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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

#181

Post by jorgec »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #120
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-takin…

He who follows two hares catches neither.

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

#182

Post by malkia »

andrewla wrote: post #145
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 lap…

To a degree, the same happens with a design doc - you may start it with a peer, or have manager oversee it, or pull someone from a team, from which you rely on specific technology to gain more confidence for you, and whoever later reads the design doc that all important bits are covered... For example decision to use system A (from your point of view) may be good idea, but owners of system A may no longer support it, or may have in plans to deprecate it soon, but haven't announced it yet, so adding key personnel there would help for sure.

I'm trying this new model at my new workplace, but I'm already seeing pain doing this with Outlook (the desktop version), the Mobile version is much better in this respect, though the comment system need some features, that I got used to (assigning action-items). The other approach would be google for business, but I'm not a decision maker here.

(Or some other cool product - EtherPad?)

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

#183

Post by Groxx »

foldr wrote: post #173
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…

Have you ever done any teaching? You might be surprised at how uncomfortable it feels to talk to a room where 50% of people are looking at their laptops or phones instead of at you. This tends to go in a vicious cycle. If people are bored for 5 minutes, they get our their laptops. Then there's no chance for me to unbore them in the next 5 minutes, because they're not listening to a word I'm saying. In most of the cla…

I imagine the "frantically trying to transcribe everything" comes somewhat from how we've been trained by grading-on-attendance and grading-on-note-taking classes. We're used to going to classes that are far less useful than the book, and getting nothing from it except a waste of everyone's time. Some schools are of course different, but IME the most-useless lecturers were also the ones who graded on attendance and/or dropped "secret test hints" to people who were there.

But I'll say a big THANK YOU for providing notes - it has always seemed stupid to me to have N people duplicating notes (often poorly), especially when they're expected to be learning things for the first time. It can be exceedingly hard to know what's useful and what isn't ahead of time, and you can't stop to write it down when you realize because the lecture goes on without you. Provided-notes (or a recording) are huge helps to people who actually need notes or don't absorb it the first time.

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

#184

Post by dragontamer »

jorgec wrote: post #180
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…

If you are a bad student then every single teacher is bad. btw, laptop for notes is a joke. A pen+paper is way more effective, cheaper and usable.

Only if you know how to use a pen+paper.

I didn't learn how to use pen+paper for notekeeping till I was a professional, way out of college. My digital note skills were superior when I was in college (just a simple collection of notes I typed up every now and then during lectures).

Honestly, today's student should do the following:

1. Take pictures of the damn blackboard. Way easier than copying. Cellphones are cheap, everyone has a camera (even if the camera is of shoddy quality, it should work indoors in a lecture hall).

2. "Stream" notes in some format. It doesn't matter what your "streaming" note format is. It was computer keyboard for me, but today I can "stream" notes faster in pen / paper.

3. The most important step: Rewrite your notes into a better organization.

"Streamed" notes have low density and poor value for studying. The importance of "streaming" notes is to have a comprehensive outline of the professor's major points. Many professors provide subtle hints about what the tests are going to look like, so comprehensive note taking is the key to picking up on these hints.

"Organized" notes require conscious effort that takes too long during a lecture (or meeting, or anything really).

4. Ask questions -- Seriously. Professors make mistakes sometimes, but more commonly, the student's brain moves a bit slower as its learning from a lecture. If something smells "fishy", raise your hand and politely ask the professor to explain it better. Most professors are just happy someone is even listening to them, and often will comprehensively answer your question. Win/win for everybody.

-------------------

With regards to "secret note taking skills", its really the split between "streaming" notes and "organized" notes. Heck, keep two notebooks for every subject. (Or really, just one "streaming" notebook which you copy into "organized" pages elsewhere). You really should keep the steps separate.

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

#185

Post by mjevans »

jimbokun wrote: post #178
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 are not describing a meeting. Meetings should only invite people who will actively participate and provide their input. Anyone not meeting that description should not be invited. You are describing a lecture, or perhaps a presentation, or series of presentations. Which classically have all the problems you cite of losing the thread and not being able to catch up again. In meetings where you actively participate,…

I hate the term "meeting" as that's merely a super-class of event. Technically a lecture is a meeting, a movie screening is a meeting, a concert is a meeting.

I find things are more productive when there's an actual expectation about what people do when gathered.

    * brainstorming
    * problem identification (a type of brain storming)
    * solution identification (a type of brain storming)
    * Question and Answer* (I tend to not find these very productive)
    * Presentation (possibly of answers to submitted questions)

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

#187

Post by mjevans »

aandrieiev wrote: post #157
hollander wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Firsthand experience, I was way better at typing than writing, particularly after they forced cursive only on everyone and permanently ruined my ability to block-write (while cursive never delivered any of the supposed benefits and looks way worse).

The cognitive act of /making notes/ (actual notes) on paper delivered the majority of the benefit. I usually never actually looked at them again.

Similarly, when preparing printed sheets of notes on a topic later, the act of creating those notes (the closer to the exam the better) again forced the processing and short-term memory storage of the information and I //usually// didn't need them.

Ideally there would be a copy of any slides (including snapshots of the 'boards' every few min / just before erasure) and an audio transcript to aid in taking a lecture again, and maybe a historical Q and A session so that the average quality of questions about the material could accumulate higher/more beneficial for the students.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by mjevans »

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…

Turn by turn is what "the book" and it's handful of reference examples before the actual test questions are supposed to be about.

The classroom time is for general theory and the QnA part for debugging errors in the understanding of students.

(In High School I found it way more useful to spend most of the in-class time doing homework... even if for another class.)

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

#190

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

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'…

There was a note taking service I used. They hired students to type up lecture notes. Available the next day. On red paper so it could not be photocopied. It was money well spent during my undergraduate tenure.
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