. Whether it is a differential geometry lecture (in college) or a test planning meeting having written notes is very important for me -- it allows me to think through the topics again at leisure.

The most important thing for me is to keep note taking at the "high secondary" importance level: not preempt thinking or participation in real time but high enough to ensure writing at least a couple of words or a quick diagram for each main topic. Break either and note taking starts to be a problem and not a help. Just my 2c, YMMV.

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

#46

Post by amha »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #42
sotojuan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find this especially true for my STEM classes, I can't for the life of me derive anything of value from lectures in math or anything math based unless we're talking about the broad overarching concept (like what an integral represents or what cache memory is for). If its the details of what some code does or how to do some operation on a matrix, forget it, I'm not going to glean anything more in that time listening…

One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.

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

#47

Post by cjsuk »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #29
hashkb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note taking exists to combat what you're talking about. You can improve your note taking, and how you use your notes, on paper or on a device.

I have a colleague who makes mind-map style notes, either on paper or via software. He doesn't try to capture everything that's said. Rather, he notes key ideas, and identifies/imposes structure to the conversation. It can actually be informative to look over his shoulder as a meeting progresses, to see what loose ends are still dangling, and where people focus the most attention. For myself, I've moved to markdown-s…

Agree with this.

I rather like HyperPhysics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html

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

#48

Post by jrs235 »

sotojuan wrote: post #31
lvoudour wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rarely took notes for similar reasons (never looked at them again). But I still found note taking useful for memory recall. Having a slight photographic memory, by writing information/notes down on paper I could more easily visualize where and what I wrote and therefore more easily recall the information.

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

#50

Post by LyndsySimon »

I didn't get much value from notes until I started using fountain pens and focusing on my penmanship. Once I did, I had to slow down and take more concise notes to avoid falling behind, which in turn lead to my needing to actually understand what was being presented so I could write it in fewer words instead of just writing down key points verbatim.
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