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Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting.

posted by janrinok on Saturday November 25 2017, @06:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the gall-ink-and-parchment dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes in with an interesting piece from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @12:39PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 25 2017, @12:39PM (#601359)

    I discovered ZIM not long ago, and I m,ust say it's wonderful!!
    The ability to take structured notes, plus you can export them to wiki html is great.
    Simple and lightweight, very handy for notes of any kind.-

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @12:44AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @12:44AM (#601549)

    The first few hits for Zim (as far as I can tell, not stylized as all caps) say "Zim - a desktop wiki".

    Type: Notetaking application, Personal wiki [wikipedia.org]
    GPL'd and cross-platform (Linux, *BSD, Windoze).
    Uses Python, python-gtk, and GTK+.

    There were attempts and plans to port to Android.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @09:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @09:10AM (#601999)

      Yes, that's the one I refer to.
      It's cross platform, lightweight, fast, simple.... Overall a great experience for me.
      Again, his is very personal ofc, but I found this sw suits much better the way I take notes.
      I have several notebooks ( a notebook is a collection of pages) depending on what class I am attending to.