31–40 of 297 posts
As far as handwriting versus keyboarding, I find them to be equal in my case.
I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference t…
What are you using the host your wiki and write markdown? I'm looking at self-hosting a similar system.
I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference t…
There seems to be zero proof to that. Too long ago that I can up with actual citations I read about studies that said a better way to "retain" information, in the context of college reading material, is recitation. With recitation they meant verbally explaining the content from memory. One of the problems with most such studies is that they don't compare techniques with each other.
There are some good studies on this topic such as this one from UCLA. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu... Abstract: Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distractio…
For starters, it's not just "take notes" and leave it at that. Those notes are reviewed, modified, reorganized, corrected, and studied. It's so much easier to just carry a laptop with several files instead of a variety of notebooks. So much easier to search in files, to rewrite/reorganize... And, for a lot of people like me who have bad handwriting (that gets worse with fatigue), they're also so much easier to read. It's also far easier to take collaborative notes.
In other words, the relation effort-results can be far higher with laptops than with writing.
I know a lot of people who insist writing by hand helps them. But I also know it's TERRIBLE for me personally.
The article claims:
> Writing by hand on paper creates a tactile, personalized experience... The complex experience of hand writing on paper contains a multitude of variable elements: the creativity of an individual’s written representation of language, the texture of the paper itself, the fine motor skills needed to translate thoughts into written language, the engagement of the physical senses... All of these complexities create a stronger memory of the information that is taken in during the note taking.
Well, no. For me, all of that is a bunch of irrelevant noise. I hate writing, it's so much slower and more awkward than typing (for me), I'm constantly concerning myself with whether I can keep up, whether I should start the next word on the same line or next line, whether it's clear enough for me to read later or if I should repeat the word, whether I need to slow down to be more legible but if that means I won't be able to keep up, whether I need to click the pencil again...
Writing requires me to use a significant amount of my brain for it, and this is taking away from my actual concentration on the content I'm trying to learn. It's not creating "stronger memories" for me, it's creating irrelevant distraction. (Whereas typing for me is effortless muscle memory that takes almost zero effort, so I can direct most of my concentration to the material itself.)
Again, I don't question that it helps some people. But presenting it as universal is just flat-out wrong.
Also, you need to have good handwriting. Some people don't. In my case, my handwriting goes from bad to worse the more time I spend writing, to the point it becomes unintelligible. Seems more productive to invest the time it'd take me to improve that in other aspects of note-taking.
Just think, you probably want: - Switch between drawing amd writing in a split of second;
- Have a large enough space amd can write in very small font;
- Can move it around not caring whether part of elbow blocks something
One thing I can agree with OP, Weinberg and what’s-his-name’s Hallmarks of Cancer series of papers are emblematic of everything that’s wrong with biology research and why we haven’t made much actionable progress in recent decades in biology: these reviews invented out of thin air dogmatic rules about cancer as if what they know about it is what’s important (in their first review, the immune system is not even mention…
I just want to add a gigantic caveat: NOT FOR EVERYBODY. I know a lot of people who insist writing by hand helps them. But I also know it's TERRIBLE for me personally. The article claims: > Writing by hand on paper creates a tactile, personalized experience... The complex experience of hand writing on paper contains a multitude of variable elements: the creativity of an individual’s written representation of language…
What I've learned since then is to introduce a buffer between the consumption of the material and the making of the note. Instead of trying to keep up, I'm trying to fill the buffer to the point where I can summarize and re-state the material in my own words and write that down.
I slip into old habits sometimes, but for me the recap-then-write approach has been helpful and I suspect it's part of the value so many see to handwritten notes. You can't take a transcription (I could probably transcribe a lot of meetings or lectures on a keyboard) so you have to condense and the condensation, as much as anything, is probably what matters.