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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)

#71

Post by sersi »

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.

I was going to say this, I used to take notes the first couple of years of university and eventually stopped when I noticed that I learned better when not taking notes. It was preventing me from concentrating on the content... (plus I don't write well enough that my notes were nice to reread)

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

#72

Post by johnchristopher »

linker3000 wrote: post #36

I'm 53 and work in IT for a 'funky' learning/media company, ranking among the seniors in both age and position. I have a customised Cornell Notes* Word doc template, and I run off batches of 5-10 sheets to take to meetings and training sessions. My colleagues typically turn up with their tablets, surfaces, laptops, phones and 'multitask', however a few have started to adopt my method - it's been particularly useful f…

Love the Cornell notes. Would you share your template ?

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

#73

Post by atoav »

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.)

It is also something else: if you take a paper note you have to actively archive it in some way at which point you might come into contact with it again. Searching for a old note on paper is like browsing backwards through the history of notes.

All of that would be entirely possible with a computer, but it would result in an inconvenient interface, where you can’t just search for a word or tag.

I have tried many ways to take notes but I’ve found myself always to come back to simple text/markdown files and paper based notebooks.

I manually type the relevant paper notes into the computer to make them searchable and link back to the notebook (e.g. like 2019/01 P.92) if I like to revisit the full note with drawings and all.

This means your notebook should get a name and a date and you should use notebooks with pagination..

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

#74

Post by rcthompson »

logifail wrote: post #67
iliketosleep wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's not, but most people (or at least, most people who grew up with computers) can type faster than they can write, so the operative comparison is between frantically writing and typing at a comfortable pace.

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

#75

Post by foota »

linker3000 wrote: post #36

I'm 53 and work in IT for a 'funky' learning/media company, ranking among the seniors in both age and position. I have a customised Cornell Notes* Word doc template, and I run off batches of 5-10 sheets to take to meetings and training sessions. My colleagues typically turn up with their tablets, surfaces, laptops, phones and 'multitask', however a few have started to adopt my method - it's been particularly useful f…

Man, I had a teacher in high school who forced us to take Cornell style notes for everything, it was so irritating at the time. Looks pretty neat now though!

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

#76

Post by patrick5415 »

acconrad wrote: post #3

What if I want to take notes but not contribute to deforestation and issues with the environmental impact of using paper in 2019?

Once produced, viewing a hard copy has zero environmental impact. Every time you open a pdf or or whatever your iPad saves your notes as, (let alone sync it with Dropbox) a coal plant groans a tiny bit and a penguin dies.

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

#77

Post by a3_nm »

I'm not sure that this study means that one should not take notes with a laptop (as the article's title would suggest). Everyone works differently: just because there is an average tendency for people to perform better when taking notes by hand, doesn't mean that you shouldn't use a laptop if your own experience shows that it works better for you.

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

#78

Post by logifail »

linker3000 wrote: post #61
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, consistent…

> Rewriting contemporary notes some time later adds [...] interpretation to the information..

Isn't this a fairly crucial part of "learning"?

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

#79

Post by acd »

But in the age of fast. Seems like going slow and putting more effort into hand writing notes pays off in learning. As a side note analogy if you drive via GPS you will not remember they way as easy if you drive without via analogue map.

How about if you take notes on laptop put that into spaced repetition software like Anki & Supermemo compared to hand written notes memory retention?

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

#80

Post by 2rsf »

linker3000 wrote: post #36

I'm 53 and work in IT for a 'funky' learning/media company, ranking among the seniors in both age and position. I have a customised Cornell Notes* Word doc template, and I run off batches of 5-10 sheets to take to meetings and training sessions. My colleagues typically turn up with their tablets, surfaces, laptops, phones and 'multitask', however a few have started to adopt my method - it's been particularly useful f…

> It's also very easy to drill down through Quarterly reviews and link chains of historic comments 'on the fly'

I have never heard about Cornell Notes, it seems like the missing piece I was looking for to convince myself to move back to pen and paper since I too feel that handwriting makes you remember and understand better.

But there are two things I am missing over OneNote

- Search capabilities, how do you drill down and find the one small items you don't exactly remember which category it belongs to ?

- Non language items like URLs, code snippets or command line parameters- in one note I simply copy paste them, how do you write them ?

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