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Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won't see that when I'm teaching.
Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.
That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.
But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It's not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @10:36AM (3 children)
I did the same thing back when I was in university, because everyone always said you should take notes to help understand the material. Preferably by hand because that activates different parts of the brain which aids learning.
For me that lasted just a few months. Until the moment I realized that I was spending so much effort writing down those stupid notes, that I didn't get to actually hear and think about and understand what the lecturer was actually saying. My grades went up when I stopped taking notes and was actually able to pay attention and think about the ideas conveyed in the lecture. So in my anecdotal experience, note taking during lectures was just a giant waste of time and actually hugely detrimental to my studies.
Take this as a warning that note taking may be helpful, or it may not be, depending on your own traits and preferred learning methods.
Much better to have the teachers write down some notes or record a video accessible to every student. Also, if you're going to cover stuff not present in the textbook, for the love of $deity, please document it somewhere instead of just assuming that everyone can always attend every single lecture!
P.S. We have all these expensive textbooks. Why not reserve a few pages of those for some condensed notes instead of expecting students and teachers to waste countless man-hours again and again and again writing their own?!
P.P.S. This turned into a bit of a rant. Sorry about that!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday November 25 2017, @11:08AM
Some lecturers use attendance at lectures as a grading bonus - adding "this will be in the exam" after a particular probkem had been shown on the board (and, to differentiate the *complete* sadists, sometimes added just *after* they had erased those notes..)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @02:37PM (1 child)
If you can't take notes by hand fast enough to keep up either you're instructor is speaking inordinately fast or you have some sort of memory/attention problem.
You're not supposed to copy the lecture down word for word, you're supposed to copy important pieces of information and any relevant examples. If you were struggling to keep up with the lecture, that usually means that you didn't have the skills necessary before you got to class to identify the main idea and other significant ideas.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday November 25 2017, @05:58PM
Personally, I don't retain well unless time is sweet between ideas for taking notes or I don't take them. I focus too intently to listen and write at the same time.