SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) by Marand on Sunday November 26 2017, @12:01AM
As a leftie that had to suffer through rightie-centric penmanship lessons, my handwriting starts at "poor", and when I have to write quickly, end at "illegible scribble". That makes typing much more attractive for me, since I can type over 150wpm with extremely high (~98%) accuracy, and can maintain >70% accuracy over 200wpm, which is still easier to understand than my handwriting.
That said, I find that note-taking is as much about forcing something to be committed to memory, and for that, it doesn't matter much if my notes are legible. Still, if there's any chance I might need to refer back to what I wrote later, I need a keyboard or, for handwriting, a lot of time to spare.