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If you're a student looking for the most advanced learning machine available, give laptops a pass—and pick up an age-old notebook.
You'll absorb and retain more information if you take notes by hand, according to a study by UCLA, giving you an edge on your tests.
That spiral-bound stack of paper has other advantages, too: You can't zone out on Facebook and Instagram during a lecture, so you are more likely to stay focused.
Putting pen to paper requires a different kind of mental processing than typing does. Sure, typing on a laptop gives you the power to record a lecture nearly word for word—but transcribing verbatim is associated with what's called "shallow cognitive processing." The words may be captured on your screen, but they basically went in one ear and out the other.
Also, your notebook doesn't run Fortnite.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:14AM (2 children)
The lecturer generally makes notes available. And even when they didn't there was always someone like you with a digital copy i can get later, that are more organized, and searchable and so on.
But I find taking notes myself has benefits. I definitely retain better if I take notes.
But it was the TAKING of the notes that helps me; i rarely actually need them. And then i get the "official" lecture notes for actual review; only occasionally skimming my own notes for some thing. Often i just throw them away, but i still take them in the moment.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:06AM (1 child)
The lecturer generally makes slides available. If the lecturer is any good, they'll be talking around the bulletpoints on the screen, rather than just reading them out.
It's often that extra stuff (that isn't written onscreen) that you'll be thinking about as you formulate and take notes.
But I agree: digital copies of slides, plus creating your own notes, is a good way to do it.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday May 09 2019, @02:23PM
Or if provided with a PowerPoint ahead of time and having M$ Office with OneNote, I print up the PowerPoint to the OneNote printer which sets up the deck in OneNote. I then can pretty quickly annotate the lecture by either typing or (missing my Wacom-enabled touch screen laptop) using a stylus on them. I get the best of handwritten note taking and the instructor's slides, and all of it wrapped up in a digital package so I don't need to carry a Trapper or 3 ring binder. (Second best: even if I don't have a PowerPoint to annotate I can just use OneNote as my "notebook" for taking the notes). I hate giving Microsoft the business but there's just nothing quite as functional as OneNote, especially when combined with the print-to-OneNote function. Double bonus: if one sets it up correctly (not trusting "cloud" anythings), one can back up the notebooks to offsite storage.... no losing my notes to floods, fires, strange dogs or stranger men. I very much grade the presenter on how many notes to take - a presentation with no notes has no additional information I thought worthy to remember.
Huge step up from the days of transparency projection slides, both the days of printing and the days of using grease pencil. Surprisingly to me products in the Harvard Graphics [wikipedia.org] brand were available until 2017. Huh.
This sig for rent.