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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

#121

Post by brndnmtthws »

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…

That's why I never take notes. I just give 100% of my focus and retain a lot more information.

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

#122

Post by albedoa »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #81
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…

Disagree. I think it's confirmation bias. You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops).

> You don't notice when good professors deviate from the norm (e.g. banning laptops).

I don't understand how that follows. Why wouldn't we notice when good professors deviate from the norm?

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

#123

Post by txcwpalpha »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #121
txcwpalpha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's why I never take notes. I just give 100% of my focus and retain a lot more information.

That's great for some situations (like some college lectures or a daily scrum meeting) but simply doesn't fly in others. At my job, for example, missing a single detail in one of our interviews can be the difference between the success and complete failure of a project. Retaining just "a lot more" of the information isn't enough, you must retain (or record) all of the information. In such situations, note taking is mandatory.

Those are the same situations that encourage the "transcription" style of notes though, which as discussed above, presents its own problems. It's all about finding a balance.

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

#124

Post by literallycancer »

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…

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

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

#125

Post by bmurphy1976 »

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…

I never took notes, I doodled. All my learning came from doing after the lectures were done.

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

#126

Post by thedoops »

retrac98 wrote: post #4

To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework. I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures. I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking…

The real value of a teacher in the same room is for immediate feedback. I'm of the opinion that lectures should be replaced with active study sessions where the teacher(s) walk the class through problems and/or help individual students through gaps in their knowledge.

Lectures can be asynchronous; rather than the teacher reinventing the wheel, let them assign students to watch the best lectures available online.

Reverse the current model, do most homework at school, and watch the lectures at home.

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

#127

Post by jjnoakes »

literallycancer wrote: post #124
ska wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

Because reviewing and being familiar with material is different from knowing it, and even if you know a topic, surely you can learn more.

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

#128

Post by ska »

literallycancer wrote: post #124
ska wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

It's unlikely that you fully understand the material from a single read.

However, if you can convince yourself that you do then by all means skip that lecture. You'll find out how accurate you were on the exam.

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

#129

Post by rockostrich »

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 don't think your points apply to lectures like they do to meetings, at least for me. Meetings are more collaborative and most of my recall during a meeting is due to participation. If I'm not participating at all then I will most likely forget everything that happened during the meeting.

Lectures are different because I tend to use my notes as a way of interacting with the lecture (and usually you can't really interact much in a lecture unless it's a small class). Maybe it was my way of taking notes, but marking up lecture slides or essentially copying proofs/problems during an engineering or math lecture during my undergrad was most of my learning besides doing problem sets. Problem sets were very important, but they were only there to reinforce what I learned while taking my notes during the lecture. I ended up recalling much less whenever I didn't take notes and just tried to listen and participate as much as I could in the lecture.

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

#130

Post by ska »

distances wrote: post #113
ska wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 beforehand, you are ready with questions and already know what parts you are unsure of. With a short revision of your notes following also, you're in great shape.

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