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A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

scientificamerican.com

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Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#61

Post by linker3000 »

pjmlp wrote: post #56

I usually take notes on paper as well. Then I either scan them directly to PDF or take to effort to re-write them, if the information is to be better structured or shared with others. Besides all the benefits mentioned by others, it is also a good way to rest my wrists from just typing.

Rewriting contemporary notes some time later adds another filter/interpretation to the information, and if you choose to remove or rewrite things that now don't seem relevant or accurate (rather than checking with the information giver), there's a risk that the notes become diluted or lose details that are re-graded as unimportant but later turn out to be the opposite.

Always best to write good, efficient, consistently-styled notes once, and annotate changes/corrections on them if they are needed. It saves time too!

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#62

Post by psychomugs »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #31
dexwiz wrote: post #24

Thank goodness I learned this freshmen year in college, also the first time I was allowed a laptop in class. I starting taking notes with pen and paper as soon as I could write fast enough. I was successful in school, and I really think a large part of it was recording so many notes. I noticed that many classmates that stayed on laptops often were bad students. And the times I did take my laptop to class I was worse…

Why can’t you just take a picture of the diagram? I actually never learned or benefited from note taking, so I’m pretty clueless. I still got through university and grad school with good grades, but I wonder if I was missing something. Professionally I draw a blank whenever someone at a meeting asks me to take notes, kind of embarrassing.

Taking a picture has always seemed like the laziest way to say that you're participating in class. I've found that people that take pictures of every lecture slide and say they'll look at them later are usually freeters who show up to lectures once in a blue moon.

To me, written note-taking was useful because it forced me to internalize the information in some way, even if it's only verbatim copying. My hand has to move to the shape of the letters, and I'd usually mouth out what I was writing; this forced me to experience the information in more ways than just listening to it. I can make my own annotations to a hand-drawn graph. Taking a photo doesn't challenge my senses in the same ways.

[1] showed that taking a photo improves visual recall at the expense of auditory recall, but I'd argue that lecture information more often emphasizes the latter.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976176948...

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#63

Post by Drdrdrq »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #44
bayesian_horse wrote: post #34

In lectures, note-taking at all should be avoided, most of the time. Most lectures cover material that is presented very clearly in accompanying materials, books or the internet. The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous. And at least for me it doesn't help recollection or focus to write notes while listening, and many students report they can tak…

Yes, this is what I came to the comments to say. For me, paying attention was much more important than trying to take notes. It's a shame this study didn't have a third group that didn't take notes at all.

This, so much! Whenever I could I avoided taking notes and instead copied them from classmates or studied from books.

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#64

Post by dschuetz »

I did both, wrote and typed, and wrote on my iPad pro with the stylus. The best results I got when taking notes and studying on real paper. I believe the cognition/perception bias comes from the unnaturally glowing panels and the lack of complex haptic feedback like that of a rolling pen or scratching. Any indirect input that comes combined with the visually perceived knowledge makes memorizing more effective, I guess. Glowing visuals are less comfortable for me, perhaps they overload the eyes in a way. Reading on actual paper feels less "heavy".

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#65

Post by nstart »

kstenerud wrote: post #54

So, the actual issue is that transcription doesn't correlate with retention, and people who type tend to fall into the trap of transcription more easily. There's nothing wrong or inferior about taking notes with a computer vs a notepad so long as you're not transcribing. But, "Don't take notes with a laptop" is punchier.

Mmm. My two cents...

There's some extrapolation here. I've tried multiple models of taking notes with digital tools. They all come with this assumption that our brains are thinking in a single mode at any given time which is not practically true. I can be understanding what a person is saying and in my head categorising the information (table) while picturing what connections that info might have to something else (drawings?). And then I remember that Ellie from the other team/class had done something similar and I note down to set up a meeting (todo/calendar). All this while noting down questions of my own (free form text).

The point is, analog allows us to take notes and organise on the go. Digital tools, especially laptops (and typing in general), assume our thoughts are organised before we digitise them.

So unless using a pen on a tablet nothing comes even close in the digital world to recording notes the way our brain actually wants to.

Therefore don't take notes with a laptop is valid advice. It's not a tool made for taking on the fly notes and you'd have to be really really special at what you do to bend it to actually be useful in this scenario.

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#67

Post by logifail »

iliketosleep wrote: post #52
rcthompson wrote: post #32

Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. I've pretty much only ever taken notes with a laptop, but I always take notes in the "digest and summarize" style, never recording the speaker's words verbatim, and it's worked great for me. (It wasn't a conscious decision; it's just how I take notes.)

> Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. Yes, that's pretty much what it explains. The title "don't take notes with a laptop" is rather misleading. It's a well known fact that summarizing requires the learner's brain to actively process the information, as opposed to passively receiving informa…

> It wouldn't surprise me if summarizing on a laptop leads to better outcomes than using handwriting, as more cognitive resources would be available to process the information (rather than frantically writing)

Q: Why should "frantically writing" be worse than - say - frantically typing?

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#69

Post by stevesimmons »

iliketosleep wrote: post #52
rcthompson wrote: post #32

Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. I've pretty much only ever taken notes with a laptop, but I always take notes in the "digest and summarize" style, never recording the speaker's words verbatim, and it's worked great for me. (It wasn't a conscious decision; it's just how I take notes.)

> Sounds like the actual learning secret is "don't take verbatim notes", and the only relevance of the laptop is that it makes it much easier to take verbatim notes. Yes, that's pretty much what it explains. The title "don't take notes with a laptop" is rather misleading. It's a well known fact that summarizing requires the learner's brain to actively process the information, as opposed to passively receiving informa…

Your notion of cognitive resources is most likely very different from your brain's.

As I recall, all the evidence shows that handwriting rather than typing - even when using similar strategies - has better recall. When writing, you can more easily draw diagrams, do very quick sketches, add arrows and links back to other parts of the text, etc. In short, you have more ways of contexualizing the notes and representing them in a spatial way, giving your brain another 'hook' to help remember them.

Re: A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop (2014)

#70

Post by vezycash »

I took notes on my laptop using OneNote - far better than Microsoft Word.

I used color for headings. Added bullets and numbers even when it wasn't dictated that way. Added acronyms - mnemonics to the headings. Marked out filler content while writing or immediately after class. Summarized, rewrote important parts in my own words. Marked areas where I'd have to reproduce verbatim.

Finally, for exams, I read using my Nook eBook reader instead of the laptop because: The glossy screen is tiring. And there are many distractions on my laptop - browser, games, movies...

Finally, while reading, I actively set questions and answered them after reading. This question method's far better than re-reading multiple times.

With all these, five hours was all I needed for a semester's worth of work.

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