This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There's a lot of comments about how digital devices are viable/helpful for note-taking and just as good as a pen. I think that's missing the crucial point: virtually every device we own today is designed as a distraction machine.
A pen + paper isn't going have any notifications or reminders or updates or emails or texts or ads or alarms or alerts. If there's any device without those that's as reliable and as cheap as a notebook, I've never heard of it.
Putting a device on airplane mode removes the distractions. If I play a video game while the lecture is going on, well that is on me, or the lecture, or both.
this entire thing reads like a fantasy. or some reddit thread where "everyone clapped" to me.
if I was told by a professor on the first day of class which I paid for that I wasn't allowed to use my own note taking method I had been using for decades, I'd just say "No." and if pressed further, I'd take it as high as I needed to. or get a full refund for the class and find another.
this isn't an elementary school. these aren't children. these are adults.
Depends on the class. Pretty unreasonable in a 200+ lecture hall, but a respected professor setting up a small seminar like this to remove distractions sounds like a fair prerogative to create an environment conducive to learning.
Ofc if a student asked for a reasonable accommodation that's probably chill too.
Did you read anything past the first paragraph?
read the entire article yesterday, yes. how can i help?
Yeah, your comment doesn't make any sense. You said that the whole thing reads like a fantasy when he backs it up with studies.
no I meant the expectation that people will just comply without complaint. especially if its not been stated otherwise in the lesson plan or syllabus.
this guy makes it seem like he magically was able to charm people into not using their laptops. and then wrote praises to him for such a thing, and quite frankly I'm certain all of that is embellishment.
I'm all for being more productive in classrooms, but banning note taking methods that quite a few people rely on is just silly.
if people want to join classes where note taking is analog only, that's great and I encourage it. but let me know its that way ahead of time so I don't waste my time having to get a refund for the course.
Just record it and use a transcriber app. Then you can fully focus on the presentation and worry about notes later
Only barbarians take notes by hand. A TRUE GREEK PHILOSOPHER would simply memorize all the requisite facts. Paper is dissolving the very moral fabric of our society. Smash that /s button for more bug facts!
I disagree that writing by hand is magically improving information absorbtion/retention. Source: I've been doing it through all of my school and all of my uni. Being half-asleep, pondering something completely irrelevant, and in general course material flying completely over my head while I write it down was a norm most of the time. And lecturers dictating their stuff at high speeds didn't help either. Maybe there is some temporary novelty effect after you switch from one way of writing to another, but I wouldn't expect that last long.
No one that has looked at this in a serious way agrees with you.
From the abstract:
“These results suggest that the movements involved in handwriting allow a greater memorization of new words. The advantage of handwriting over typing might also be caused by a more positive mood during learning. Finally, our results show that handwriting with a digital pen and tablet can increase the ability to learn compared with keyboard typing once the individuals are accustomed to it.”
The more muscles and senses you engage in learning the better you will retain the information.
One method is not necessarily the best for everyone, but studies show that writing notes by javd does improve retention.
I've found typing works extremely well for everything but math. I type everything out as they speak, but horribly, with zero respect to grammar or spelling, just get the information down. Then, I go back afterwards and fix it all, and in doing so, reinforcing my learning. Its hard to do, because it had to be written well enough for me to be able to understand my chicken scratch later, but damn, it helps.
If you're going back and fixing it, you're getting that absorption the article is referring to. If you're not referring to your notes ever again, handwriting is better because it forces that absorption to happen (i.e. you need to summarize). If you want all of the content, just watch the recording.
I'm pretty sure that writing something down has been proven to be helpful for retaining the information.
But that study is probably 50 years old, and people learn and retain information differently.
So I wouldn't be surprised if using a computer to take notes is just as effective as writing it, especially for younger generations.
See my comment to OP for a recentish publication that shows the same thing all studies previously have shown. You are quite correct.
I switched from using paper notebooks to take lecture notes to using a computer for most classes around 2nd year of college and it was about the same. I mostly used the notes for spaced repetition when going over the material again a week or so after the lecture and helped keep my focus on the material during the lectures. It's also easier to share notes with a study group if they're already digital.
(I posted this comment in the other thread as well)
I banned all cellphones and computer-based note taking in the classroom, with the exception that students could use a device if they wrote with a stylus.
I get the cell phones, for most classes you won't need to have it out aside from taking an occasional photo of diagrams.
However, I've always thought that it was silly to have this stance on computers. Not everyone has access to an iPad or nice Wacom device, nor stylus compatible software that matches their workflow / note-taking style. I tried a lot of them and never found one I liked.
The article cites that same decade-old paper, which suggests that handwritten notes have better retention. If you actually look at the paper, here is the design of the commonly cited study:
Students generally participated 2 at a time, though some completed the study alone. The room was preset with either laptops or notebooks, according to condition. Lectures were projected onto a screen at the front of the room. Participants were instructed to use their normal classroom note-taking strategy, because experimenters were interested in how information was actually recorded in class lectures. The experimenter left the room while the lecture played.
Next, participants were taken to a lab; they completed two 5-min distractor tasks and engaged in a taxing working memory task (viz., a reading span task; [...]). At this point, approxi- mately 30 min had elapsed since the end of the lecture. Finally, participants responded to both factual-recall questions (e.g., “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?”) and conceptual-application questions (e.g., “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”) about the lecture and completed demographic measures.
The advantage of typed notes is being able to reformat the notes over time and to go back and fill in details after class. If students don't get the opportunity to do that, then yes it makes sense that the more cognitively demanding method of taking notes would give better recall.
This also depends a lot on the type of course being taught, which I didn't see when I skimmed the NYT article:
I’ve taught the same course to a class of undergraduate, M.B.A., medical and nursing students every year for over a decade
What's true is that laptops can be distracting to other students around you if you are doing something else (ex. watching sports / e-sports was common). If profs want to reduce that without policing what people are doing in class, having a "laptop section" in a back corner of the classroom works nicely
I don't know about you, but I rarely referred to my notes later. The lectures frequently corresponded to the textbook, so I'd review the textbook again in light of what the lecture covered.
For me, handwritten notes were much more effective than digital notes because I rarely actually used the notes and taking notes was more to keep my attention on the speaker than actually recording the lecture.
Everyone works differently of course, I'm just pointing out that my experience was close to what the studies measured.
I don't care. Mostly because we already have examples of what classes were like without them and the people who are reliant on them now will adapt and learn to cope if they're taken away.
Additionally, people only think about what phones could be used for in class that they'd disapprove of, rather than things it might actually be useful for. I've personally had great success with recording lessons/lectures, and being able to refer back to them. This allowed me to ask more questions and take more time to understand the subject. Taking photos of diagrams? Awesome. Having a note document that I could reformat that was legible? Awesome.
I'm getting old, but when I retire, I'm going to go to as many free post secondary classes as I'm able, having never been to pist secondary, and never being a good student (I was mediocre at best and was smart enough to pass, without doing much of the work. I do not recommend or endorse being me as I was in school)
I really am curious what and how people use modern devices to great effect for studying/learning.
The world is so much different than in my youth it fascinates me what modern good study habits exist now. Like what's the modern equivalent to flash cards? There has be something technologically amazing right? Even if it's not well known to be widely adopted.
I exclusively wrote everything down with a pen, since I was not going to bring a laptop everywhere and somehow get it to stay powered for so many hours. Not to mention that it would have been terrible to draw schematics etc.
The best were those courses where you could prepare a "cheat sheet", so then I go over everything and put key information and formulas into a word document. So I go over my notes, then have to filter them and then write the key things again. Maximum retention, as I can tell you 10 years later.
Ex university prof here (instructor actually. Lowest monkey up the tree). Duuuh! No shit Sherlock!
My issue is that I type faster than I write. I think instead they should push for something like audio/memo recorders.
One of the points in the article described how being slower to hand write makes you think about what you write before doing so, which leaves you with more meaningful notes instead of a transcript.
I used to handwrite and record lectures, and listening to it back, it was amazing how much I had missed while writing stuff down.
I'm still in favor of handwriting because my notes were thoughtful and helpful, it was just eye opening how much more I heard the second time through.
Reading the textbook before class helps me pay attention to things I missed in the reading, and rereading it after class helps me recall stuff I ignored in my lecture notes. I have never found value in reviewing lectures, and my grades were pretty good.
These were humanities classes, where I'd pick up some nuance in the lecture/ discussion i had missed. We had textbooks but there was a lot of stuff in the lectures that weren't in the text.
For me it was always about:
Being able to take notes with a pen wasn't about how fast I wrote but about how little I wrote. Notes were there only to help me remember what was covered and write down some concrete values/dates/names that are hard to remember.
