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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

#61

Post by ttlaxia »

I took notes in college in org-mode on a little eeepc and graduated summa. Instead of banning laptops to cater to the least common denominator, why not just tell the kids not to surf the web during lectures? Have the TA sit in the back of the class or make a video recording from the back if it's a problem.

It's hard not to imagine that the ones who surf the net on their laptops are the same ones who would be busy doodling in their notebooks otherwise.

And I'm not too sure about the study they cite that claims that other people are distracted. The assumption seems to be that people using laptops are ipso facto on Youtube and Twitter all the time. And the questionnaires they gave the test subjects beforehand practically begged them to be distracted during the test.

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

#62

Post by hollander »

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'…

I went to college before laptops as well. Taking notes has two purposes. First to remember what was said in class, extras that are not in the book, and it's a good indicator of the exam questions. Second is processing what is said. Research has shown that writing down what you hear makes you better understand and remember what is said, then when you type it on your laptop.

Even if you don't use the notes afterward, they are still useful. Video is a very useful method, but then the video has to be edited, or do you get three simultaneous streams, one of the professor, the board and the powerpoint? Videos like on Udemy are made for the medium. Class is not made for video, and I wonder how productive those videos are.

And when you go to class, do you really go home and see the whole class on video once again? That's way too time consuming. The notes are a good summary, much faster. Yes and it is taking effort, exactly what is needed. It puts your mind to work.

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

#63

Post by Bartweiss »

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've had a very strange experience: the act of taking notes helps, but having the notes isn't worth a damn.

I do benefit from note-taking, and I benefit more from pen-and-paper than typing. But looking back at my notes is rarely useful, and consistently worse than textbooks, lecture videos, or almost anything else. So I do the whole project just to boost my retention a little bit, and study from other sources.

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

#64

Post by Communitivity »

The idea that we can't use laptops in meetings is outdated. You can do active listening while taking notes, as long as you practice good note-taking instead of verbatim transcription. I typically use a concept-mapping tool such as CMapTools from the great folks at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Florida. That lets me capture the essential concepts from the meeting and the relations among those concepts.

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

#65

Post by cholantesh »

cjsuk wrote: post #30
bebe3000 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a too hard course. Or a bad lecturer. Or you skipped the previous lecture and it's all gibberish again.

Hard course (electrical engineering, laplace fun!), shit lecturer (complacent, dismissive of questions), skipped lecture (never although I probably should have just stuck my face in the course books).

Do Laplace Transforms get very difficult? I'm taking a course right now that teaches Differential and Integral Calculus, followed by Differential Equations and Laplace Transforms. Laplace Transforms have, so far, been the least challenging portion of the course.

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

#66

Post by SatvikBeri »

cyphar wrote: post #10
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…

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 deriv…

It also depends a lot on the student - personally I tend to learn faster from a mediocre textbook than an excellent lecturer. But my wife is the opposite, she retains much more from in-person lectures than videos or books.

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

#67

Post by kurthr »

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…

As far as I understand meetings (and lectures) are to derive consensus. Slides are regularly available before meetings while reading is normally required before lectures. Lecture presentation is not the time for the details of complex unfamiliar derivations, but for familiar motivation of larger goals and big questions.

If you feel the need to take notes of every point rather than summarising the most salient/important concepts, or recording your questions/disagreements, someone is doing it wrong. At a lecture communication should be about conclusions, possibly single critical details, but not the entire texture and flow of every detail.

If the material is so unfamiliar and surprising that you don't understand and can't ask relevant questions, I would say it's a failure of the speaker or yourself. Certainly, after a convincing talk, question, and answer, you should feel like you understand both the material and the motivation/goal better even without notes.

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

#68

Post by pellanti »

In a digital age, where we should be recording lectures, we still talk about the merits of note taking (whatever medium) vs. learning.

I agree the value is in the teaching itself and learning in the moment; however, I would still like to go back and access that lecture/class.

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

#69

Post by christophilus »

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…

The sole value I got out of lectures was the ability to raise my hand and ask questions. Other than that, yeah. It's a pretty bad medium for learning, I'd say. And even the one benefit I mentioned is now arguably better accomplished via a good forum / community.
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