(FYI -- article is from 2014 -- I was wondering why this was being studied again, when it seemed well established, both anecdotally and in literature).
Anytime I took notes by typing, I'd forget it seconds after finishing. But writing by hand forced me to think about what I was writing. The only thing that trumped that in cementing my understanding was actually having to explain what I learned to my classmates/peers.
I wonder how recall from writing compares to typing out flashcards (e.g. Anki) and then using spaced repetition techniques to memorize concepts.
The kinds of questions I ask when writing flashcards: How can I split this info up into different facts? What facts do I care about / will I care about?
But I think I wouldn't make flashcards for something if I understood it. I've found practicing recall with flashcards highlights what I don't understand. e.g. sometimes I've been confused between similar cards, and it's not obvious when looking at the cards the similarities/differences.
I think this complements rather than replaces things like the manually writing notes or explaining concepts.
I've done classes where I've typed out flashcard questions whenever the lecturer said something that I considered "testable." The system works okay. Forces you to pay attention. Unfortunately, it quickly devolves into spending the entire class copying and pasting between the digital slides and Anki (or sometimes I would use Workflowy as an intermediary). It feels like a chore.
Is the environmental cost to produce and run your electronic device over its lifetime less than the "cost" to use paper over that same amount of time? Honest question; I don't know the answer.
Study of one, here, but I find typing notes on my touch screen phone causes me to think a bit more about what I’m writing because I can’t go as fast. So I end up having to summarize to take notes. If I manage to flesh out the notes later, it’s not bad. The problem is when I try to take shortcuts by just taking photos or recording audio. You can do either of those things, but it won’t help the message sink in. Only thought and repeated usage/reference will cause it to eventually stick. Active research can help too, if timeboxed. I only learn passively when I can repeat something at least twice, like an audiobook.
What deforestation? At least in my country there's more forrest planted each year than cut out for all the purposes, including paper production. And given that, the rest of paper production process is pretty environment-friendly compared to producing a laptop.
I use a Rocketbook for taking notes, when I fill it up and all the pages are captures digitally (straight to the cloud provider of my choice per page), I just erase it with a do cloth and it's good as new. Pages are a bit like plastic, and you have to use their pens, but it feels like writing in a notebook and serves the purpose for me.
Where are you buying your paper? For example European paper is made from local wood, (re)planted in a sustainable way; also recyling. If you rely on extra cheap paper made from Brazilian wood that might be an argument. The stronger argument is that paper production is fairly energy and water-intensive.
That said, I would be highly skeptical that an ipad + pencil is more eco-friendly to produce than however much paper you use during its lifetime.
The people using paper probably also have the iPad, so it's probably whether the pencil used is more eco-friendly than the extra disposable plastic pens (which it might be)? Then you'd need to look at product lifetime, which is probably more limited by time-passed for Apple users and products than by actual hours of use??
I think these things are always more complex to analyse than it first appears.
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.
Paper is renewable. The rare earth metals in your devices are not. If you want to make this a political statement, you should instead research which paper companies are buying sustainable wood products, and buy from them.
My issue with this has always been that my longhand is terrible, and writing under pressure makes it worse.
Longhand notes (which I do frequently for the RPGs I run, so practice isnt the issue) are nigh unreadable. I literally have dozens of notebooks (not full, but at least 30 - 50 pages each is pretty common ) of notes I struggle to read and organize.
Being able to write with speed and br able to read them is why an elementary school teacher recommended that I try using a computer to write on back before laptops were a thing, and it remains a big reason I rely on them for work notes now.
Most skills are things that you can get better at.
I bought a nice fountain pen (well, a $14 pilot) and overhauled my cursive writing. It took about 6 weeks and I write pretty legibly in cursive. I'm more legible in various print scripts (that I have also worked on as an adult), but cursive is faster.
Admittedly, that is just an anecdote. But if you're curious, try and get better... you'll likely improve if you actively practice.
Have you tested? I recall - maybe a decade ago - seeing a study suggesting that in fact printing individual letters could be faster; I still write in cursive when I need to handwrite though (basically never).
I never liked pure cursive and do a mix, it's more of a print-sive where some letters are always print (F, J, G, Q, a couple others) and others are cursive depending on flow, speed, etc.
I have a bit more practice because I also sketchnote.
I suspect it more typically degrades. I always had poor handwriting scores but, over time, I wrote more and more for my personal consumption and speed became more important than style. Arguably shorthand would be more useful for people in general than impeccable Palmer script.
Don't know if this is just me, but just short hand the entire lecture - it keeps your brain in check that you are understanding each word. Even if it doesn't read back you'll retain a lot more than just passive listening.
I got frustrated that I enjoyed writing on nice paper with nice pens, and yet I could type much faster than I could write. So about 4 years ago I started learning shorthand. I use shorthand plus icons as needed to pull out important concepts. It's really helpful. Most of the time very little transcription is needed.
How did you learn. Where should someone start? I think now is the perfect time to learn shorthand since we have abandon hand writing completely due to overusing computer, mobile etc
Yes, it at least partly depends on the reason you are taking notes. If it's purely to use for studying that's one thing. But if it's for writing a story, a trip report, or for otherwise sharing, there are a lot of reasons to have more of a verbatim record.
Ideally, I suppose I'd have an accurate transcript and I could just take time-stamped notes that could key to that transcript but that's not the reality. (I know I can record audio but, in practice, going back to audio after the fact is just too much work for most purposes.)
I frequently still use notepads for notes, I find it actually helps me retain information.
Additionally, when reviewing shortly after a meeting, I find that I can better suss out the truly important action items. Especially if things need to be delegated.
This isn’t to say I never take notes on my computer.
(Notepad++ is wonderful for this), but I find the physical note taking to be incredibly beneficial for organization of information.
Additionally, there may still be a certain social impact where people feel that you’re “paying attention” when taking notes on a physical pad, vs they feel they’ve “lost your attention” the second you start to type away on a device.
I use Sublime Text for not taking when not doing it longhand, and I really like it. I think it's because it's an environment we're intimately familiar with, so there is nothing to get in the way of just capturing the information you want to capture.
I like notepad++ because it’s light, there’s no formatting or similar that happens if I hit 1. Space or 2. Space
Or I use a.
Additionally, I like that I can hit new and have quick new tabs of notes (instead of new windows ) and that when I close it it gracefully saves them as “new” rather then promoting me to have to save them. (Of course I have the option to save them, but it doesn’t have a prompt like word and defaults to making sure they’re saved somewhere ).
> Additionally, there may still be a certain social impact where people feel that you’re “paying attention” when taking notes on a physical pad, vs they feel they’ve “lost your attention” the second you start to type away on a device.
Never mind what people feel - I care more about the fact that I do actually start to lose attention when I'm working on a laptop! (And I don't even need Internet for that, there's enough other things to distract me.)
I've never been fond of note taking in general, I found that I retain the most knowledge when actually trying to make an effort to listen, and actively trying to conceptualize everything mentally while the teacher is talking, instead of occupying myself with writing notes.
I'm the same way and when I was in college, I just took the notes off of one of my classmates and just uses a copy machine. I never did find them particularly useful though and have found seeking the same information from different sources, i.e. manuals, books or online, to be of a far greater impact.
I _never_ understood this argument that "note taking helps you remember" since I never felt this was the case for me. I may just be lazy, or it might be the fact that I have a horrendously hideous handwriting.
I’m the same, this was before professors posting lectures were a thing. I still graduated at the top of my class in CS, there are many people out there who get by well without note taking, or even attending lectures very much (just go by the syllabus and self study).
Also, as a lefty, note taking is a bit more challenging (even when I could snag the proper desk) and I probably just compensated in other ways.
Same here. It was really stressful trying to write everything down, to the point where I couldn't really focus on making sense of what was said.
Most good profs had a script with the important knowledge in it. Or at least printed out a miniature view of the powerpoint, to take notes next to each slide.
In person, taking notes on paper always works better for me. And when I’m on the computer (Zoom conference or Skype), notes on the computer feels more natural.
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 for it.
This article aligns with most of why I thought note taking was good. It definitely has a mechanical nature that typing just doesn't match. Also you don't want notes that are just transcription, you want your own thoughts recorded on the page. Something I think they missed though was diagrams. Typing may result in a perfect transcription, but most lectures contain a visual component. Being able to quickly copy a graph or diagram is extremely useful. When taking notes via typing, there is no good way to do that without a touch screen and some skill. I'm much more likely to remember a diagram I drew than one I looked at.
I love how they gloss over the internet connectivity portion, but I also find that to be a huge component in reality. Sometimes I need to "space off" for a few seconds to digest an idea. When taking paper notes, I end up doodling boxes or lines. When typing, I inevitably get distracted by some shiny thing designed to steal my attention.
I do note in the workplace who brings paper and who brings a laptop to a meeting. Sometimes you need a laptop to present or look up information. But if you are solely there to listen, people who bring paper pay the most attention.
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.
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)
> Why can’t you just take a picture of the diagram?
Because the learning effect is zero. (Also, not every professor allows it, and you don't always sit in a location from which you can take a decent picture. But that's beside the point.)
The best teacher I ever had in school never got tired of reminding us that we learn in four different ways: hearing, writing, speaking, drawing. Taken individually, hearing is the worst, drawing the best. The more you combine, the better your rate of recall will be.
Drawing is fantastic because it engages your kinesthetic learning, your spatial learning, and your analytical learning (because you really have to look at a picture in detail before you can copy it).
I personally learn the best from listening intently to what the lecturer is saying. That is why in college I would always sit at the front with an audio recorder, and then listen to that until I memorized most of the content.
- Screen protector that gives a significant amount of friction to the screen so that it feels closer to paper. [1]
- Goodnotes 5 or Notability (I use both--depends on the circumstances). [2]
- A rule: iPad is solely a reading/studying/note-taking device. No keyboard, no social media apps.
- Bonus: Twelve South BookBook case.
[1] ClearView Paper-Like Screen Protecter for Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2015/2017) [Made in Japan]
[2] I generally prefer GoodNotes over Notability, however, Notability has side-by-side notes and recording. These features are supposedly in the pipeline for GoodNotes, but have yet to materialize. GoodNotes handles large PDFs better (Notability crashes). They both have passable desktop clients for quick cmd+F searching of handwritten notes.
I'm definitely open for suggestions on the note taking software front. OneNote is sometimes pain to use, but Microsoft have designed it to work relatively seamlessly with the Surface line so it's what I defaulted to. I'll give those a try.
Personally, I'm far too undisciplined to enforce such rules on a tablet, so I got a Remarkable instead.
Essentially an e-ink reader with handwriting capabilities.
I've wanted something like the Remarkable for years, but the cost is still way too high. The rocketbook has been a decent interim solution, but there is always the issue that I can't re-load and modify old 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. 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 information and copying. 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).
> 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.
I've never taken notes on a laptop. For those who do, are you typing every single word that the speaker says?
I've taken notes on paper during many, many talks. I don't write down every word that's spoken.
Isn't the cognitive load likely due to to deciding what content to record, not due to controlling the brain-hand-pencil-paper interface / brain-hands-keyboard interface (as it were)?
I take notes on a
laptop for school and what I have learned is it
is very valuable to reorganize notes after readings or lectures. My goal is always to make a document that I can review later that is structured. Restructuring online without rewriting entire pages is pretty efficient. Also, with some discipline you can tag sections and grep them later.
A disadvantage over writing is not having multiple columns if you are using plain text. Tools like onenote solve this, but I find it too distracting to use in general.
The article is saying that typing the speaker's words verbatim is exactly what most people do when taking notes on a laptop, even when they are explicitly warned that it's a bad idea, whereas it's generally not possible to do so when writing notes, without some kind of shorthand.
In any case, that's not the point: regardless of what text you decide to record in your notes, it's faster to do so by typing it than writing it for most people. That means that if you switch from writing to typing your notes but continue taking notes in the same style, you should in theory have more time to figure out what to write without falling behind the speaker or needing to rush your typing.
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.
> Your notion of cognitive resources is most likely very different from your brain's.
In this context, I disagree. If the act of writing is using most of my attention, I will miss large amounts of what is being said.
> As I recall, all the evidence shows that handwriting rather than typing - even when using similar strategies - has better recall.
I believe this is a highly nuanced issue and it's hard to make blanket statements. For example, I can't see how it would apply to people with various degrees of dyslexia - which could be up to 20% of the population. Having said that, I'd be interested to see evidence that proves otherwise.
I think “frantically writing” is the wrong way of looking at it. It implies the mental systems that control the complex process of handwriting could easily be reapplied to ‘listening and comprehending’ if only they could be freed from their task. This seems unlikely to me, having read a few studies demonstrating that doodling can improve focus, especially in people diagnosed with ADHD – it seems like our dexterity control systems can actually be a source of frustration and distraction if they’re not given something to do. In my own anecdata, engaging my hands in writing the actual information I’m trying to learn works even better than doodling. I see it as rallying the different parts of my brain to work together to maximise focus and cognition on one target, while doodling is more like giving a kid a toy to shut them up. I might be reaching though.
You make some valid points, and physically writing may indeed be helpful to particular cohorts. But for people like myself, who are slow writers and poor multitaskers, the act of physically writing takes attention away from the act of listening, meaning that I miss a lot of information. The core issue is that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, which is why there is no such thing as "one size fits all" when it comes to learning.
Learning is very much a multi-sensory process. The act of writing is part of the learning - the two-dimensional shapes your fingers trace actually help cement the memory in your brain. (And no, simply clacking away on the keyboard is not the same.) As these authors [1] say: "the additional context provided by the complex task of writing results in better memory."
The study you've referenced is invalid for this particular discussion (but it's an interesting read and thank you for posting it). The study is focused on memorizing words, with this limitation being clearly stated in the study: "Future research is necessary to investigate the effect typing has on remember more complex stimuli, for example, phrases rather than just words."
It's also notable that the participants are 72% percent female (females as a population are better at writing than males [1]), and that 72% of participants admit that they prefer pen and paper.
Having said that, I agree with the study in that the kinesthetic aspect of writing will generally lead to better retention of words - I believe this is well established.
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..
I suppose in this day and age, with OCR being as good as it is, you could take a picture with your phone, and be able to search on text in the picture.
Now I think about it, I seem to recall Evernote doing something like that a while back. Mind you, I don't know how easy it is to get the meta-data back out.
It's not just the verbatim aspect, part of the issue actually is the distinction between laptop and paper. When you hand write notes, another piece of information you store in your mind is where on the page you wrote it, and what it looks like. Then, when you need to recall, you can often remember where it was on the page and generally what it looked like there, and that can help remember the actual content.
Why would those factors be any different when taking notes on a laptop? It is still on the screen/document somewhere, and it still looks like something.
The problem is that word processors and word wrap make it too easy to move text, destroying the absolute and sometimes even relative position.
Much of human memory evolved to remember locations, and almost all of the top memory competitors use locality association ("Memory Palace"/loci) as their primary method.
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 take notes without the information passing through their brains. Other people swear they have to take notes to focus.
There are exceptions of course, for example if the information is new and any other available material is worthless.
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.
Same here. I wonder if it's the courses we took. I did Mathematics and Computer Science. The only time I took notes it was a disaster. My notes were perfect, my recollection awful. I had to reread them to get any value.
The rest of the time I just sat in class and paid close attention, rarely noting down to look up some lemma or the other. Way better results. Instant recollection. I can still remember the Nullstellensatz vaguely and the room in which I first encountered it and where I was in it and that's almost a decade ago.
I actually fall into a third bucket, at least when it came to math courses: I'd attempt to work ahead of the instructor during the lecture, instead of just writing notes or just listening.
Because of the way well-done math courses are structured, with topics building on each other, I was able to do this about half the time. Most importantly, any mistakes I made would be almost immediately corrected, so I never learned the material wrong, like if I'd waited until the homework.
Right. That’s Mathematics/CS in general, right? The lecture is usually driven by the students progressing the proof. That’s bucket one, I think. I know most of us used scratch work but it wasn’t notes. It’s more like swap space than general disk. I rarely looked at scratch space again, though I preemptively held all those books with me.
As another data point, I take notes almost almost solely for increased recollection, I've never really studied them. The physical act of writing down a phrase or idea emphasizes it in my memory to such a noticeable degree that if I lack writing utensils I will mime the action; the physical notes themselves are rarely useful once made. I find this also works in settings that are not live, I am able to work through textbooks significantly faster if I take notes while reading in a similar fashion to a lecture.
I get regular remarks from people who don't know me asking why I'm throwing away the page of notes I wrote down in a meeting - it's because I'll never look at them again. But now the important parts of that meeting will be crystal clear in my head for the next couple months instead of the next couple days.
Maybe you would do even better just imagining writing it down on paper or actively building mental representations.
But if it works well enough, why not? The act of writing notes may involve mental processing or not. If it's just a matter of concentration and focus, there might be better remedies.
Imagining writing it down would keep me from actively building mental representations in most situations :)
The writing is semi-automatic and does not merely involve verbatim quotes from others. If today I were to attend a lecture or talk and something the speaker said prompted some visual insight I would immediately draw it as part of my note-taking process. The whole reason I began taking such copious notes, in fact, was the realization that if I didn't write these things down I often needed to have an insight two to three times for it to become a permanent part of my mental model of a problem space, rather than the once.
No matter how good your mental discipline, it won't be as consistently good as writing down the notes. This is just another variation of point-and-call [0].
> The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous.
Agree. I remember that I had one course that the prof couldn't really explain nicely and it seemed really hard. Then while preparing for the exam I actually read the book, and everything made sense and was quite easy.
I wish lectures weren't really a thing in their current format. Why just reiterate what is already available in text and video? Have students consume the theoretical material beforehand and schedule Q&A's or practical application sessions or anything else where the interaction between lecturer and student may become something more dynamic.
That’s a great point. I could see professors iteratively updating source material based on QA. Wasting less and less time students time each semester. Compiling, refining and polishing whatever it is they had to say.
Making students sit for hours in lectures still seems the most practical and efficient way to ensure they spend enough of their time learning something.
Expecting them to prepare the theory beforehand has not proven to be that practical. Lecturers who try this quickly learn to adjust their expectations downward, in my experience. And even then a lot of the "class" will be quite underprepared.
> Making students sit for hours in lectures still seems the most practical and efficient way to ensure they spend enough of their time learning something.
I don't believe the onus is on the educational institute to ensure that students learn anything when it comes to higher education.
The student is paying tuition or taking a student loan to be there, I think it should be reasonable to expect them to exercise their own responsibility and learn the source-material.
The fact that they do not might be indicative that they should be studying something else, and catering to them only exascerbates the issue rather than leading to a Darwinian solution.
>In lectures, note-taking at all should be avoided, most of the time.
That's a very strong statement that I guess is based on your own personal experience?
If I can provide my own subjective opinion and educated guess, I do agree that taking notes verbatim feels close to pointless. You need to take in what you're hearing and grok it before you jot down your summary. Then you can go revisit your notes later to practice, or even better try to recall without looking at them first, and then check to corroborate.
>The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous.
I don't think anyone has suggested this to be the case. Even though it doesn't work that way for you, the point of note-taking even when the information is available from other materials is to facilitate retention and understanding, not to produce superior source material. I do believe it is effective for this purpose, for most people.
All through my education, I never really bothered to listen to teachers and lecturers and basically never took notes. I just read course literature and tried to grok the main concepts, and it worked wonders for getting me through tests and exams. Longer term retention of what I learned was atrocious though. Now as an adult I take notes and study in a much more disciplined way, and it's so much more effective long term that it leaves me with a sense of regret that I didn't know or realize all this as a kid.
My strong statement is first of all based on the specific act of note taking in the specific situation of lectures for the specific goal of learning.
You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.
The idea is that engaging with the material (i.e. breaking it down, summarizing it and putting it on paper) helps with retention compared to just taking it in and trying to understand it in your head. I can tell you don't believe in that, but that's what the argument is.
>You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.
I honestly can't see how you get this from my comment.
Note taking massively helps me on both remembering and the level of attention I pay to the lecture itself. Without notes, my attention drifts and I might as well just be passively watching TV.
Like Hermitian909, I don't particularly care about the notes afterwards. They're sometimes handy for skimming over when prepping for an exam or reworking through an example of a half-understood concept, but for the most part I don't use them.
This is why as an undergraduate, I rarely went to a course's lectures, I just read the readings and then came in for the exam. In many fields, lecturers at the undergraduate level are capable of giving you no more information than you could find in the standard textbooks and handbooks.
I tend to agree in general. I found that actively listening and paying attention to a lecturer and maybe taking a few sparse notes on some key points or things emphasized by the speaker worked fine. I advised my kids as they went off to college that showing up and paying attention were the most important things they could do.
I think it really depends on the teacher. My abstract algebra teacher, for example, expected us to copy the blackboard every class and our notes to be our primary text.
Some people are very good at organizing and reading & working on the material before the lecture. This seems ideal, though I'd never been able to do that.
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 for client meetings where I have been able to later confirm sub-points or asides mentioned by customers - sometimes months later. It's also very easy to drill down through Quarterly reviews and link chains of historic comments 'on the fly' - for example, being able to confirm that so-and-so first mentioned something about a similar technical issue on a different system 12 months ago.
My 'Cornell' style has developed an element of mindmapping on the pages, which makes it easy to track conversations or sections of meetings that break off into side discussions/brainstorming.
The biggest benefit is that the structure of all notes is consistent, so not only can I find things very quickly, but others can interpret them too - this is a particularly powerful way to allow teams to share, compare and understand someone else's notes, even months after the meeting or training took place.
Edit: I also believe it looks very professional in customer meetings when everyone from the same business is taking notes in a similar way, using identical stationery.
I've been working this way since the mid 1990s and find it beats all forms of tech.
The top of the page has headings for: meeting subject, date, room/location (can help jog memory), attendees, 'page x of y' and a 'confidential' tick box so I can keep corporate strategy or personnel discussions separate and secure.
The bottom section is marked 'Notes / Actions' where I highlight things that need follow-up (by me or others) - this is far better that having, say, 12 pages of notes from a 3 hr meeting with a few bits of underlined, ringed or asterisked text somewhere therein. Later I can visually scan the bottom of each page and quickly see all meeting actions - and I will have drawn a manual tick box by all mine so I can mark them off when completed.
Started a new school again after 12 years and recently learned about this. Just picked it up along with some bullet journalling techniques and so far it's been great.
Yes, but in the UK they are stupidly expensive - I thought about buying Cornell notebooks for the team (or having company ones made up), but soon changed my mind.
Did you have a look at the big online printers in the EU area?
I would throw Flyeralarm in the ring (not connected to them), looks like you can get a Wire-O notebook with 50 pages, and cover artwork as you like, for around 3 Euro (at 50 pieces) with prices dropping from there on.
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!
> 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 ?
The left column is the notes/subject/item/named person index. If a 3 hr meeting has 12 pages (double sided), I can probably pick up the notes and check all columns in about 10 seconds.
If a URL is mentioned, it's likely either because someone knows it (make a note to ask them for it), it's in their notes (ask for them), or it's been put on a whiteboard (take a photo if needed). Ditto for code, if it's that kind of meeting (and, yes, I do have those kinds of meetings).
For search capability you could try the method shown here: http://www.highfivehq.com. Basically you mark the edge of a page in the spot that corresponds to an index. You can then find items form a certain category by looking at the edge of the notebook. It's an interesting concept if you don't need a ton of granularity in your ability to search.
I'm also in my 50s, and have been carrying A4 hardback notebooks around since 80s or 90s, that I use similarly. I add a margin, leave 5 pages at the front for indexing, and I've adopted a few highlighting habits to cross reference and link for easy reference later.
It's my definitive memory, and has been worth it to answer the months later questions of why we did or didn't include some feature, or designed something as we did. It's also where I think by pencil, so there's lots of plans, hierarchies, thoughts too. Those rough scribbles go at the back.
The few times I've tried to improve on this either by tech or organisers like filofax etc, it's quickly proved much worse or slower. The old Psion 5 got closest! Simply happy to stay old world now. It works, it's quick, and never needs charging.
Yep, I think it's good to note that like me you have tried tech options, but not found them to bring anything useful to the party.
It's too easy to look at us old farts and draw the conclusion that we're just too stuck in our ways and unable to cope with this new-fangled stuff, but I've spent periods (maybe perhaps a few months at a time) taking notes in other ways to see if I can 'evolve' - off the top of my head I've tried: Mind mapping meetings (on paper and electronically), netbooks (I still have a Samsung NC10 running Mint which is great as a portable terminal when a physical keyboard is a 'must' and the company HP laptop or home T420 is just too bulky for the situation), tablets and phones with styluses. (I used to have a Note 1 phone and still use a Galaxy Note 10.1 daily for research at home).
Yeah, it hasn't been for lack of trying. Laptop I thought too intrusive, though the earliest versions (before the weather widgets and web additions) of Google Desktop search showed lots of promise for retrieval, the note taking itself just took me too much out of the discussion, and too much into faffing about with a laptop. iPad is brilliant for home surfing but useless as meeting tablet. Maybe smart paper and AI indexing one day...
Then there's the software. Evernote was something a previous boss swore by - until some change he really couldn't get on with forced him to migrate, with much muttering, everything to something else. Evernote, wikis and most of the rest are best if you do proper categorisation of notes and indexing. Indexing always feels must be a second pass after, as categories and choices from before never quite do it. So it's always ended up slower than simply writing in an index at the front at the end of the day or week.
Six months later I often don't know quite what I'm searching, haven't a clue of keywords needed, but it's more archaeological, going back through layers of time, then re-following choices and paths. Grab a handful of pages that is about six months... Skim, find the follow-up. Oh, yeah this, that, who and why. Job done.
I would be even more impressed if you then circulated proper meeting minutes, with all the Action points properly recorded, document named and version controlled etc
I think a lot of people whose roles are client facing would benefit from this even though 90% of them would have no idea of what properly run meetings look like.
Capturing into a shared Onenote book using a phone camera would be a simple task and could be a good repository for notes of this type. The notes would be automatically dated
and with OCR, searchable.
I'm trying to get into the habit of writing messy mindmaps, then redrawing those as a process to understanding the material. One single glance at a Mindmap a week later and I reactivate the concepts and understanding. Especially important for building internal context (how the components relate to each other)
Yeah I have one of those too. They recently added sync (through your phone) to dropbox/evernote, which makes it even more useful. It's a great device - zero distraction digital notetaking.
According to one of their support agents, their sales numbers were low. Personally I think their marketing sucked - they seemed to be targeting kids rather than students/business users. Their styling reflected this identity crisis too.
They have a product coming later in the year which will "address some of the same needs", TBD though how thoroughly it'll be a fill-in for it. In the meantime I bought a protective folio case for mine and am babying it.
Just picked up a "livescribe" echo from eBay for $30. I don't do well with notes on a computer or tablet but I like the idea of digitizing them and recording a meeting at the same time; and pin point play back. We'll see how it goes.
From my experience, I found that the Livescribe and their ilk depend on a razor/cartridge model. The pen itself might be cheap(the razor) but the refills/special paper (the cartridges) are ridiculously expensive. Any particular reason/hack you found to circumvent the prices?
Going against what seems to be the prevailing thought in this thread. Here's why and how I take notes primarily on a laptop.
When the lecture, presentation or meeting starts a have a macro that creates a new Evernote note prepended with the date and starts recording into QuickTime. Throughout the exchange, I am typing up quick and dirty first draft notes using a macro to screenshot the portion of the QuickTime window displaying the time elapsed. I also employ symbols/emojis to flag points in the notes that are important‼️, should be returned to and reviewed later , are confusing, raise a question ect...
Whenever there is downtime (e.g. interruption or lull in the presentation) I work my way back and start improving the notes: Organizing them into a hierarchy with headings, indentation and boldation. Also, I Hyperlink useful, relevant or referenced URLs.
At the bottom of the document I have a separated section called TAKEAWAY containing a bulleted list of questions to ask, things to follow up on, and key points. I can always ⌘↓ > ↩ to add an item line to this section.
At the end of the exchange, I check my TAKEWAY section and clarify any questions. I stop recording and add the audio file to the top of the document. This leaves me with a reference document I can revisit, clean up, and reference later.
The process of making the note visually appealing and easy to read by cleaning up, formatting, and adding hyperlinks accomplishes a lot of the internalization handwriting does because it forces you to try to convey the kernel of the information being consumed in as well few formatted, organized words as possible.
Furthermore, I'm the type that really values immediately looking up unfamiliar referenced concepts/ideas so I don't misunderstand what/why something is said. As for diagrams, they can usually be incorporated by adding slides of the presentation, taking a picture of the whiteboard at the end, or just googling whatever the diagram was.
With the wonderful world of macros and automation I can change color, size, formatting, add lists; add hyperlinks, multi-media images, timestamps ect... and keep everything in an easy to read, search and share document.
Most importantly my handwriting is bogus. I really couldn't do it any other way.
Nice workflow, and goes back to this comment somewhat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20271383 However, I'm not sure about the legality of recording audio without informing everyone in the room. In my country that would be illegal as some people have protected identities.
I think I understand your concern about the [local] legality of “recording audio”... if everybody would cease bringing (or otherwise sufficiently disable) _recording devices_ to/in public spaces.
I don’t think the average person understands > cares > is negatively impacted by that concern.
I suppose it's a lot like jay walking. Some people will care enough to observe the law and others will not. In reality, the problem only arises if you record something (say a lecture) and share it publicly and it exposes an individual whose identity is otherwise protected.
My experience has been, as someone that observes the law, I've been denied the opportunity to audio-record a lecture. In this instance, the person in question did not object but the professor did - stating that there was an individual that could be affected. Granted, it doesn't really make a difference if I use it for my own personal use but since everything is hosted in the cloud these days...
I used a Wacom Bamboo Spark[1] during my Post-grad and am really impressed by it. You write on regular paper using a special pen (ball pen) and the notes get synced to their app called Inkspace. Your own hand-writing , regular paper. No dependency on Livescribe refills or special papers.
FWIW, I explored iPad + Pencil but it was too costly for my needs in 2017.
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.
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.
another learning secret: take courses where the teacher gives you printed notes of the content he will present, and write down the occasional comment/clarification during class.
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!
Sure, write up stuff that supports your referral back to the original notes, or makes corrections and additions - but don't get rid of the original notes or replace them with interpreted copies.
The original article was talking about students learning in lectures. One might presume that the learning process ends with students being tested in a situation where they have no notes of any kind?
If that's true, then there's no point holding on to "the originals", because on the day of the test/exam/whatever, you won't have access to them anyway.
In essence, transferring knowledge from the original lecture via the written notes to ones memory?
I've heard students about using 1 shared google doc where the "multiplay" with their notes, so that they all chip in and even elaborate on certain questions.
ahh that's cool. I've done similar things at Meetup organizer meetings where everyone chips in to add what the feel is important to the "minutes". like a static record of what each person felt the others should remember takeway
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".
I honestly never believed that digital devices are good to take notes, especially if you have to reflect them. Digital devices distract you on so many levels, it is hard to believe people even started doing it.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadAnytime I took notes by typing, I'd forget it seconds after finishing. But writing by hand forced me to think about what I was writing. The only thing that trumped that in cementing my understanding was actually having to explain what I learned to my classmates/peers.
I wonder how recall from writing compares to typing out flashcards (e.g. Anki) and then using spaced repetition techniques to memorize concepts.
But I think I wouldn't make flashcards for something if I understood it. I've found practicing recall with flashcards highlights what I don't understand. e.g. sometimes I've been confused between similar cards, and it's not obvious when looking at the cards the similarities/differences.
I think this complements rather than replaces things like the manually writing notes or explaining concepts.
isn't that what well typed/formatted notes should. unless your explanation always involve a bunch of bak-and-forth?
But I guess you could get a used iPad with the Apple Pencil or something similar.
That said, I would be highly skeptical that an ipad + pencil is more eco-friendly to produce than however much paper you use during its lifetime.
The people using paper probably also have the iPad, so it's probably whether the pencil used is more eco-friendly than the extra disposable plastic pens (which it might be)? Then you'd need to look at product lifetime, which is probably more limited by time-passed for Apple users and products than by actual hours of use??
I think these things are always more complex to analyse than it first appears.
Longhand notes (which I do frequently for the RPGs I run, so practice isnt the issue) are nigh unreadable. I literally have dozens of notebooks (not full, but at least 30 - 50 pages each is pretty common ) of notes I struggle to read and organize.
Being able to write with speed and br able to read them is why an elementary school teacher recommended that I try using a computer to write on back before laptops were a thing, and it remains a big reason I rely on them for work notes now.
I bought a nice fountain pen (well, a $14 pilot) and overhauled my cursive writing. It took about 6 weeks and I write pretty legibly in cursive. I'm more legible in various print scripts (that I have also worked on as an adult), but cursive is faster.
Admittedly, that is just an anecdote. But if you're curious, try and get better... you'll likely improve if you actively practice.
Have you tested? I recall - maybe a decade ago - seeing a study suggesting that in fact printing individual letters could be faster; I still write in cursive when I need to handwrite though (basically never).
Edit: http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/cursive-handwriting-and-o... is a good summary; first 2 paras of last section are the TL;DR.
I never liked pure cursive and do a mix, it's more of a print-sive where some letters are always print (F, J, G, Q, a couple others) and others are cursive depending on flow, speed, etc.
I have a bit more practice because I also sketchnote.
Ideally, I suppose I'd have an accurate transcript and I could just take time-stamped notes that could key to that transcript but that's not the reality. (I know I can record audio but, in practice, going back to audio after the fact is just too much work for most purposes.)
Additionally, when reviewing shortly after a meeting, I find that I can better suss out the truly important action items. Especially if things need to be delegated.
This isn’t to say I never take notes on my computer. (Notepad++ is wonderful for this), but I find the physical note taking to be incredibly beneficial for organization of information.
Additionally, there may still be a certain social impact where people feel that you’re “paying attention” when taking notes on a physical pad, vs they feel they’ve “lost your attention” the second you start to type away on a device.
Additionally, I like that I can hit new and have quick new tabs of notes (instead of new windows ) and that when I close it it gracefully saves them as “new” rather then promoting me to have to save them. (Of course I have the option to save them, but it doesn’t have a prompt like word and defaults to making sure they’re saved somewhere ).
Never mind what people feel - I care more about the fact that I do actually start to lose attention when I'm working on a laptop! (And I don't even need Internet for that, there's enough other things to distract me.)
I _never_ understood this argument that "note taking helps you remember" since I never felt this was the case for me. I may just be lazy, or it might be the fact that I have a horrendously hideous handwriting.
Also, as a lefty, note taking is a bit more challenging (even when I could snag the proper desk) and I probably just compensated in other ways.
Most good profs had a script with the important knowledge in it. Or at least printed out a miniature view of the powerpoint, to take notes next to each slide.
This article aligns with most of why I thought note taking was good. It definitely has a mechanical nature that typing just doesn't match. Also you don't want notes that are just transcription, you want your own thoughts recorded on the page. Something I think they missed though was diagrams. Typing may result in a perfect transcription, but most lectures contain a visual component. Being able to quickly copy a graph or diagram is extremely useful. When taking notes via typing, there is no good way to do that without a touch screen and some skill. I'm much more likely to remember a diagram I drew than one I looked at.
I love how they gloss over the internet connectivity portion, but I also find that to be a huge component in reality. Sometimes I need to "space off" for a few seconds to digest an idea. When taking paper notes, I end up doodling boxes or lines. When typing, I inevitably get distracted by some shiny thing designed to steal my attention.
I do note in the workplace who brings paper and who brings a laptop to a meeting. Sometimes you need a laptop to present or look up information. But if you are solely there to listen, people who bring paper pay the most attention.
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.
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...
Because the learning effect is zero. (Also, not every professor allows it, and you don't always sit in a location from which you can take a decent picture. But that's beside the point.)
The best teacher I ever had in school never got tired of reminding us that we learn in four different ways: hearing, writing, speaking, drawing. Taken individually, hearing is the worst, drawing the best. The more you combine, the better your rate of recall will be.
Drawing is fantastic because it engages your kinesthetic learning, your spatial learning, and your analytical learning (because you really have to look at a picture in detail before you can copy it).
I personally learn the best from listening intently to what the lecturer is saying. That is why in college I would always sit at the front with an audio recorder, and then listen to that until I memorized most of the content.
- iPad Pro with (Gen 1 :sadface:) Apple Pencil.
- Screen protector that gives a significant amount of friction to the screen so that it feels closer to paper. [1]
- Goodnotes 5 or Notability (I use both--depends on the circumstances). [2]
- A rule: iPad is solely a reading/studying/note-taking device. No keyboard, no social media apps.
- Bonus: Twelve South BookBook case.
[1] ClearView Paper-Like Screen Protecter for Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2015/2017) [Made in Japan]
[2] I generally prefer GoodNotes over Notability, however, Notability has side-by-side notes and recording. These features are supposedly in the pipeline for GoodNotes, but have yet to materialize. GoodNotes handles large PDFs better (Notability crashes). They both have passable desktop clients for quick cmd+F searching of handwritten notes.
- Surface Go using stylus.
- OneNote for note taking
- ColdTurkey app (completely locks you out of blacklisted apps for a set amount of time [I've tried to crack it - I couldn't])
>iPad
>Apple
>iPad
Still in college? DId your parents buy you, your computers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The #2 pencil is so much better, I almost wished they would have skipped v.1...
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 information and copying. 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?
I've taken notes on paper during many, many talks. I don't write down every word that's spoken.
Isn't the cognitive load likely due to to deciding what content to record, not due to controlling the brain-hand-pencil-paper interface / brain-hands-keyboard interface (as it were)?
A disadvantage over writing is not having multiple columns if you are using plain text. Tools like onenote solve this, but I find it too distracting to use in general.
In any case, that's not the point: regardless of what text you decide to record in your notes, it's faster to do so by typing it than writing it for most people. That means that if you switch from writing to typing your notes but continue taking notes in the same style, you should in theory have more time to figure out what to write without falling behind the speaker or needing to rush your typing.
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.
In this context, I disagree. If the act of writing is using most of my attention, I will miss large amounts of what is being said.
> As I recall, all the evidence shows that handwriting rather than typing - even when using similar strategies - has better recall.
I believe this is a highly nuanced issue and it's hard to make blanket statements. For example, I can't see how it would apply to people with various degrees of dyslexia - which could be up to 20% of the population. Having said that, I'd be interested to see evidence that proves otherwise.
Learning is very much a multi-sensory process. The act of writing is part of the learning - the two-dimensional shapes your fingers trace actually help cement the memory in your brain. (And no, simply clacking away on the keyboard is not the same.) As these authors [1] say: "the additional context provided by the complex task of writing results in better memory."
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/154193120905302...
It's also notable that the participants are 72% percent female (females as a population are better at writing than males [1]), and that 72% of participants admit that they prefer pen and paper.
Having said that, I agree with the study in that the kinesthetic aspect of writing will generally lead to better retention of words - I believe this is well established.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180920102135.h...
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..
Now I think about it, I seem to recall Evernote doing something like that a while back. Mind you, I don't know how easy it is to get the meta-data back out.
Much of human memory evolved to remember locations, and almost all of the top memory competitors use locality association ("Memory Palace"/loci) as their primary method.
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 take notes without the information passing through their brains. Other people swear they have to take notes to focus.
There are exceptions of course, for example if the information is new and any other available material is worthless.
The rest of the time I just sat in class and paid close attention, rarely noting down to look up some lemma or the other. Way better results. Instant recollection. I can still remember the Nullstellensatz vaguely and the room in which I first encountered it and where I was in it and that's almost a decade ago.
Because of the way well-done math courses are structured, with topics building on each other, I was able to do this about half the time. Most importantly, any mistakes I made would be almost immediately corrected, so I never learned the material wrong, like if I'd waited until the homework.
I get regular remarks from people who don't know me asking why I'm throwing away the page of notes I wrote down in a meeting - it's because I'll never look at them again. But now the important parts of that meeting will be crystal clear in my head for the next couple months instead of the next couple days.
But if it works well enough, why not? The act of writing notes may involve mental processing or not. If it's just a matter of concentration and focus, there might be better remedies.
The writing is semi-automatic and does not merely involve verbatim quotes from others. If today I were to attend a lecture or talk and something the speaker said prompted some visual insight I would immediately draw it as part of my note-taking process. The whole reason I began taking such copious notes, in fact, was the realization that if I didn't write these things down I often needed to have an insight two to three times for it to become a permanent part of my mental model of a problem space, rather than the once.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
Agree. I remember that I had one course that the prof couldn't really explain nicely and it seemed really hard. Then while preparing for the exam I actually read the book, and everything made sense and was quite easy.
Expecting them to prepare the theory beforehand has not proven to be that practical. Lecturers who try this quickly learn to adjust their expectations downward, in my experience. And even then a lot of the "class" will be quite underprepared.
I don't believe the onus is on the educational institute to ensure that students learn anything when it comes to higher education.
The student is paying tuition or taking a student loan to be there, I think it should be reasonable to expect them to exercise their own responsibility and learn the source-material.
The fact that they do not might be indicative that they should be studying something else, and catering to them only exascerbates the issue rather than leading to a Darwinian solution.
That's a very strong statement that I guess is based on your own personal experience?
If I can provide my own subjective opinion and educated guess, I do agree that taking notes verbatim feels close to pointless. You need to take in what you're hearing and grok it before you jot down your summary. Then you can go revisit your notes later to practice, or even better try to recall without looking at them first, and then check to corroborate.
>The idea I could do a better job than those authors while listening to the stuff for the first time is ludicrous.
I don't think anyone has suggested this to be the case. Even though it doesn't work that way for you, the point of note-taking even when the information is available from other materials is to facilitate retention and understanding, not to produce superior source material. I do believe it is effective for this purpose, for most people.
All through my education, I never really bothered to listen to teachers and lecturers and basically never took notes. I just read course literature and tried to grok the main concepts, and it worked wonders for getting me through tests and exams. Longer term retention of what I learned was atrocious though. Now as an adult I take notes and study in a much more disciplined way, and it's so much more effective long term that it leaves me with a sense of regret that I didn't know or realize all this as a kid.
Just my two cents.
You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.
>You seem to conflate taking no notes with not listening. If the only point of the note-taking is to ensure the listening and mental engagement, then I doubt that's the most effective way.
I honestly can't see how you get this from my comment.
Note taking massively helps me on both remembering and the level of attention I pay to the lecture itself. Without notes, my attention drifts and I might as well just be passively watching TV.
Like Hermitian909, I don't particularly care about the notes afterwards. They're sometimes handy for skimming over when prepping for an exam or reworking through an example of a half-understood concept, but for the most part I don't use them.
An ounce of analysis is worth a pound of law.
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 for client meetings where I have been able to later confirm sub-points or asides mentioned by customers - sometimes months later. It's also very easy to drill down through Quarterly reviews and link chains of historic comments 'on the fly' - for example, being able to confirm that so-and-so first mentioned something about a similar technical issue on a different system 12 months ago.
My 'Cornell' style has developed an element of mindmapping on the pages, which makes it easy to track conversations or sections of meetings that break off into side discussions/brainstorming.
The biggest benefit is that the structure of all notes is consistent, so not only can I find things very quickly, but others can interpret them too - this is a particularly powerful way to allow teams to share, compare and understand someone else's notes, even months after the meeting or training took place.
Edit: I also believe it looks very professional in customer meetings when everyone from the same business is taking notes in a similar way, using identical stationery.
I've been working this way since the mid 1990s and find it beats all forms of tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes
http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html
The top of the page has headings for: meeting subject, date, room/location (can help jog memory), attendees, 'page x of y' and a 'confidential' tick box so I can keep corporate strategy or personnel discussions separate and secure.
The bottom section is marked 'Notes / Actions' where I highlight things that need follow-up (by me or others) - this is far better that having, say, 12 pages of notes from a 3 hr meeting with a few bits of underlined, ringed or asterisked text somewhere therein. Later I can visually scan the bottom of each page and quickly see all meeting actions - and I will have drawn a manual tick box by all mine so I can mark them off when completed.
Searching also led to a few suppliers of pre-printed notebooks or paper with a similar grid.
I would throw Flyeralarm in the ring (not connected to them), looks like you can get a Wire-O notebook with 50 pages, and cover artwork as you like, for around 3 Euro (at 50 pieces) with prices dropping from there on.
Or what price do you think of?
I checked Amazon (yeah, OK) and a few commercial printers that specifically mentioned Cornell notebooks.
I may have to revisit this matter.
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 ?
Typically I don't write this kind of information down ; I reference them from the original document.
If a URL is mentioned, it's likely either because someone knows it (make a note to ask them for it), it's in their notes (ask for them), or it's been put on a whiteboard (take a photo if needed). Ditto for code, if it's that kind of meeting (and, yes, I do have those kinds of meetings).
It's my definitive memory, and has been worth it to answer the months later questions of why we did or didn't include some feature, or designed something as we did. It's also where I think by pencil, so there's lots of plans, hierarchies, thoughts too. Those rough scribbles go at the back.
The few times I've tried to improve on this either by tech or organisers like filofax etc, it's quickly proved much worse or slower. The old Psion 5 got closest! Simply happy to stay old world now. It works, it's quick, and never needs charging.
It's too easy to look at us old farts and draw the conclusion that we're just too stuck in our ways and unable to cope with this new-fangled stuff, but I've spent periods (maybe perhaps a few months at a time) taking notes in other ways to see if I can 'evolve' - off the top of my head I've tried: Mind mapping meetings (on paper and electronically), netbooks (I still have a Samsung NC10 running Mint which is great as a portable terminal when a physical keyboard is a 'must' and the company HP laptop or home T420 is just too bulky for the situation), tablets and phones with styluses. (I used to have a Note 1 phone and still use a Galaxy Note 10.1 daily for research at home).
Some things 'just work'.
Then there's the software. Evernote was something a previous boss swore by - until some change he really couldn't get on with forced him to migrate, with much muttering, everything to something else. Evernote, wikis and most of the rest are best if you do proper categorisation of notes and indexing. Indexing always feels must be a second pass after, as categories and choices from before never quite do it. So it's always ended up slower than simply writing in an index at the front at the end of the day or week.
Six months later I often don't know quite what I'm searching, haven't a clue of keywords needed, but it's more archaeological, going back through layers of time, then re-following choices and paths. Grab a handful of pages that is about six months... Skim, find the follow-up. Oh, yeah this, that, who and why. Job done.
I think a lot of people whose roles are client facing would benefit from this even though 90% of them would have no idea of what properly run meetings look like.
I'm not always hosting/minuting the meeting so it'll be done by whoever is.
It is the best of both worlds. You basically have a zero latency touchscreen that can save your notes to PDF.
Even the best Tablets today have latency, most are designed more as touchscreen. Writing gets tiring and distracting really quick.
I wonder why the Boogie Board Sync was discontinued.
According to one of their support agents, their sales numbers were low. Personally I think their marketing sucked - they seemed to be targeting kids rather than students/business users. Their styling reflected this identity crisis too.
They have a product coming later in the year which will "address some of the same needs", TBD though how thoroughly it'll be a fill-in for it. In the meantime I bought a protective folio case for mine and am babying it.
When the lecture, presentation or meeting starts a have a macro that creates a new Evernote note prepended with the date and starts recording into QuickTime. Throughout the exchange, I am typing up quick and dirty first draft notes using a macro to screenshot the portion of the QuickTime window displaying the time elapsed. I also employ symbols/emojis to flag points in the notes that are important‼️, should be returned to and reviewed later , are confusing, raise a question ect... Whenever there is downtime (e.g. interruption or lull in the presentation) I work my way back and start improving the notes: Organizing them into a hierarchy with headings, indentation and boldation. Also, I Hyperlink useful, relevant or referenced URLs.
At the bottom of the document I have a separated section called TAKEAWAY containing a bulleted list of questions to ask, things to follow up on, and key points. I can always ⌘↓ > ↩ to add an item line to this section.
At the end of the exchange, I check my TAKEWAY section and clarify any questions. I stop recording and add the audio file to the top of the document. This leaves me with a reference document I can revisit, clean up, and reference later.
The process of making the note visually appealing and easy to read by cleaning up, formatting, and adding hyperlinks accomplishes a lot of the internalization handwriting does because it forces you to try to convey the kernel of the information being consumed in as well few formatted, organized words as possible.
Furthermore, I'm the type that really values immediately looking up unfamiliar referenced concepts/ideas so I don't misunderstand what/why something is said. As for diagrams, they can usually be incorporated by adding slides of the presentation, taking a picture of the whiteboard at the end, or just googling whatever the diagram was.
With the wonderful world of macros and automation I can change color, size, formatting, add lists; add hyperlinks, multi-media images, timestamps ect... and keep everything in an easy to read, search and share document.
Most importantly my handwriting is bogus. I really couldn't do it any other way.
I don’t think the average person understands > cares > is negatively impacted by that concern.
Any knowledge or experiences?
My experience has been, as someone that observes the law, I've been denied the opportunity to audio-record a lecture. In this instance, the person in question did not object but the professor did - stating that there was an individual that could be affected. Granted, it doesn't really make a difference if I use it for my own personal use but since everything is hosted in the cloud these days...
[1]https://www.amazon.in/Wacom-Bamboo-Digitizer-Tablet-CDS-600P...
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.
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.
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.
Always best to write good, efficient, consistently-styled notes once, and annotate changes/corrections on them if they are needed. It saves time too!
Isn't this a fairly crucial part of "learning"?
If that's true, then there's no point holding on to "the originals", because on the day of the test/exam/whatever, you won't have access to them anyway.
In essence, transferring knowledge from the original lecture via the written notes to ones memory?