Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #45

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: n…

People learn in different ways is the answer. Different people have different ways of cementing understanding in their heads.

My ideal form is to record the meeting, and then later review it and write notes.

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

#112

Post by qznc » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #108

While I worked at Google, laptops @ meeting were pretty much the norm. A note-taker (in our case the oncall person, or build master) would open a Google Docs document, or continue from a long going one (well known to everyone) and start typing notes, agenda, action items. At the same time the rest of the team can join (especially useful, if meeting is happening in more than one room, with people working from home, re…

I love the collaborative style for remote meetings. I'm still waiting for an opportunity to try it for meetings in a single room. I believe it could be nice.

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/meeting.html

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

#113

Post by distances » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #103

amorphid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own. That way you know what to look out for, and your notes will be a concise revision. Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them. Trying to write down everything the lecturer says is at best inefficient, and at worst a complete waste of time when you lose th…

Interesting, I have never heard of this, and definitely none of my professors instructed me to familiarize with the material before a lecture. So I never did. I suppose this could've been a useful technique.

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

#114

Post by sand500 » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

bpyne wrote: post #84

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'm of the same opinion. I realized in college that I can write or think about the material being presented, but I can't do them simultaneously. So, I stopped taking notes and relied much more on memory and text books. I'm still that way in the work world. My major was math. It would have been significantly better for my learning if we spent class time solving problems rather than watching the professor write out a p…

Same for me. I could take notes but then I would just be blindly copying what was on the board.

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

#115

Post by frou_dh » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

I'm so glad that I attended university before it was the done thing for students to be on laptops during lectures. If nothing else, it's simply a distraction to have all the other peoples' bright and animated screens in your field of vision.

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

#116

Post by baldfat » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

I used OneNote with a microphone on my 2003 PC Tablet. Syncing my lecture notes with my the professor was amazing in Graduate School.

I searched my notes for test and the audio of the professor was right there.

Had to repeat Art History and do a Freshman Course due to a mess up from the registrar's office = Civ 3 but still got an A.

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

#117

Post by jayess » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #103

amorphid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own. That way you know what to look out for, and your notes will be a concise revision. Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them. Trying to write down everything the lecturer says is at best inefficient, and at worst a complete waste of time when you lose th…

In law school it was mandatory to review the material before class and be prepared to discuss it, because you likely would be called on to explain a case or concept for the class. It's a bit anxiety inducing but forced me to learn the material, which is I suppose the whole purpose of a class.

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

#118

Post by bargl » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

I think my preference is a table with a stylus followed by pencil and paper over a computer. I never found computers to be useful in meetings but something I can write on and get handwriting recognition has been useful for me.

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

#119

Post by djtriptych » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:15 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #80

djtriptych wrote: post #70

I bought an iPad Pro 2 this september and it immediately replace my laptop for meetings. Light computing when I need it, but primarily a note-taking advice. Really great.

What software do you use on the iPad? I also have one but have things scattered between Nebo, GoodNotes, Apple Notes, Bear, Pages, and Evernote. I really need to pick the best app and focus everything there, but each one has different strengths.

yeah they're all kidna terrible. I started a roundup review but gave up due to costs of downloading each app.

I've settled so far on Linea. It has plenty of problems but hit my key points. I was aiming for a paper-like experience to replace my favorite tools: a technical pen/pencil and a nice graph paper pad.

- Use finger to erase (like a whiteboard). - Focus mode with no toolbars / chrome. - Good-looking graph paper background. - Technical pens and pencils. - Zoomable.

All the apps have layers - that's table stakes. Linea does NOT allow you to make selections and move components individually. I think I might do better design work with a few technical restrictions.

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

#120

Post by txcwpalpha » Mon, Nov 27, 2017, 5:16 PM UTC

brndnmtthws wrote: post #6

NY 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…

Agreed that this seems to be a no-brainer. But then again, if you look at the responses in this thread, apparently it's not a no-brainer to some people.

On the other hand, if you read the article in full, the debate isn't just about distractions and multi-tasking. Even when not being distracted, the use of a laptop to take notes is less effective than hand-writing notes. This is because laptops encourage a note-taking style where you don't necessarily need to actually process the information before typing it out:

> The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. 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.

In another study[1], it was found that this happens even when students are warned against this "transcript" style of note-taking.

It all very much depends on the person doing the note taking, the information being taught, and the person doing the speaking, but in general it appears that laptops encourage bad note-taking and bad listening habits that hand-writing notes don't.

1: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/taking-notes-by-hand-...