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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

#91

Post by alistairSH »

alistairSH wrote: post #43
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'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 can't edit my initial comment, but here's a link with citations that support my comment. In particular, the "Why do we take notes?" section... https://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/notetaking_0.pdf

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

#92

Post by timthelion »

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 agree.

While not a direct replacement for lectures, I've been prototyping an audio media which does not have these same disadvantages, called push to talk. You can find the prototype here: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html

Click on the first track, and then use the arrow keys to move through the essay. Note that you can rewind, review, pause to think, just like with text. But it is speech.

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

#93

Post by Dave_TRS »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #81
Dave_TRS wrote: post #58

My 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 o…

Disagree. I think it's confirmation bias. You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops).

In my case I think a small N might more likely be the issue if there is one (only ~50-70 professors for me). I am very keenly aware of every professor that has banned laptops (after struggling through an entire semester), and none of them were the star professors. Interested to hear if others find the good professors allow laptops and the brutal ones are quickest to ban.

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

#94

Post by txcwpalpha »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41
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.

The actual act of taking the information and processing it into your own words, and then also the act of actually writing those words down, has been shown to improve memory retention and understanding of that information over what you would get from simply reading the same information in a textbook.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

amorphid wrote: post #90
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…

That's why lectures suck for me. I can't "listen fast enough", and I lost track of the lecture when I try to take notes. This is where something like Khan Academy is way awesome-r for my style of learning.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by wpietri »

ptman wrote: post #89

It's not the laptops that are the problem, it's the lectures. Check out flipped classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom - watch lectures/read a book/etc on your own time and attend problem solving with teachers / TAs available.

Wow! Yes, this seems much better. The key opportunity of being all together in a room is interactivity. Large lectures mostly waste that: the time gap between having a question and getting it answered can be large. (E.g., having to wait until discussion section puts a gap of hours to days between the Q and the A.)

But when I'm trying to apply the material, I'm not in passive listening mode. There, hopefully my feedback loop with the material is in the seconds-to-minutes range. If I'm stuck, being able to get a question answered can keep me in the zone of fast learning.

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

#97

Post by mtpn »

timthelion wrote: post #92
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 agree. While not a direct replacement for lectures, I've been prototyping an audio media which does not have these same disadvantages, called push to talk. You can find the prototype here: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html Click on the first track, and then use the arrow keys to move through the essay. Note that you can rewind, review, pause to think, just like with text. But it is speech.

This seems awesome. I can’t get it to play from my phone but the concept is really really useful. I used to want to make something like this for audio-based exams for people with dyslexia, for example. In Ireland people with reading difficulties have a person sit with them and read the questions in a whole other room. It’s expensive compared to just having a group with headphones working through on computers.

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

#98

Post by AlexCoventry »

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…

The ability to stick your hand up and ask a question is orders of magnitude more valuable than a rewind button.

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

#99

Post by AlwaysRock »

If I have my laptop or phone our during a meeting it's because I've either already had this meeting with whoever if giving out the information and don't need to pay full attention to it or I'm in a meeting that I shouldnt be in because I have nothing to add.

I assume everyone else is the same way and It's a really easy way to tell who does and doesnt need to be in future meetings for me.

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

#100

Post by btbuildem »

> Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.

This seems to be the key point -- when taking notes by hand, you have to think about what you're hearing and writing down. In a way, you're translating the lecturer's language to your own, and that seems to help retain the information better.

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