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).
I always allowed laptops in my lectures. I encouraged the kids to google things and challenge me when they thought me wrong. If i was unsure of a fact id have them look it up. That back-and-forth kept them engaged, and made my life much easier. If your lecture isnt more interesting than facebook you have to up your game.
I have such terrible attention problems that I have secretly recorded just about every class, meeting, and discussion in the last ten years. Legalities and ethics aside, afterward I'll listen and make detailed notes, then depending on the content, destroy or keep the audio. The legalities and ethics will always trouble me but without the audio I get very lost. The medium has never made a difference, nor the delivery method.
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'm of the same opinion. I realized in college that I can write or think about the material being presented, but I can't do them simultaneously. So, I stopped taking notes and relied much more on memory and text books. I'm still that way in the work world.
My major was math. It would have been significantly better for my learning if we spent class time solving problems rather than watching the professor write out a proof, which was often enough already in the text. Active learning is really critical for me.
I’m at university and often find myself ignoring the lecturer and reading through the slides in my own time, making my own notes. The only reason I show up is because the lecturers often give extra information they don’t put on the slides, so I always keep an ear open.
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'…
I went to college before laptops as well. Taking notes has two purposes. First to remember what was said in class, extras that are not in the book, and it's a good indicator of the exam questions. Second is processing what is said. Research has shown that writing down what you hear makes you better understand and remember what is said, then when you type it on your laptop. Even if you don't use the notes afterward, t…
lvoudour didn't seem to be arguing against the research so much as agreeing with cjsuk that the lecture model of teaching is ineffective for some population regardless of note-taking medium. The research shows that, of people who learn effectively in the lecture-style learning model, more of them learn better from taking notes on paper. But, there is a significant - I would never claim majority - population that doesn't learn well in lecture-style learning. For that population, they could use electronic device, paper/pen, clay tablet, or direct imprints to the brain and it wouldn't matter: they don't learn well from being lectured to.
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'm of the same opinion. I realized in college that I can write or think about the material being presented, but I can't do them simultaneously. So, I stopped taking notes and relied much more on memory and text books. I'm still that way in the work world. My major was math. It would have been significantly better for my learning if we spent class time solving problems rather than watching the professor write out a p…
We are similar and I studied math as well.
I solved this problem by just buying a friend coffee regularly in exchange for notes. She used to take fantastic notes and they were probably the reason I even excelled in a lot of classes. However, there was no substitute for being deeply engrossed in whatever the lecturer was saying. My only regret is not having figured this out sooner.
It's not the laptops that are the problem, it's the lectures. Check out flipped classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom - watch lectures/read a book/etc on your own time and attend problem solving with teachers / TAs available.
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…
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.