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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

#141

Post by kkylin »

I think an effective strategy depends highly on the subject matter. Also, appropriate use of technology by the lecturer makes a huge difference.

For mathematics (my field) or something similar like theoretical physics, the pace at which the lecturer can write on a blackboard with a piece of chalk is just about the right information rate for the audience to absorb. Not to say one cannot teach well using more modern media, but it has to be done with careful thought and planning to be effective. (Same applies to lecturing at the board; we just have more practice at it.)

As for note-taking, I used to write everything down in class when I was in college & grad school. Sometimes this worked, sometimes not -- what's right for a course in abstract algebra isn't going to be right for a course in computational neuroscience. What I think is very effective, but requires some discipline, is: - take minimal notes (or even photos) in class - reconstruct lecture after class - go to office hours and clear up any questions that arise. It would be hard to do this for everything. For the subjects you really care about, this might be a useful approach.

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

#143

Post by jimmaswell »

amha wrote: post #46
SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

All of my math classes derived things and went through some problems step by step, and then often later a problem would be given and you have 5 minutes to try to solve it then compare with what was done on the board. It worked well and I don't see why you'd do it differently.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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'…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by andrewla »

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 can second this; at Google I've found that meetings are unusually productive because of the practice. For the most part, regular meetings will follow a fairly strict agenda, which keeps them moving and stops them from going off on tangents (not always, sometimes tangents do happen, for better or worse, but I've found that it's for better significantly more often than at previous workplaces). And the presence of laptops helps here -- people can add bullet items to upcoming agenda items to ensure that they are discussed, without having to interrupt the conversation currently in progress, and the use of a single document means that the historical record is easily accessible.

For meetings that are more oriented as design sessions or free-form discussions, the laptops tend to go away because they are not useful in that situation, unless you're at a point where data that can be quickly acquired can be useful.

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

#146

Post by SPBS »

btbuildem wrote: post #100

> 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…

There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentences.

I find writing better because you can freely draw on your lecture notes. The benefit is twofold: one, you don't have have to slavishly transcribe everything your professor says if it's already in the slides. Two, the mental overhead is very low as your thoughts go straight from pen to paper.

If you type from scratch, you end having having to 'transcribe'. If you annotate the slides on your laptop, you have to deal with the high overhead of textbox and geometric shape manipulation with a keyboard and trackpad.

If my lectures didn't have so much diagrams or equations(unlikely in an engineering major), I think a purely text based notetaking software like org-mode would be pretty good.

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

#147

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

Problem-based learning is a highly effective form of learning for some materials.

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

#148

Post by Bartweiss »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #76
Bartweiss wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really depends on how the notes were taken. Jotting down thoughts when you study on your own is helpful. But it's extremely common for your brain to just copy words from the board / screen to the notebook without any cognitive involvement.

I think this was a big part in why pen-and-paper outperformed typing for me.

I'm slow at handwriting; to keep up with a lecture I basically have to use shorthand and restrict myself to the most useful observations. But typing, I can just be a pipe moving every word from powerpoint to a text file. That distracts me from the content of the lecture and doesn't do anything for retention.

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

#149

Post by THE_PUN_STOPS »

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…

My experience (Mechanical Engineering) was that laptop banning was only an indicator as to whether the professor was "old-school."

IMO, some hardcore practice-until-you-bleed cornerstone topics benefited immensely from an "old-school" professor (Thermodynamics, Mechanical Design, Heat Transfer, etc) whereas softer, more conceptual classes (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics, Mechanics of Materials, etc) benefited from "new-school" professors that were savvy to the benefits of interactive software and additional visualizations and knowledge multipliers afforded by a computer.

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

#150

Post by otakucode »

The problem here lies not with the laptops or with their use. It lies with the continued existence of such radically and absurdly inefficient and pointless traditions as 'lectures' and 'meetings'. They were started because physical co-location was necessary for knowledge transmission. Physical co-location is no longer necessary for, and indeed is severely hampering of, knowledge transmission.

Anyone who proposes an in-person meeting is planning to abuse the frailties of human biology rather than meet with you honestly. They intend to use bluster and charm to convince you of ostensibly objective claims - and it will probably work. It usually does. That's one of the reasons they fight so hard to avoid being put on an actual even playing field where their ideas must stand or fall solely on their own merits.

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