I've found (full-sized) tablets to work out better in these environments than laptops. Both in terms of focused-usage as a information recording or reference/retrieval tool, and the favorable reception it gets from other participants when used for such purposes.
Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
51–60 of 235 posts
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dire…
Right, its one of my biggest frustration with my university experience. Why am I paying you large sums of money for instruction that feels like it equates to a list of practice problems.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#53NY 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 swi…
Yeah this seems like a no-brainer for anyone who has had a laptop in front of them during a meeting or a lecture.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#54Earlier 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'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.
I had one professor in college who told us that when she was in undergrad, she would take pages of notes every lecture and then literally throw them in the garbage on her way out of the lecture hall. She just discovered through trial and error that this was the most effective way for her to learn the material. And she did well enough to become a professor at a top-20 institution.
Conversely, I never took notes in her class (or any other), and that didn't stop me from doing well.
The moral of the story is, people are different and find what works for yourself. There are a lot of oddball strategies out there that some people swear by, and I bet it really works for them, but you don't need to try them yourself unless you're unsatisfied with the effectiveness of your current approach.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dire…
Very true and unfortunately all to frequently ignored.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#56I 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'…
Also before tablets and ubiquitous laptops, but after PowerPoint hit: whenever I had the opportunity to have slide printouts ahead of time, they were a surprisingly nice scribble sink (many slides per page, not a big stack). Those short bursts of details, questions or clarifications both from the talk and from thinking while listening that would be useless riddles without the context provided by the rough timeline of the slide deck. These won't magically turn lectures into the hours that make you pass a test (where did people ever get that expectation?), but unlike many other forms note-taking they do increase the value of the "on topic entertainment" provided by a lecture.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#57Earlier 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'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.
In the time you're crystallizing the knowledge in your head by writing down notes, you're missing information from the lecture. Note-taking is great when you're in front of a textbook.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#58My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren't phased by the laptops and rarely ban them.
But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it's almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That's what I've seen over and over in 7 years of post secondary classes. I don't know much about the professor in the article, but I would suspect improving his lectures will be more effective in helping students learn than banning laptops.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#59Earlier 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'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.
I met a professor who acknowledged hammering the class with fast-paced talk to purposely frustrate note-takers.
His purpose: 'If you want to pass my exam, don't miss a class. Getting notes from others would let you "cheat"'
..asshole.
Re: Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
#60I 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…
Completely agree. One time I faced a laptop ban and purchased a tiny tripod to take steady pictures in dim light of what the professor was writing on the board. For many of us it's mentally taxing to write with pen and paper what the professor is saying, banning technology is not the best way to get students to learn.