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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

#151

Post by r00fus »

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…

> You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle.

I disagree about meetings. I often ask to repeat a pivotal discourse in a multi-party meeting simply to emphasize it's being understood by all participants.

Also notes help to structure the meeting so you don't take 1hr to discuss 30m of content. I prefer to share my notes on screen (either as email minutes I'm taking or preferably something collaborative like Google Sheets). Notes, well used, can keep everyone on the same page. If the agenda is prepared in advance, it can turn a 1hr ramble-fest that achieves nothing into a concise 10m confirmation session.

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

#152

Post by grogenaut »

It's pretty common where I work to bring laptops to meetings. If the meeting is engaging they close, and sometimes in deep meetings they are asked to be closed. In other meetings it helps to have many hands on keyboards updating the sprint board in jira and entering new tasks, or the meeting is rolling attention and people are there and do work until they are needed by the meeting. This is often what happens in all hands on deck situations or launches.

People who are holding meetings where I work realize when they're wasting time and generally dismiss people if they're not needed and everyone is generally free to just leave if the meeting isn't of use to them.

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

#153

Post by anotheryou »

If you want me to remember more than just some big picture, let me write it down. And if you let me write it down, please let me use my tools.

Just teach people how to use tech right, the younger generation is surprisingly much better at this. I have a full screen white on black text editor and turn off the display while not typing (sometimes I even keep it off while typing).

And yea, lectures... just gave me the stream so I can play it at double speed and repeat the interesting parts.

The only things I need paper for are geometry, layout and surprisingly: math. With math for me it's super valuable to keep something like nested contexts. I write things down to free the brain for more, but need to be able to jump back in on demand. Easier on a 2D pane than in a linear way.

With OpalCal/Soulver i tend to do more on the PC though, variables are damn nice.

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

#154

Post by anotheryou »

ska wrote: post #130
distances wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was teaching undergrads I always told them that a good minimum target was 3 hours of work for every 1 hour of lecture. Roughly one of those hours was to be spent on the lecture material beforehand. Think about it this way. If all you are doing is rushing to copy down what the lecturer says, you don't really hear it or have a chance to think about it. So you have to review anyway - if you spend that same time b…

How much lecture is there than? Here in germany 3 Seminars a day with 2h each are often the norm. That would mean 18h of prep and 6h of seminars a day.

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

#156

Post by r00fus »

anotheryou wrote: post #154
ska wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was teaching undergrads I always told them that a good minimum target was 3 hours of work for every 1 hour of lecture. Roughly one of those hours was to be spent on the lecture material beforehand. Think about it this way. If all you are doing is rushing to copy down what the lecturer says, you don't really hear it or have a chance to think about it. So you have to review anyway - if you spend that same time b…

How much lecture is there than? Here in germany 3 Seminars a day with 2h each are often the norm. That would mean 18h of prep and 6h of seminars a day.

Wow that sounds intensive. What does a 2hr seminar usually consist of in Germany?

Could be a cultural difference in seminar style?

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

#157

Post by aandrieiev »

hollander wrote: post #62
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'…

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, t…

I'm curious whether the research you mentioned had the people who actually grew up writing or typing. If the former, no wonder: I spent all my school years extensively taking notes, and nowadays taking a note on paper is a reflex I cannot get rid of, even despite typing way faster than writing. How feel those growing up with typing as the major way of taking notes I don't know, but am curious to learn more about any research on them.

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

#158

Post by ska »

anotheryou wrote: post #154
ska wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was teaching undergrads I always told them that a good minimum target was 3 hours of work for every 1 hour of lecture. Roughly one of those hours was to be spent on the lecture material beforehand. Think about it this way. If all you are doing is rushing to copy down what the lecturer says, you don't really hear it or have a chance to think about it. So you have to review anyway - if you spend that same time b…

How much lecture is there than? Here in germany 3 Seminars a day with 2h each are often the norm. That would mean 18h of prep and 6h of seminars a day.

That's a good point, systems vary. That recommendation was for a 3 lecture hour per week course (there are additional tutorials, etc), and a full course load would be 4-5 courses a term. So that arithmetic gets you to 50-60hours/week in total, which is about right. With an easier course load the expectation might be 40hr/week.

The expectation is you would spend some time in formal lectures, some in tutorial sessions (usually with graduate student assistants) and some on your own - in roughly equal proportions.

I did teach some courses with more time in formal lecture (per week) and less in tutorial sessions, in which case the ratio would be adjusted to end up at around the same place.

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

#159

Post by jupp0r »

It seems like the more obvious conclusion from the facts stated in the article would be: lectures are more efficient when people can dedicate their brain to understanding the content instead of having to write down everything being said/shown. I never understood why some lecturers thought that making students write things down would be a good way to teach them anything. Certainly did not work for me. I got much more value from mentally following the lecture and thinking about the topic.

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

#160

Post by mcfunk »

It's unfortunate to see laptops conflated with "all electronics" here. I benefitted greatly from using SoundNote on an iPad in grad school, which allowed me to make recordings of lectures that I could then annotate in real time. Rather than taking a transcript or feeling I had to record all key concepts, I could stick to noting where in the lecture was an especially important concept, or where I had spaced out and should re-listen. More valuable than any written notes I could have taken.
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