Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 235 posts

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

#71

Post by valine »

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…

Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.

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

#72

Post by cjsuk »

cholantesh wrote: post #65
cjsuk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard course (electrical engineering, laplace fun!), shit lecturer (complacent, dismissive of questions), skipped lecture (never although I probably should have just stuck my face in the course books).

Do Laplace Transforms get very difficult? I'm taking a course right now that teaches Differential and Integral Calculus, followed by Differential Equations and Laplace Transforms. Laplace Transforms have, so far, been the least challenging portion of the course.

If you get them crammed into one hour then yes. In your own time they are quite easy. I required a bit of tutor support if I'm honest but if you can get over the basic calculus hill you will be fine. There's a lot more material out there to support you than there was in the mid-1990s! No having to fight for the last copy of referenced text in the university library either.

I have literally never used anything I learned on that part of the course however.

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

#73

Post by 52-6F-62 »

Bartweiss wrote: post #63
sotojuan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I stopped taking notes after I realized I never looked at them. Even when studying for an exam, I'd always make new notes from scratch rather than rewrite or read old ones. It doesn't work for all classes, but I found that listening closely to the lecture and maybe writing down some main points and then reviewing or studying later worked for me.

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.

I think this is key. There are studies that point to handwriting notes helping with the learning process, even if you don't end up using them later. I always found this to be true for myself as well — whether I'm in a lecture or doing some study on my own. I don't often go back to them unless I need to refresh on a single point. If I write them, I don't need them as much. If I don't write them, I'm usually having to study and read more and return to the references.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

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

#74

Post by ontouchstart »

I am reading the book "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint (2012)" on the iPad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745202

and it seems that PowerPoint kind of "solved” the first half of interactive classroom information exchange: presentation (output). Note taking (with laptop or tablet) can be think of as the second half of the problem (input).

Perhaps we need to rethink the challenge of "realtime face-to-face group interactive information exchange" in a more integrated way and come up with more revolutionary solutions.

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

#75

Post by dkarl »

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…

In school, I never got anything out of looking at my notes, but I had much better retention when I took notes. Now I take a lot of notes and actually use them, because I take down tons of information that isn't very interesting and can't be learned by connecting it to a conceptual framework but which I will definitely need later.

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

#76

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

Bartweiss wrote: post #63
sotojuan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I stopped taking notes after I realized I never looked at them. Even when studying for an exam, I'd always make new notes from scratch rather than rewrite or read old ones. It doesn't work for all classes, but I found that listening closely to the lecture and maybe writing down some main points and then reviewing or studying later worked for me.

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.

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

#77

Post by ghaff »

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…

It's been a long time since I've sat in classrooms on a regular basis but I do attend a lot of conference events. For the most part, I find presentations that get into a lot of very detailed step by steps and the like cause me to zone out. I'm far more interested in learning enough to cause me to check out something later and to understand some of the motivations, thinking, etc. It's also a reason I think that conference presentations are generally longer than is optimal.

Having said that, people do differ. And with a smaller and more interactive group, getting into the nuts and volts can make a lot of sense. But it should IMO be done sparingly in more of a lecture format.

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

#78

Post by ghaff »

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'…

One option available today is writing on tablets. There are apps available that let you record and sync any notes you take to the recording. This lets you highlight a key point and then go back to the right spot in the recording. There have been various attempts to do this with special pens and paper but the tablet approach works pretty well.

It's not super-useful for me personally--I tend to default to a laptop for various reasons--but there have been times when I think note-taking like this would have been very useful.

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

#80

Post by criddell »

djtriptych wrote: post #70

I bought an iPad Pro 2 this september and it immediately replace my laptop for meetings. Light computing when I need it, but primarily a note-taking advice. Really great.

What software do you use on the iPad? I also have one but have things scattered between Nebo, GoodNotes, Apple Notes, Bear, Pages, and Evernote. I really need to pick the best app and focus everything there, but each one has different strengths.
Post reply on HN