I question the value of taking notes at all. Of course different people learn in different ways, and I'm sure some students can benefit from taking notes. But for me the process of note taking is too distracting. Better to just focus on the lecturer and really listen . Then maybe write a few short notes afterwards for points not adequately covered in the assigned text.
Taking the notes help me learn. I'm also the forgetful type so I have trouble remembering the details of a lecture after the fact. Writing by hand is slow for me, though, so I found myself paying attention more to the note-taking than the lecture. Taking notes via laptop was a game changer for me. I could take voluminous notes and keep up with the lecturer. It was wonderful! Not all upside, of course, as laptops come…
The Cornell Note-Taking System
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Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#62Any tips for taking meeting notes specifically?
I use what I know as the the "Bill Gates method". Separate things into: * important points * questions to ask, either during the meeting or afterwards. If it gets answered during the meeting, I put the answer under 'important points' and cross out the question. * things for you to do after the meeting * any commitments others take on which you want to keep track of I do this by entering them on different areas of the…
If you don't have a dedicated assistant, set up a rotation with your team to scribe for each other.
Only jot down a few brief personal notes for yourself.
Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
GTD's a wonderful system for keeping track of things you should be doing, but I find his filing system for everything else to be a bit lacking. I've supplemented it with ideas from The Card Index System ¹, traditional library card catalogs, and Umberto Eco's recommendations in How to Write a Thesis . At the moment, my card index fills most of my center desk drawer. It may outgrow that soon, but I have no intention of…
Yes, I agree that GTD isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable. Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file system. I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and organization. Other books that have been highly influe…
This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.
Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is probably a value in taking notes after a lecture -- repetition and recall is a strong component in memory formation.
In my experience (on both sides of the lectern) there is even more value in taking a few before the lecture. With typical lecture structure, you get a little review tying in the last subject(s), a little bookkeeping/admin (next week we will...) and then a new topic or topics, followed by some synthesis. If you've had a quick look at the new topic already, you'll know where your understanding is good and where it isn'…
As you point out, asking questions is useful, and trying to answer them yourself first is even more so. One student classification researchers have identified is rule vs example learners. Rule based learners seek out rules to learn something, while example learners typically try to memorize examples. Rule based learners tend to do better in scholarly tasks / exams. However, example based learners can be taught to be more like rule based learners with a few hacks: prompt them to compare different examples, instead of reviewing one example at a time, inserting questions into the marginalia / chapter headers, etc.
Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trint[0] has a wonderful UI/UX for exactly this. I'm not sure if they're using the latest & greatest ML models, but even years ago I was pretty blown away. I still am. It's one of the most "right" products I've seen in this generation of web development. Someone realllllllly cared about the details of UX. Some of that only comes across when you actually use it - when you clean up the transcription immediately after t…
At $60 per user per month?
That doesn't mean I was willing to pay $60/mo/pp though, and ended up not.
However, I still think it's the best product in its category right now and given the disappointing state of product design these days, I don't expect anyone to catch up to its interface. I'd love if an open-source group did though.
Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's really useless to take notes on what is already written in 1000 other places with much more legibility and coherency. Sometimes I see people with tomes of notes that is basically a duplicate of the textbook, and I can't help wondering that this is just a holdover from the days before the printing press.
I write notes to solidify the idea in memory. Placing the idea in a real space helps me relate the ideas spatially. If I can remember one thing on a page, I can usually remember the rest of the page.
Re: The Cornell Note-Taking System
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Record everything, ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation. Plug text input into company search engine. Radical transparency by giving everybody access to this interface. Awesome bullshit filter.
> ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation Neat idea, do you know of any software that's capable of taking an audio file and producing multi-user text from it? Seems like it would be useful in a wide variety of situations.
If such a speech-to-text, multi conversation system existed then the field of court reporting/closed captioning would have a real shake up.