Slashdot Mirror
Pen Still Mightier Than the Laptop For Notetaking?
theodp writes "While waiting to see if the iPad is a game-changer, this CS student continues to take class notes with pen and paper while her fellow students embrace netbooks and notebooks. Why? In addition to finding the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in her mind, there's also the problem of keeping up with the professor: '[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.' So, when it comes to education or business, do you take notes on a notepad/netbook, or stick with good old-fashioned handwriting? Got any tips for making the transition, or arguments for staying the course?"
Taking notes on notepad/netbook is an extremely good idea, and now with WiFi's and 3G's everywhere, you can also chat, email, post insightful posts to slashdot, and go raid in World of Warcraft all at the same time. It also lets you work on your latest coding project or post updates to facebook and twitter. If you're getting hungry towards end of the class, you can just use Google Maps to search for some good pizza joint nearby.
Oh notes.. "what notes? I was a little bit busy online..."
But what does iPad have to do with this? Even if we ignore the fact that iPad doesn't even have a stylus, writing with such is laggy and just messes up the text. You write a lot better on paper. The technology isn't there just yet.
And then theres the thing that with your written notes you're more likely to actually read them again. Write them on computer and you just shove them to some obscure location and never read them again.
I do both; I'll usually take notes with pen and paper, but if there's a lot of math and I feel like my handwriting isn't going to be legible enough, I'll do them in LaTeX. If I can't remember the syntax for something, I make some up, comment it, and come back to it later.
With the use of tablets, you can do the best of both worlds. You can type, and draw with your finder of stylus. Since when does one person's blog post = news?
I've tried to do it on the laptop, but graphs, tables, annotations, colors, mathematical formalae (sometimes many of those together) are all too difficult to handle in a timely fashion when using a laptop.
I teach math at a university. In the last 10 years, I've only had one student who tried to take all her notes with a computer. This is her third time taking the course. Coincidence?
I personally type faster than I hand-write, but those darn diagrams mess me right up and stops me cold. I doubt using any word processing will ever replace pen and paper for note taking or brainstorming.
When a good tablet (cost effective that is) comes out that let's you "sketch" and "diagram" as well as type easily, then it could happen. In that sense, we'll just be talking about electronic paper.
Because it's erasable. Use a hard (light) pencil to avoid smearing, or recopy later.
Also, not having a laptop discourages you from checking email, facebook, or playing games.
I've found some teachers provide the slides(Powerpoint), so taking notes on those documents is much easier with the majority of the content already on the page
In courses that are more graphic oriented, I do tend to have a pen and paper handy, but still take the majority of the notes on the laptop.
Then there are those teachers who feel that they should be the only one in the room using any sort of electronics, so you don't really have a choice. And yes, these professors still exist.
I'm slightly biased towards e-notes because I can type far faster than I can write. I also use Dropbox, which gives me peace of mind that those critical notes for next weeks exam are synced instantly in the cloud. A misplaced paper or crashed hard drive sucks during final exam week.
Pen and paper for diagrams.
Notebook/netbook for plain text.
Convert your hand-drawn diagrams later, using a scanner or re-draw using a graphics tablet after class.
Best combination of being able to freehand notes/diagrams while still keeping the abilities of a laptop. I used a IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X41t in my recent foray back to school (several years ago) loved it!
"Sometimes the only thing left to say is 'Oops'" -- debbers
During my undergraduate physics degree I started by taking notes on paper, however I started to notice I was struggling to read my handwriting. I soon moved onto typing notes, in openoffice, using its built in equation editor, and attempting to draw diagrams with a stylus on a graphics tablet. After a year of doing this I realised it was a bit of a struggle to keep up, but in the mean time had learnt LaTeX. Then I stumbled upon an even better solution, type the notes (and equations - managing to keep up with the lecturer), and leave a space in the notes for the diagrams (i.e. setup the environment and name them in ascending order fig1, fig2 etc), but draw the diagrams manually on paper. Then I could copy the diagram at a later point into the LaTeX document using the graphics package of my choice (and for the particle physics module, feynmf for LaTeX proved particularly helpful). It is actually possible to keep up with the lecturer, so long as you reach the point that when typing you don't have to think about what your typing for things such as \alpha and so on. You also have to be fairly accurate with your typing, and be able to visualise how the notes are going to look without compiling them. Overall, if you don't think yourself capable of that, stick to pen and paper, if you do and you have troubles reading your own handwriting when trying to scribble quickly (I can type much faster than I can write legibly), then it is worth looking into.
Professors should post their slides on the web, and students should spend their time listening, thinking, and asking questions instead of writing. Anything less and students become mere stenographers, only retaining long enough to commit to paper.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"But what does iPad have to do with this? "
I agree: Why was the iPad even mentioned? It's not a tablet PC, there is no stylus to write on the screen with. The closest equivalent to the iPad is the iPod Touch and I can't imagine anyone taking notes with an iPod touch.
Why were Tablet PCs left out? Here's a great video review of how to take notes with graphs on a tablet PC. Here's another example
Tablets are not expensive either, you can get a nice Pentium M 1.6ghz for under $300, some even sell for $150. I know everyone thinks they need a 3ghz quad core, but the Pentium M is plenty to run office and watch youtube videos.
Using laptops in class is so 2000. Tablet PCs are the only way to go for taking notes.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Personally, I can type a lot faster than I can write, and my writing skills have deteriorated over the years -my writing is often illegible, even to me. Plus, I can't grep notepads, which also often get lost or tattered. I can keep my notes and papers organized on a USB stick. Still, I do keep a notepad handy in case there are diagrams I want to jot down or if there is an activity that requires paper.
I was in engineering school so I always took notes with pen and paper. With the few arts courses I did take, I found huge advantages to taking notes with a computer. The engineering lectures were mostly linear and had a lot equations and diagrams to copy. The arts lectures were more non-linear. I cursed every time I had to write another point in a section we covered 10 minutes ago.
Then there are the courses which are covered following power point slides. Some students had tablet PCs and were easily able to write notes to each slide. This was optimal for those courses.
Offer to share the information with your prof or student teacher and they will usually give you the green light or become the note taker for the class (some schools have them for hard of hearing/deaf students - R.I.T.)...
If you use something like MS OneNote you can drop all these separate pieces onto the note pages and keep them better organized. Text, your notes, the sound clips, and the diagrams...
At my university, most CS students do not take notes at all. It's kind of foreign to see someone taking notes in a CS course. I assume it is because CS courses are about understanding the concept instead of memorizing information. Because it's not as much memorization, note taking is not as needed.
I'm a recent ISDS major entering the workforce and I use a number of notetaking methods. I'm primarily a Mac user but am forced to use PC at work. Fortunately (or unfortunately) Microsoft's OneNote is one of the best notetaking software I've ever used! I've used my iPhone to capture diagrams drawn in a meeting and later referenced them by going directly to my phone or e-mailing the photo to myself and merging it with my notes. Often, even in technology, our meetings are somewhat linear and the number of variables/connections and necessary diagrams to dissect a topic are minimal. Note, not a developer, but perform some level of development/scripting to interact with OS.
In my entirely anecdotal experience, kids^Wpeople tend to goof off or multi-task instead of focusing on the material/teacher when there's a laptop in front of them.
Even Senators and Congressmen have been caught on camera playing solitare or checking sports instead of following along with debates.
And that behavior doesn't begin to compare to the endless amount of texting at inappropriate times/places.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I have used pulse pen http://www.livescribe.com/Smartpen/index.html for a few years it records audio and text to be transfered to PC
Turn netbook around, click space bar. How hard is that?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
While no-one cares in college, there are still people in the business world who become annoyed if you take notes on a PC during business meetings. For whatever reasons, pen-and-paper skills are still important at higher levels. (Something about body language, eye contact, and putting others at ease.)
I'm hoping the Apple iPad or the coming HP Slate will not incur this stupid prejudice, but need to be prepared in any environment.
Analogous to your professors' white board diagrams, business white boards also contain knowledge that your re-copying will lose as you struggle to keep up.
To deal with high level meetings, I bring my notebook, but also pen and paper and use that which is appropriate for the audience I am dealing with.
To deal with the whiteboard issue, my laptop case ALWAYS also has my camera. I photograph the white board at various times during the meeting. By definition, my photos are always 100% accurate. Oddly enough, the same people annoyed by computer note taking never seem to take offence at snapping pictures of the white board.
After the meeting, I'll scan any hand-written notes AND my digital images into a single Word document.
Good luck!
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Why, I wrote up this very comment with a quill pen on foolscap before having my secretary type it in to this new-fangled "analytical engine" thing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I was part of a pilot program using tablet pc's in the classroom back in 2002 or so. Really I have to say that it was a great experience, especially once you were using the right software. For any type of class involving mathematical formulas, diagrams, etc., it was a very useful tool. I could simply draw the image or formula into my notes on the tablet just as if I was using a notebook, with the added benefit of the organizational abilities you have when dealing with a digital document (searching, etc.,) when going back to study for exams or use in projects.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Livescribe http://www.livescribe.com/ is a pretty good tool/idea.
It records sound as you take your notes syncing up the two, then you are able to click on points in the notes and play back the sound at the time the note was taken.
Only downsides is there isn't a direct way to download to your computer, you have to use their web service , so it is no go at work. And there isn't any linux support.
I use good old pen and paper. It's versatile, it's cheap, it's lightweight and it never suffers from hangups, startup times etc.
Instead of thinking "how could I use a digital device to take notes?" you should ask yourself "why do I want my notes to be digital?". Myself, I rarely feel that need as I mostly take notes to study from (less important) and stay awake at lectures (more important). Neither of these reasons require notes in the form of computer files.
On the other hand, you could easily think of several other uses for digital notes. You can share them with friends. You can upload them to somewhere, letting the whole class benefit from them. You can copy them easily. You can store and arrange them easily. You can send them to people on the other side of the Earth, should you want to. But do you want to? That's the question you should answer before making the switch.
But I always use pen and paper for notes, you can write down everything easier and you has less to carry with a computer and power cords and hoping you are near an outlet.
Then I copy my notes (or scan diagrams) onto the computer.. easier to find and read and organize. I find using something like Mind Map or Free mind also help to get all the notes in a better flow.
I'm just going to take an etch-a-sketch to one of my classes and take notes with it.
Think Different(R)
More to the point, even if it was a "game changer", it still wouldn't eliminate pen and paper. Just as the word processor didn't. Just as the typewriter didn't.
After centuries, the ax and the shovel and the knife are still used everyday. They didn't disappear just because the chainsaw and the bulldozer and the laser were invented. Not all tasks require elaborate technological solutions. If you want to just dig a small hole, a shovel is the best way to go about it. Same with taking a few pages of notes. In any work, the task calls for the appropriate tool, not necessarily the most modern one.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
There is an on-going discussion of note taking during lectures over at Math Overflow.
See: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/12638/taking-lecture-notes-in-lectures, especially Anton Geraschenko's comments on Live TeXing. It works!
I've been out of a college class for a few years, but I simply would and still prefer paper/pen. It's not about being old school, but I am extremely picky about what I want technology doing for me. I tend to be uncompromising and really think out what some input device will do for me. I want technology that works the way I do, not me having to compromise heavily in order to use it. I have yet to see something that fits the flexibility of pen/paper while giving me the advantage of a digital device thought those electronic note taking pens are probably close.
I can tell you me typing for an hour on a netbook would lead to uncomfortable typing, as netbooks have too small a size. I could probably swing a regular sized laptop like my 15" Macbook Pro, or other similar full size key laptop.
I also have my own short hand method of note taking, coupled with identifying things that I don't need to memorize and things that have to be written down. Also I tend to circle important bits of information and tie them together with arrows pointing to what they relate to creating a type of cluster diagram meshed in with regular note taking. I don't see how any laptop software out there can compare there.
I am hopeful that a well thought out, well implemented tablet PC comes along that gives me good flexibility.
That said I can imagine taking my ipod touch or other such small form tablet device and scribble or look up some info on it while I take notes with pen/paper. As I was thinking about this I considered an iPhone or other similar device being indispensable, since you can take a photo of the board if there is a complex diagram, and simply drop a note on paper (see iPhone pict for blah diagram). ;-)
.... ... }
int main (void) {
I graduated 3 years ago, but it bothered me immensely when professors would write things on the board that weren't duplicated in the course notes. It was just a lazy way to enforce attendance. I always learned better out of books than by listening to someone, so sitting around in class just to transcribe felt like a waste of time.
So this whole issue of not having diagrams or about which device to use seems like a manufactured problem. Putting a PDF on the course website with all the diagrams and text would render it moot.
At least in my case, taking notes implies that probably noone will be able to read them, maybe not even me. But is too little technology to carry.
But if you dont mind to carry technology, some ideas:
- a notebook/netbook with comfortable enough keyboard and long enough battery is an option, you can use the (builtin?) webcam to copy diagrams.
- Speaking of cameras, you can film the entire class, and write down it later, at your own rythm, same for just the audio. Both alternatives will mean to spend maybe more time that you been in class for saving what is worth of it. Maybe even your phone could do that work (and then you are not carrying extra hardware specially for this), else you have or dedicated hardware (i.e. videocam) or a note/netbook for that.
- You can do a mix, taking audio or video of the class, and take notes, maybe with something that tracks time to compaginate them with the media.
- Not sure about note/netbooks that have touchscreens that let you use pen, how much you win i.e. for drawing diagrams while you use the keyboard (not the pen) to write whats happening, probably depends on the app you use to store all that info.
I was really hoping that the iPad would have come with a stylus and bult-in handwriting/sketching software a-la the Newton. Multi-touch is cool, and the keyboard thing is fine, but really what I'm looking for in that type of device is basically something I can hold in my hand and write directly on rather than with say, a wacom tablet, in an application like Microsoft Journal. If it were powerful enough to run Illustrator on, that'd be a bonus but not really a necessity.
Maybe iPad can work with a third-party stylus device, and perhaps Wacom or someone else will release said stylus with the type of software that I want. But as it stands, I've been able to give away two 15" laptops and a 10" EeePC and consolidate on a 13" MacBook Pro for which I have an external monitor as well and get along just fine. iPad, at least from what I've seen demoed of it, doesn't really fit into the niche I was hoping it would. There is a place in my life for such a device, but only if I can write directly on it with a stylus pen -- and it must be bigger than a Palm Pilot.
At law school, everyone uses laptops. It's a different world than the world of pen and paper. There are a very few students who still take notes the old-fashioned way, and they do remarkably well sometimes, but the simple fact is that when you have a particularly intense class you can get down a lot more information typing than you can with pen and paper.
You still have to be disciplined--turning off your network devices can be helpful, and you also have to avoid taking notes just because everyone else is. (There are times when one person starts typing, then another, and it snowballs, even when there's nothing noteworthy being discussed.) But if you use the laptop as a tool, it's a very effective one. It also lets you learn a bit more, because you can actually do some outside research during class which enriches it for everyone.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
It's 2010 and people still have lectures? That's quaint.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Within the computer science realm, I found there were two major lecture methods being used. The first and most common was a lecture based off of powerpoint slides and the slides are almost always available in advance. Those classes are easy because you can just print the slides (or view them on your notebook) and just take some small notes on the few things not covered in the slides.
The other major method was usually for the more mathematically oriented classes and involved seeing hand-written proofs, equations and diagrams. I think the best method was to use pen and paper to write things down. Then, the next day I transcribe those notes into a LaTeX document. Transcribing makes you go back and follow through all the math and you can take your time to make sure it looks nice. I then study off of the electronic version (which I call my cheatsheet).
As a side note, I always recommend making cheatsheets for every class. It isn't that you actually cheat, but you say if I were going to cheat, what would I want to have with me. It forces you to concisely summarize the class in a small space and is very useful and forces you to go beyond just tryng to memorize things.
In my college and grad school classes I did not have to draw diagrams a lot since most of them were on the slides. Using my tablet,I was able to draw a few lines on top of the slides for future reference or to make things clearer. Also, it had the option of typing stuff in it below the slide if I was lagging since I can still type faster than I write on my tablet. But I am surprised that you have to draw a lot. In my classrooms ( I have been in college + gradschool for 11 years ) I noticed people switching from pen and paper to laptops for taking notes and then some students started getting tablet PCs. The fraction of people with tablets to total ( regular laptops + tablets ) in classes that I have been to has been mostly around 0.1 though. I think there should be a way to take pics like a camera on a laptop for taking pics of whatever is on the white board and then merging it with my notes. Ofcourse, with flash in it I dont know how much the professor could get annoyed.
This seems like the optimal division of time and one that keeps classroom discussions relevant. It also means that not having laptops and cell phones can actually make for a better overall experience.
For me, the laptop was a lifesaver in class, the reasons are below:
:)
I type many times faster than I can write with a wooden stick... And correcting errors is much easier than the ink filled version of the stick...
I can always record audio and edit it later.
As to diagrams/drawings, I either reproduced it using a separate drawing program, or the one in the word processor, or took a picture of it with my phone (later transfered to document)
I do agree that sometimes a notepad is better than a computer, especially if you already lug around 30 lbs of books, but for me, it was pretty rare.
As to the ipad, it's not going to be a good choice for class. It's little more than an economy sized ipod touch and it's lack of real keyboard will be a major disadvantage in the classroom. (I don't know what software it will run, so I don't know what kind of word processing, sound editing, or drawing programs will be available for it. Just a note, I haven't seen anything saying it runs the same stuff the Mac does, just things implying it runs what the i-stuff does.)
If I write fast enough to be able to keep up, then it's almost impossible to decipher, if I write so it is legible, I end up writing every second word or so. I type a bit faster than I write (when I try to write legibly) but still not fast enough. So I found a solution: a tape recorder. A reel of tape is good for 3-6 hours (at 2.4cm/s speed) and then I need to turn it over (lectures last only 1.5 hours so I don't have to do it during a lecture, but I cannot use cassettes, since they are 1 hour per side at the most).
If I need to save what is written on the board, I can take a picture with my Nokia N93. 3Mpx resolution and 3x optical zoom makes it easy to do so.
On my paper notebook I write the topics (or sub topics) of the lecture and,.if I can, times when the sub topic started, so I can find it on the tape easier. I also write which tape and track it is (the tape recorder is 4 track) and what the tape counter showed at the beginning of the lecture.
I'd agree that any device without a stylus seems pretty silly for note taking, or any business like applications. In particular, the iPad has clearly been designed for consuming visual media like movies or books, not creating documents, not creating media, not note taking, etc.
An ebook reader with a stylus for markup like the iLiad might provide a reasonable note taking system however. In fact, I feel that students are often too busy writing when I'd rather they were listening and/or thinking. It might help if they were merely marking up the text instead.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
During my architecture / engineering classes days, I found the winning combination was Laptop + digital camera.
Towards the end of the year, everyone in class had a camera, and the profs would actually play along and ask if everyone has finished taking a picture before erasing the board.
The above was WAY better than any pen and paper. This is because the professor would often make mistakes as they draw and would erase parts. In addition, they would use multiple colours to make the image communicate more information. Impossible to capture this without a digital camera.
Today: I would do Ipad + digital camera for any class... I would just dump the camera pictures into a folder labeled for that lecture along with my .odf / .doc / what-ever text format.
Works great!
Huh? [devShell.org]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Typing?
Handwriting?
Copying diagrams by hand?
Don't your mobile phones take videos? Record the lecture. Take photos of the diagrams. Narrate your own thoughts and comments.
Deleted
I'd probably use my cell to get the photo, but either way...
From TFA:
I could never type fast enough to keep up with the professor...
WTF? You write faster than you type?
That's bizarre. Learn to touch-type, it'll serve you well.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I use my Livescribe, too, in the corporate world. Pen and paper, instant sketches, others can quickly annotate my drawings right there. Works anywhere, and being able to sync audio with the writing is beyond belief helpful. Highly recommended for any student or professional who needs to take notes!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
My cell phone is probably the single most important tool I use every day, for such occasions as:
- Using the camera to take a pic of the whiteboard, and sending it to everyone.
- Using the audio recorder to record a conversation or lecture in detail.
- Sending tweets as a to-do list.
- Shared calender functions let me set up meetings with people.
- Video recorder is available if I want to grab a clip off a multi-media presentation or demo.
- Using IM features to quickly touch others for information.
- Using google maps and GPS to see satellite overhead of where I'm at.
- Adding contact information for new people I meet.
- Making phone calls.
- Driving car salesmen crazy.
All in a pocket sized device with about 3-4 days of battery life. Oh, it syncs with the bluetooth in my car. Plays music. Is extendable by adding new apps. Works just about anywhere (wi-fi FTW!). And lots more. Future features look even more useful.
Just be sure to drop it in to silence mode before sitting in a meeting.
...is the best thing that ever happened to the human mind.
Taking notes is distracting, and yes - most of us have some kind of note taking capacity either via our smartphones, mobilphones or pc's. But they are NOT as practical as the pen. The pen - you have - here and now, no need to "boot-up-your-pen" or click on some application deeply hidden in your cellphone somewhere... ...yes - you KNOW you have it, but you'll rather prefer to REMEMBER it rather than bother with all the "clicking", so your brain gets trained to remember things better - and what do you know...it WORKS!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I tend to use a pen and paper, unless the meeting/lecture is a hands-on course involving software. My reasoning goes like this: I only want a note taker/diagram editor, so given the weight and the probability of failure for the device, I choose a couple of pens and some paper over a computer.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
I was one of those students who used pen and paper in lectures, and I have to agree that it's a more effective way of learning. I did take the time to add additional notes later to "decode" what wasn't legible.
My approach was to get down everything on the board and as much as possible that was said - including student questions and interjections.
This certainly worked for me - I had a GPA of 7, won scholarships, University Medals and Distinguished Scholar awards.
My son (who is in a special school for gifted students) uses a TabletPC. Except for the slippery feel, it seems to be the best of both worlds. Once the handwriting recognition is trained, you have the kinaesthetic sensory input of handwriting, the ability to make diagrams and formulae, and the clarity of formatted text. It will be interesting once the technology matures.
Taking notes has always detracted from my understanding of a lecture. A considerable portion of my attention is spent keeping things in short term memory until you can write them down. Meanwhile, the professor is already saying new things.
I rarely manage to write down the special insights that the professor says out loud but does not write on the board, even though these are often the most valuable parts of the lecture.
Now days I take notes with an electronic pen that records audio along with the notes I'm taking, and can play them back synchronized. But it's not as good as a video lecture would be.
I take the notes with a pen and paper and also record everything with a voice recorder. Since I'm taking mostly math courses, it works out quite well. I focus on writing the formula with annotations, and then when the lecture is over, I reconstruct the whole thing. The annotations help to connect the voice recording and my scribbles. That takes some extra time, of course, but the end result is detailed lecture, with everything on a blackboard carefully reconstructed. As a last shot, I typeset the whole thing in LaTeX (if I have time).
I think, if you start using computer (tablet or whatever), you won't have the ``instant connection to the recording media" that pen and paper provide.
As a side note, my favorite professor normally creates some handwritten outline of the lecture, but all the proofs and staff he does on the fly. By accident, while talking to him, I've mentioned I have recorded and typeset his lectures. He looked at them and liked them so much he asked me if he can use them as a supplementary material for his course(s). I didn't mind at all, of course.
Notes should not be taken during lectures. Take notes while you do the readings. All you have to do is note any interesting anecdotes, and record examples, as they often appear on the tests with little change.
Decades later, I still remember watching my classmates furiously scribbling stuff in calc class as though they'd never heard of this stuff until moments ago, while I sat back, relaxed, yet confused... And then suddenly realizing, they probably had never heard of this stuff, because they did not read their textbook...
Even in those fluffy politically correct liberal arts classes, you can pretty much guess what the lecturer is going to talk about.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The best bet for notetaking is a smartpen, and pay the money for a handwriting recognition program so you can index them properly. A good one will let you record the lecture and keep in sync with what you were writing. Your mileage may vary on the legal issues around recording a lecture.
This way you get a paper book, an electronic version of the notes as backup, but then the paper is also the backup if your computer gets blown up or stolen etc.
My thermodynamics professor last semester had amazing penmanship, and he inspired me to work on my horrible chicken scratches. I almost never took notes in class because my notes were simply too awful-looking, so I didn't enjoy the process of writing. I worked at my penmanship with some online guides, and bought a slightly weightier pen (Parker IM gel). After practicing my cursive over the winter break and writing at every possible moment, I've seen some definite improvement. More importantly, I now enjoy writing and looking at the finished product. I recently bought a $25 fountain pen and some $5 Piccadilly notepads (Moleskine lookalikes), and my notes have improved even more. Anyways, I think that if we worked on our penmanship a little, we'd enjoy taking notes in class a lot more. And correspondingly, we'd get more out of each lecture! It definitely worked for me.
And I can do it effectively well at that too. Formulas are easy in Word '07. Pressing ALT + '=' creates an equation space which, after learning all the ins and outs of the shorthand methodologies, became a breeze to use. For diagrams I use Dia. Its much quicker than drawing and I can do multiple diagrams in a single page for a single day's lecture.
I have not touched paper for notes in almost a year. Last time I did so was due to the professor making it a rule to not use laptops/netbooks in class (and even then, everything was on slides on the net, so taking notes was moot). I started this in physics of all things, where equations are very hefty. I did notes from the book and learned how fast I was able to take notes and decided to take it from there to class. I ended up with clean notes that were easy to read. My test notes (we were allowed a single sheet of paper full of notes) was a simple copy and paste of formulas on a 2 column page, printed on both sides of the sheet. I aced all my tests thanks to them. I continued using this method for 3 quarters of physics, all three ended with my highest marks I've had in a while.
Sure I goof off during lectures by being on the net and reading articles and such, but I mainly only do this for things I have knowledge on or if the topic is no where near the material we need to be learning.
I think the best solution would be a tablet that's specially designed to suit notetaking. Pen and paper is great because of its flexibility (as per article, ability to draw), and digital methods are good because the text can be retrieved as actual text later, rather than an image or a poor OCR.
So it seems that the ideal solution would be a capacitative touchscreen tablet with a deformable screen like the one that was rumoured to be a possibility for the iPad. i.e. where the screen can create raised and lowered areas to simulate, say, a keyboard. This is necessary because typing on glass, like I'm doing now on my iPod touch, is really annoying—one needs some kind of physical feedback to hit the keys accurately.
The reason for capacitivity (?) is that this would allow one to draw with a specially designed stylus: when I began to draw the screen would be able to detect my hand resting on the screen and ignore it, while the small point of the stylus would be recognised. Alternatively you could combine a resistive and capacitative touchscreen in the same way— capacitative sees your hand, resistive your hand and the stylus: the screen just draws the difference between the two.
The benefit of this setup is that it allows one to switch from typing (best for recording words) to drawing (best for drawng diagrams) without having to do anything but pick up the stylus: as soon as its presence was detected on the screen the keyboard would simply melt out of the way.
p.s. Feel free to make one of these and send me the prototype for free ;)
"CS student continues to take class notes with pen and paper while her fellow students" "CS student ... her ..."
I call bullshit.
If you use a tablet, with some sort of handwriting ability, you can get the best of both worlds. Add a camera, and its even better.
Biggest problem is battery life. My pad of paper wont run out 1/2 thru the day..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Take that up with the profs. I would welcome this, if my profs actually released such material. In classes where slides or notes are released that closely line up with the lectures, I don't take notes.
Why use either primarly? Merge them into different tasks.
"I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board"
That's the perfect example! It's much easier to copy that by hand, and then copy it to the PC later, at home. This also promotes revision of the class-work, possibly increasing your productivity.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I wrote down a lot during the lectures, and I feel this helps memorize things, and get a better understanding of the formulas as well. See, when you're writing down complicated math, you can only do it at a reasonable speed if you understand the notation. This forces you to really _understand_ what all the subscripts and superscripts mean. In addition, you reinforce your memory by writing stuff down because several types of memory are involved at the same time. As if this wasn't enough, you're forced to systematize and abbreviate things, because writing down every single word would be stupid.
I think pen and paper have a bright future. Eventually someone will figure out a way to digitize them (i.e. actually recognize handwriting, and to some extent, diagrams and formulas). So I'm keeping my written notes until that happens.
As an old fart, 30 years experienced draftsman (a trade that "changed" due to computers, making my artistic ability and talent obsolete) I gotta go with good old writing utensils.
I've evolved and "embrace" CAD technology, but scribbling/doodling on paper is the best way to focus the mind. When I draw I want as little interference as possible between my brain/eyes and my hand.
Maybe I'm weird though.
I'm no longer in class... So I'm not taking notes from a professor's lecture... But when we're having a meeting with clients or going over a new installation I'll usually take notes with my netbook.
'[While taking notes on a laptop] every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.'
That's where the built-in camera on my netbook comes in handy. It's pointed in the wrong direction, so I have to turn the netbook around or hold the page up in front of the camera or something... But it's great for grabbing diagrams that I can't easily type in.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
If you like taking notes using a Palm PDA, I would assume you'd like using an N800 at least as much. I take notes using Xournal for Maemo, using a combination of zoom and scrolling to compensate for the smallness of the screen compared to paper. The software isn't perfect, my main complaint being that I have to manually save often to avoid data loss in the case of an occasional hardware or software crash, but it's good enough to keep up with what's on the board, and it probably rivals paper, while still fitting in my pocket.
It depends on the class for me quite frankly. More mathy classes I take paper notes. More programming classes I type notes on my netbook because my instructor normally ends up editing something 2-3 times and inserting. On paper that results in a lot of arrows.
For other classes that it could go either way I type my notes. I can type faster, and then if I get bored I can check my email and stuff (ie not really pay attention). When the instructor busts out the tables and whatnot I bust out my ASCII art skills.
I find the laptop superior in Art History classes (unless I get distracted by the internet). It helps me google search for things while the teacher is talking (especially the artwork in question if the projector is off color or blurry or someone is sitting in front of me since I have to come to class barely on time due to my schedule which is cramped due to budget cuts).
It also helps clarify when the teacher slurs words and you don't want to slow down the rest of the class because your not sure if you were the only one who couldn't understand "this was painted in nineteen sixty blehd..."
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
People say there is no use for a tablet PC, yet you describe the perfect scenario for one: notetaking. Get a convertible tablet PC (with a keyboard), get OneNote (the best software MS has made IMO) and create searchable notes where you can also draw diagrams. It was a lifesend in medical school. I still have my handwritten notes from undergrad in a box and I can't even read half of it. Ever wonder "hmmm, I remember taking notes on thijakoojis 3 months ago, I wonder where the hell they are?" well I have to do is search in OneNote and it will show me all the pages with that term. You can even export your notes into pdf to read on your ereader.
And sorry but some of us can overcome internet distractions, and I'm pretty sure if I didn't take notes in my classes I would have failed some of them, as professors frequently taught outside of the books, and I have to look at something several times to retain it.
For me the value in writing is primarily the cementing of information in my memory. It's a style of learning. For those of us who work this way, it's not about easily being able to refer back to them. The act of writing itself is a kind of entrenchment of the cognitive pathways, and because of it I almost never have to refer to my handwritten notes. My recollection of them has consistently proven to be very accurate.
Notes I've taken via laptop I do not find as easy to recall, but they are generally more thorough and easier to use for review.
personaly, pen everytime, its distracting using a laptop, and not really much of an advantage. i also prefer to have paper notes to look though. most my lecturers print the slide, so i can annotate them and they make good notes for revision. i see people trying to do it on their laptops but it is so limiting, you can squeeze those last few words down the side, or just diagrams, and lines all over the place...
Just use the built in web cam to snap a shot of the diagram. I do that during meetings and my boss actually asked me to mail copies to her after the meeting. It's all in how you use the technology your given.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
a phone is always with you. I find the iPhone(tm)(r)(c) is very handy when taking notes. What makes it even handier is the way everything in iphone is backed up to your desktop machine which in turn is getting backed up...
I tried using calendars, memos and stuff with nokias. NOT WORTH THE HASSLE, basically I lost all my data periodically and it was hellish to use. iPhone makes it actually easy and I have yet to lose any data.
Usability is king.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
For pity sake, let the student be responsible for their own learning. If they want to use a tool to do it they should be permitted to. At university level, and I'd argue earlier, the student is responsible for learning. If they don't want to learn and are so easily distracted, let them be. That is their choice. Banning an item that might help a student who is there and wants to learn so that a lazy student that doesn't care is not distracted is completely irresponsible. If a student is intent on being distracted they can always do something that doesn't require a computer, like doodle, or even something that you can't prevent like daydream. There are only a couple of exceptions. If the student's distraction becomes disruptive or distracts others (for example a noisy keyboard that prevents concentration) that the lecturer should step in. If the tool interferes with assessment. (eg. Internet in a closed book exam) it should not be permitted (but then I consider closed book exams archaic).
When I lectured part time a lot of lecturers were having trouble with students talking through the lecture. I had a simple approach. I stopped talking if I was being talked over. It worked really well. I treated the students as adults and I gave them respect. I expected the same in return. If they didn't want to be there they were free to leave.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I can type fast enough to keep up with a normal speaker (not auctioneer). My handwriting can't cope with the speed that people talk. For diagrams do both pen and computer perhaps, or use a drawing program. Very personal preference. We didn't have laptops when I was in school so it was moot. I used ultra-short hand and then transcribed.
When I was in college 5 years ago, the instructor had you get a Blackboard account, all course materials were available for download and you could right along on your computer. Most people that practice good 2 hand technique when typing are faster at note taking...so I wonder why this instructor doesn't do this because even without black board course material could be emailed to you.
Me thinks this instructor is behind the times.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I prefer making handwritten notes because I can write things out faster than I type; I add margin-notes, questions/issues to follow-up on and I make diagrams; I doodle during lulls; and most important: transcribing the notes to my computer gives me a second chance to go over it, thus increasing my absorption of the material by repetition.
My grades are consistently high.
Lectures were mostly a waste of time for me, since they were so one-way. I learned from the coursework and the tutorials where I had to put what I had just read into practice.
Lecturers rabbiting on was just a waste of time since they never went at my speed (probably rather slow) and I couldn't stop them and say "I just don't understand that" in any of the subjects where I needed to (e.g. maths) because the classes were too large and time too short.
So personally, I think **** lectures altogether. Some hours with the textbook and the examples are what I want, together with someone to call on when I am stuck.
What we needed at my university was a newsgroup where people could ask the lecturer questions after hours and everyone could see the replies.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board.
I used to have the same problem until I remembered I had a camera in my mobile phone. I use a netbook for note taking these days and when I take a picture I just put a shorthand note in the text regarding when I took the picture of the diagram. Between classes I tidy my notes up and past the image in. What would be a better fix (something missing on the iPad) is a webcam that can be turned to look forwards or backwards on a tablet or netbook.
Why would I want to take notes by hand when I type 3x faster? It's more efficient. The only classes I ever took notes by hand in were math classes, or classes that involved copying diagrams.
It is nearly impossible to take notes using an electronic device in geology courses. As the OP mentioned, diagrams are rather difficult to draw quickly and effectively on electronic devices. Thus I use a pad of engineering paper to write all notes and draw all diagrams. The exception occurs for those times when the lecturer posts slides online beforehand and *never* draws on the blackboard. If necessary I convert to PDF and then use PDFXChange Viewer to annotate, highlight, and draw *very* simple diagrams or point out important parts with arrows. It's nice to have notes directly on the slides and it saves me time since I don't have to correlate notes with each slide during study sessions.
The tablet industry needs to prove that tablets can be fast and accurate when taking notes and diagramming.
-Drache Kubisuro
I don't actually have a netbook right now, but even when I get one, I will be taking hand-written notes.
My attention span is too short when faced with a computer, let alone an internet connection. It's bad enough that while taking those handwritten notes, I'll start writing out something unrelated and lose the thread; if I were able to check my email or look up stuff on Google, I might as well not attend the lecture at all.
I'm working on integrating my handwriting with T9 for notetaking purposes.
As someone with slow and terribly messy hand writing I would have loved to be able to take today's net books into class. I spent most of my university years frantically writing and so focussed on trying to record what was being said or written that I emerged from lectures not having understood anything, only to get home and find my notes were illegible and useless. It was a nightmare.
Unlike most of the others posting my goal in taking notes is not to learn the material. It is to record it with maximum accuracy and recoverability so that when I review it later I understand it, while using the minimum effort so that I can devote my attention to actually understanding what the lecturer is saying. Being able to type most stuff and take the odd web cam grabs and audio would have made my life so much easier.
I found that a small digital camera solved the diagram issue just fine. 5 minutes later at night to integrate the image with my notes and I was ready to go, and it encouraged me to actually re-read my notes. Highlighting or back-editing is easier, making study guides is a snap, I can tap-tap much faster than I can scribble-scribble and since my writing hasn't improved since grade-10 Chem class when I started writing in all-caps, (and it still looks like a composition of someone in grade-4), I actually CAN read, study and share my notes. Go laptop, go!
One place where laptops/software really falls down for me is spatially organizing notes. Writing in the margins ("see page 435.") or organizing notes into blocks, adding diagrams/etc/etc. works so much better on paper than on a laptop. To say nothing of quickly switching pens (colors/line thickness) which isn't to bad on in most programs but also isn't super great. What I don't get though is why the professors can't simply make a base set of notes and use something like I dunno... a photocopier or the internet to distribute them so students don't spend 90% of a class taking notes, but instead actually can pay attention to the prof and note down anything extra that comes up. This is quite a medieval way of doing things (scribe-monks in training?).
You could use a digital pen like Logitech io or LiveScribe that allows you to write on paper, then plug the pen into the netbook/notebook and save a digital copy.
The best datum I can offer is a course I took a few years ago on error control coding.
Each week the prof got somebody to volunteer to take very good notes, type them up in LaTeX, then he would distribute them to the rest of the class for reference. The "scribe", as he called the role, got extra credit. The week I volunteered to be scribe it took 8 hours to turn 2 hours of lectures in to something presentable and machine-readable. This included 28 diagrams in Xfig, plus numerous equations.
I started a night school course last week (private pilot ground school, if you're curious). My notes are by hand, plus some highlighter work in the textbooks. I haven't the slightest interest in transcribing them. Why would I? They're my notes, written by me.
Old-tech really is the best tech some times.
...laura
I'm a big fan re-writing notes, it forces you to re-examine the stuff that didn't totally sink in
during lecture. Rewriting them in digital form makes it that much more portable, cleaner, and
you can bring your friends up to speed faster. Engineering notebooks (wire bound) plus a good
mechanical pencil was what I settled while I was an engineering student. Couple re-writing
the notes in digital form with a audio recording of the lecture and you're golden. Alternatively,
you can scan your notes in and then annotate them.
Tablet computers were always good for homework.
www.alphalinux.org
I even got to be so good at transcribing the notes to LaTeX "cheatsheets" as you call them, that I tried taking notes directly in LaTeX in real time during a (math heavy) lecture. To my great satisfaction I succeded – but then I didn't understand diddly-squat of what I had written down. Slides can be both a blessing and a "PowerPoint Hell". Sometimes the professor surprises you by diverting from the slides and starts writing lots and lots on the blackboard. But the real problem is that the brain can't stay focused for hours, and taking notes keeps me awake during many lectures.
Hi theodp Try a digital pen. It writes on paper (specially printed but you can do that yourself). It uses a ball point refill and has a tiny built in camera which records all of your pen strokes. You can then tick a pre-programmed box on the paper and that page is emailed using the bluetooth on your phone. Simple. If you need more help then please let me know. (UK)
For all of the hype and drama surrounding the ipad and Kindle, there's been a pretty big missed market.
I would pay a _lot_ of money for a 8.5x11" screen that had enough resolution to behave like my old gridded engineering paper. I can't back up engineering paper, and I can't take it around with me easily. I go through about ~1000 sheets/year, and have several boxes of notes I'd love to have with me. In university, a decade ago, I'd take notes and scan them after - that worked, ok. Enough of a pain I don't do it anymore.
Tried the Newton back then, and the Palm too. The resolution resulted in doodles that looked like do-do, not drawings.
It amazed me though - all of my technical documentation is standard A4 PDF's, why don't we have a standard A4 device I can write on a decade later? That's all it has to do!
..don't panic
Not to be a shill, but I've been using the Livescribe Pulsepen for about a year and it's perfect for class notes. It records what you write then uploads your notes to your computer, along with audio that is sync'd to your notes, so you can hear what was being said while you were writing. You can convert notes to text using 3rd party software, but I've found it to be better just to leave it in handwritten form. The search function actually works pretty well for handwritten notes.
Pens are getting better, there are now some pretty good options for recording/writing at the same time and uploading this to your computer later in pdf/audio/video. For example you can checkout Pulse Livescribe. I would like to see a product with Linux support though.
I suspect pen and most importantly, paper will continue to rule for a long, long time. Costs 1 cent. Extremely portable, folds, fits in envelope, notebook, folder, wallet, under school test sheet, under door. Universal compatibility with humans and future generations of pens. Accepts multi-individual notes, in between lines, in any color. Accepts drawings. Lasts generations. The old lady at the store and the five-year-old can use it, update, store, retreive, and afford it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm still amazed that people have failed to realize that digital cameras do a great job of capturing a diagram in a hurry.
I find that pen is the better choice not because of any particular property of the course material or my transcription thereof, but because of the question of attention.
Over my years in school, I've finely honed the art of doodling -- it keeps me just distracted enough I don't start daydreaming without sucking up my attention so I get lost. It allows me to tune in and out as needed.
There's really no netbook equivalent of doodling, and since, in the vast majority of classes, there will come a time when I'm bored, I'm likely to start doing something like checking my email, reading a blog, or, worse, doing some other work, which is far more distracting than doodling. When I've brought laptops to meetings (haven't done it in classes yet), I've found I often miss important information, which is pretty embarrassing.
Until I figure out how to doodle on a computer, I'll keep it out of the classroom.
First, I'll admit, taking notes in a professional context is way easier than class notes. Firstly, I'm an "expert" and rarely if ever actually depend on the notes I take, they are more like reminders. Second, when details are very important there are two vital tools that eliminate the need for writing every single word down: digital audio recorder, and digital camera. I have both of those on my iPhone, though I can't snap a shot and record at the same time (a rare case where multitasking would be nice) I don't have an issue with it in practice as everyone else snaps shots of the whiteboards between erases anyway, so there is a cooperative break for everyone to do that. It's also nice to have a natural break between recordings and new topics based on this micro-epoch in the meetings.
I haven't even tried to find an App that will do several note-taking tasks at once, but, I imagine they exist, so if I really cared I could probably go get one.
In school though, I remember, it was pretty important to capture every detail. I would be very tempted, if it was allowed (and I know, it probably isn't) to simply bring an HD camcorder with optical zoom, a mini-tripod, and tape every lecture and the writing on the board, etc. then I would note important moments with short reminders and probably a time reference in the recording.
Oh man am I glad I don't have to go to school and take notes like that anymore :)
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
For me, I found that I was much less distracted when I was taking notes on paper. I had one particular class (it was a CS class) that was pretty difficult. The first half of the semester I would bring my laptop to class every day, and attempt to follow along with the Powerpoint slides and take notes on each one. By the time the midterm came up, I realized I was taking almost no notes and was spending most of my time during class on Slashdot and other distracting sites instead of paying attention. My grade on the midterm exam reflected this. To solve the predicament I found myself in, I decided to go the pen-and-paper route for the rest of the semester. Not only did my grades come back up for the final, but I can definitely say I learned a lot more in the second half of the course.
If you've got wireless internet, you've got a distraction waiting to happen. If you really need to concentrate on the lecture material, I suggest leaving the laptop at home/dorm/apartment and coming to class with a pen and some paper.
Instead of going full-bore typing, and not really absorbing the data, I prefer to read it, analyze it, and not write down the fluff. drop useless words, in my own sort of shorthand.
Couple that system with a 2H pencil and some graph paper, and you're laughing.
Sent from my PDP-11
They listen. They learn.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
One benefit of the pencil-and-paper approach (other than its immediacy and simplicity) is that you invariably have to rewrite your lecture notes soon after the lecture to get them into a form suitable for rereading later on when doing coursework and revising for exams. This extra step is vital (a) to embed the information in your brain and (b) to help you identify the material that you haven't fully understood. I don't really see this happening with people who take notes on their computers.
[While I'm dispensing advice: highlighting chunks of prose in your textbooks is no good. Take separate notes on what you read for the same reasons you need to rewrite notes taken during lectures.]
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What are people trying to accomplish with attending lectures and taking notes that can not be done in other ways, like watching videos or reading books? Learning by working on problem sets, or better, real world problems, drawing on digital materials you search through and read as you need (on-demand learning) seems more appropriate these days.
An essay by me on this, about the poor use of technology by schools because schools are using an obsolete social paradigm:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Here are lots more of my writings organizing collections of links and ideas about college issues in general:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Study: Doodling Helps You Pay Attention http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882127,00.html
I prefer to mix doodling & note taking. Much harder to doodle with a laptop.
- Jasen.
He did not say that this was the third time taking HIS class...he may have just met her.
Or maybe he (or another teacher) HAS suggested she improve her note-taking strategies. Students don't always follow the advice teachers give for succeeding in a given class.
I was teaching chemistry at a small private college a few years ago, and had one girl in class with her laptop open every day. She consistently scored in the 20's on tests.
The rest of the class sat somewhat paying attention (as much as you can in an 8:00 class, I guess), listening, writing down what I indicated was material they may wish to take note of or review later. They did MUUUUCH bettter on the tests.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
I love my tablet PC and MS OneNote. And I know there are other programs out there that will do the same in other OS's. I am in my 2nd year of med school and each of our lectures typically comes with a PowerPoint or PDF. I download it, print it to OneNote and then take notes directly on the instructor's presentation. I can draw, type and highlight. It is by far the best combination of writing/drawing/notetaking that I have ever used. Furthermore, it allows me to organize by course, exam and lecture. It is really rather keen.
Nothing is better for note taking than pe nand paper, and many other tasks aswell which requires freeform representations of something.
As a coder, i also plan on paper anything complex.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
The Logitech io Personal Digital Pen is one example: you write, and it records what you do. I'm not sure it's the Logitech one, but I also recall seeing a pen that records voice at the same time, so you can actually track back what drawing you made with which commentary. AFAIK it works with specially coded paper.
Insert
That's a fairly good idea you know..quick, get a business patent!
only half joking...they'd probably give it to you...
They used to make ball point pens that had four (or just three, don't recall exactly now) colors on the same pen. You could click down on one or the other, etc. Seems I had one like 45-50 years ago or something like that. Wonder if they still make them?
I never liked pens that much though, (all the way back to real fountain pens you had to suck the ink up into), I always liked either a mechanical pencil for fine writing, or a black warrior (a particular brand) #2 for fast and dirty writing.
But for *fun*, one of those old 100 lb cast iron harley davidson rebadged as a royal or underwood mechanical typewriters. You got a nice workout and they made a helluva nice racket when you typed. Even if you sucked at typing, they were still fun.
Trebek, if you are selling penismightiers I'll take a dozen!
But will it really mighty my penis?
You should try typing out the lecture. Here are my results through high school and college (and for the record, you're all wimps and sissies):
biology notes
Building Brains (it was a quasi "ai" class)
psych
other crap
Also: learn LaTeX.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the proper tablet PC option. I'm in 3rd year EEng and there's about 15-20 people in my classes (myself included) that use tablet PCs.
I bought a 5 year old motion M1300 off ebay for about $300 and it works great for note taking. I'm using OneNote 2007 and have no problems with speed. There is no way I could type in graphs and equations fast enough but writing on the tablet using a proper stylus is just as easy as writing on paper. Plus my notes are way better organized now since I can re-order and index pages.
I don't see the I-pad being any sort of competitor to these devices. Most people use either a cheap HP convertible tablet or a Lenovo X-series tablet. All the tablet computers use some sort of wacom tablet built into the screen. I very much doublt that capacitive touch could work for handwriting, even If you had a proper stylus.
Most teachers have powerpoint slides online and I just drop them into my notes and take notes on top of them. It's the best of both worlds because I don't need to print out the slides but I can still write on them.
As a college freshman myself, I find both to be useful in different situations. Electrical engineering class obviously has plenty of diagrams, so paper and pen works best for that. Math has all sorts of stuff that's much harder to do on a computer. But psychology has (almost) no diagrams or equations, so typing works better for that simply because it's faster. Look, this whole discussion is almost pointless. People are going to use whatever they feel the most comfortable with. Go to any college and you'll see that neither paper nor laptops are extinct.
I got a hold of a Tablet PC during my Junior year of my CS degree, just in time for my advanced Algorithms class.
Fun. Lots and lots of fun. Thanks to OneNote I didn't have to touch paper for an entire year. I did everything in OneNote, including homework, which was exported and emailed into my profs.
OneNote syncs up notes with audio recordings taken during lectures/meetings/etc, and my Tablet had a 3d Mic Array, which means it had (IIRC) 3 microphones spread out around it and I could tell the software which direction to emphasis recording from.
The model was a Toshiba M200, 12" screen long before the current trend of smaller laptops was in style. Everyone was lugging around their 15" monster laptop that had an hour or so battery life, at the start of each lecture they would rush to the power outlets so that they could feed their machine. My 3hr battery life lasted me through an entire day of lectures.
Studies have shown [citation needed] that the physical act of writing notes helps with both comprehension and recall. I have always hated taking notes out, my fine motor skills are horrible and I writing hurts my writes like hell, but the benefits were so obvious that I continued to do so anyway.
The only problem with laptops in classrooms is that I tended to post a lot on /. during boring lectures...
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Hate to boost Microsoft on Slashdot, but I've been taking notes on a tablet (Toshiba M200 Portege) in class using Microsoft OneNote 2010 (the beta) running on Windows 7. There's some great features in OneNote and, while there's definitely a few kinks to work out, at its base it's a pen and paper and you can take the same notes as you would on a regular notebook, and sort it all out later. The full-screen mode makes it really non-distracting, and a pretty great solutions. The fact that trying to use Windows 7 with a pen is annoying and somewhat slower than with a keyboard and mouse breaks off the distraction factor. Ignoring the fact that the M200 has some serious flaws and is a relatively underpowered machine. Plus, if someone forgets notes, I can send them a quick PDF of the day's lecture with two clicks. Makes me kind of a popular guy.
Although I graduated some years back, I still advocate the use of pen and paper to students because of final exams. You are going to be sitting in the gymnasiums writing 15 hours of exams in the space of a few days. By hand. On paper.
If you haven't been training up your hand all semester, your arm is going to break down after about 20 minutes because your muscles are not used to manual writing. Good luck being effective on your exams when your wrist is about to fall off.
I experienced this a couple of years out of school when I chose to write the Professional Practice Exam. About 45 minutes into the three hour exam in the freezing cold gym at University of Toronto, I just about gnawed my hand off.
Having tried working with Tablets to take notes, there are some distinct problems...The primary problem with tablets, and I am sure it will be so with the Apple tablet, it that when you want to take notes, you apply some amount of pressure with your palm on the writing surface, and the remainder applied at the stylus point to take down what you are copying. The two points of pressure, one general and one specific throw off the tablets touch surface, and the software loses track of everything... Another issue is calibration... for whatever reason, the tablet PC's lose track of where the stylus is touching the screen, sometimes it's off 1/16, sometimes it can be off as much as 1/4". It's annoying at best to work around these kind of issues... I think that a keyboard for text only notes is still the best... and if diagrams or pictures are involved, pen and paper can't be beat.
This is semi-offtopic, but it's something I wish I'd realized sooner. After getting two bachelor's degrees, near the end of my graduate program in math the following occurred to me: I didn't really have to take class notes in the first place. In my last year or so, I just put everything away, kept my desk clear, and just listened to the professor. Anything I needed later was already in a book somwhere I could look up, so what the hey. Relaxing comfortably and watching the professor fully all the time kept my train of thought on-topic and focussed, freed me from up-and-down context switching, and left me better prepared later on.
I know it's a hard habit to shake with everyone in schools everywhere taking notes all the time. But truthfully I would have been better off never doing that in the first place, and just listening carefully.
Maybe I'm (a) different, or (b) mistaken, or (c) on to something that one or two other people might find useful. Wish I'd known it sooner.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
No, I'm long past it all - I got through with very good results. It was all much better after I realised how to deal with it.
But you are right that 4/5ths of it was a complete waste of time other than for putting on my CV.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I still find that when working out ideas, nothing beats graph paper. Believe me, I have tried using the computer. Once the ideas are solidified, sure, use the computer to make a pretty version. But when taking notes, working things out, etc, you can't beat paper and pencil.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I wish this crowd would wake up and look more seriously at the tablets that have been around for 3 years. I know I should get off your lawn.
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
I only use my Newton MessagePad 2000 for note taking man! Are you nuts?!
OK really? graph paper is my preference. I do own a few Newtons and they were great note takers.
The best solution is to make a deal with a professor to promise to pay close attention to what they say if they'll give you a copy of their notes later.
Otherwise, what works best for you is best for you. Try different note taking techniques http://www.cui.edu/studentservices/learningservices/index.aspx?id=2416 and see how they work out.
I favor spider notes myself as they develop the webs of association more like what the brain does. Right after class write the main topic in the center of a page. Around it write the main subtopics, drawing lines connecting them to the center and each other if appropriate. Around each of those write small notes giving details and such, again drawing connecting lines. Get a few friends to do this, and when you get together to compare, compile a best-fit spider note from all of them.
For most thorough coverage: during lecture, listen, draw diagrams and tape record the lecture. Later, listen to the recording and write notes in your best working style around the diagrams. Before my second year in grad school (of ten) was over, I gave up on the 'afterwards' part, being content with listening to the recordings and looking at the diagrams for any and all studying.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Like others I would tend to simply use a pen for note taking rather than a computer, but that may be because when I was a student computers were not versatile enough (by some way) to allow this type of use.
New technology though allows you to take shortcuts, to be more efficient, but beware of using technology left right and centre, it may be your downfall. I personally find that any type of full-length recording is generally a waste of time: you have to listen or view the full thing to be able to get it again. Sure you can fast forward and the like, but.
Always remember the purpose of note-taking, in whatever form you may do this. The purpose is to help you remember. More specifically, to help you remember what you have _learnt_. I will emphasise again: the lesson, course, presentation or whatever it is that you are attending, is there to provide you with the information you need. Your _first_ job is to understand it there and then and, as much as possible, remember the key tenets of it. The greater the detail you can remember the better. Any form of note taking should support that purpose and only that purpose. You should not use notes as a substitute for understanding things as they are explained. Surely you have a course book, a synopsis, some form of support, some way to find the appropriate information online or in some printed form or other support, so why be the scribe to take it all down? Someone else has done it. Your sole job is to make sure that you understand and you know how to get to the information when you need it.
I remember repeating a year of studies, way back. That repeat year, I relied on my notes from the previous year. I did not take new notes, except for minor corrections and to better structure (put hierarchy) into my notes. Instead, I focused on learning (i.e. understanding & retaining). It made a huge difference to the amount I actually was able to digest. Ever since that time I always swore, with great success, to take only the bare minimum of notes and to make sure that by the end of the lesson I had understood all of the material. This meant that I was free to actually apply this knowledge immediately and only occasionally use my notes as a pointer or reference rather than reviewing my notes to learn what had been given in a lesson before I could begin to understand - as I had been doing before.
With all of this in mind, I believe that technology can help you produce the best of notes. But do not stick to one technology. Continue to use whatever is most appropriate for the task at hand. Sometimes the pen might be best, other times a camera will be best for snaps, the computer can help with storage and calculations for instance. Rarely but sometimes you will want a video or a sound recording of a small duration for illustration purposes (studying behaviour or motion comes to mind). The key is that all of those should be eventually kept in a single place, with an index so that they are all easily accessible. The least amount of work that this creates for you, the most you will get out of your system.
hth,
walkey
But what does iPad have to do with this? Even if we ignore the fact that iPad doesn't even have a stylus,
Oh really?
How people so soon forget that all the Apple products take advantage of the growing ecosystem of third party accessories and hardware built to work with the iPod/iPhone...
writing with such is laggy and just messes up the text.
So how long did you personally use an iPad with a stylus? Not at all you say? Then the video observation of the iPad in action using he aforementioned stylus? None are there?
Then perhaps you are basing your observation on Windows tablets/netbooks that "aren't good at anything" as Apple noted, and wait to see what it's like taking notes on a device that is purpose-built around touch based data entry - just like a pen and pencil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are already a lot of iPhone styluses around, I see no reason they should not work equally well on the iPad. Is there another area you were not liking?
It seems that addresses the only complaint I read there that could apply to the iPad, everything else you list would be doable and as you say the form factor is better suited to note taking than a wider form factor would be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I disliked doing Chemistry Stoiciometry because of all the sub case and super casing. I'm sure different types of maths its bad too. Maybe theres scientific notation out there, but I don't know about it.
God spoke to me.
I use OneNote on a ThinkPad Tablet PC. I hand-write notes and diagrams, OneNote converts them later; I add keyboard-entered text when I can, particularly with key text, keywords and metadata that OneNote can search and retrieve very efficiently and effectively. It has still to be one of the best software products that Microsoft have ever released.
I am a CS Programming major and took notes for the first year and a half by hand before I realized I could never possibly write as fast as I can type. Life has been great since the transition. I don't get writer's cramp in my hand and I am able to utilize effective memorization tactics like bolding and color coding with one click. Sometimes you remember things better by where they were on the page - how they stood out. It's quite difficult to do that writing. However, I think it comes down to a matter of typing ability. If you're a great typist - I think you should try it out for a week or so. If not, stick with the hand-written notes. No shame in doing it the old fashioned way.
You can use any iPhone stylus with the iPad (or so I am presuming since the technology is the same).
As for the video, you know the old saying "You had me at..."?
Well, you lost me at "right click". With a stylus. What kind of UI is that?
Not to mention the billions of tiny, tiny buttons everywhere. As a technical student myself I understand the appeal of having all those things at hand, mind you... it's just that after years of using so many different devices, I just think it could be so much better and less user hostile, so that not just engineeering students could benefit from it...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...only if you can write faster than you type and still read it.
The fact of the matter is that I spend many more hours working on my laptop in my course and at home, then taking notes in class (and handwriting), so I can type more accurately and faster than I can write. If I were taking handwritten notes, it would: A) take more concentration (because I would have to look at the page to stay on the lines, as opposed to touch typing, and reading directly off the board) B) look like sh*t because I would be in a rush, and would make the notes useless. C) take at least 2x longer than typing, meaning that by the time I have written down what's on the board, the prof. has already wiped it clean... not to mention I wouldn't have heard a word while I was taking notes.
If you do it properly, you will have a strong word processing application. NOT MS Word or OpenOffice, but something more basic, like Notepad, TextEdit, TextMate, VIM, or Nano. Then you will have two documents open, one for notes, and the other for questions. And the last thing you will have open is a simple drawing application to sketch out something important.
You could do all that in Pages, Word or OpenOffice, but If you are not familiar with the interface, and you can't insert drawings and graphs quickly, then there is no point. You don't want to ever be in an instant where you are fumbling around in the dark.
IF you write-and-forget (never read your notes again, having saved them somewhere in obscurity), notetaking on a computer is worse.
IF you try to write down everything that is said, instead of sorting and prioritizing as you would more obviously have to using pen and paper, notetaking on a computer is worse.
IF you have no system of differentiating headlines, topics, quick asides, stuff to look up later, direct quotes, etc. etc., notetaking on a computer is worse.
But if you actually think about what media you are using, and adapt your notetaking to it, I have found that the increased throughput, self-and-techonology-enforced order and readability make my lecture and class notes made on a computer far superior than anything I might have had time for in hand. And yes, I have tried taking notes by hand recently. It sucks.
PS: Your milage may vary, some people are helped by doodling, illustrating, making their own charts and connecting bits with arrows. Such people should not, however, make any claims that computers are worse for notetaking, only that they are worse for them. My statements above should be read with similar qualifications.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
so I never had the option of taking a laptop to class.
But I do wonder if it's possible these days to video record the lecture?
It seems to me that a video of the class would capture any diagrams, while you could annotate the resulting video with notes taken by hand.
Penis mightier?
However, if your notes contain a lot of mathematical symbols or technical diagrams
I can't speak to the technical diagrams, but for mathematical symbols and equations, I've found the following to work reasonably well:
Type some pseudo-LaTeX. Don't sweat the {}-grouping or the $ (or $$) around your equations. For instance something like this (replace the parentheses with the named characters):
For each (alpha) (element of) (blackboard bold Z)_p^*, (exists) x, y: x(alpha) + y(alpha)^-1 = 1
You can cheat and use 'a' instead of alpha, "in" instead of (element of), and Z instead of (blackboard bold Z).
Or, at least on X Windows, you can set up your ~/.XCompose to contain compose key sequences for all your mathematical characters. That works quite well for me.
So, for instance, I press "shift+shift, space, a" to input alpha, "shift+shift, i, n" for "element of", "shift+shift, equals, greater" for an implication arrow, etc.
Why does that work? The main problem with inputting mathematics, as I understand it, is that a lot of mathematics typesetting systems (i.e. Word's equation editor) require you to spend a lot of time in the input phase. So,
Whether it's fast an non-distracting enough for you, that's of course for you to decide. But for me it's like inputting text a bit slowly, rather than "oh noes!!! Teh maths!!1!"
Knuth? Is that you?
[FUCK BETA]
pen is the ultimate tool for taking notes.
laptop lacks free drawing tools (combined to keyboard noting, free software, for many operating systems, _small_, preferable portable...)
but if you can video the whole stuff then you can freely concentrate on the lecture and if you want, use pen from time to time for clarification.
laptop is limited to technology, in one or more ways and to your abilities to use it.
pen is limited to you. only.
I was finishing undergrad at around the time Microsoft first tried the waters with tablet PCs. I think they failed mostly because they were a niche market, so they were underpowered and expensive. The people who had one were actually quite happy using them for note-taking though.
One area where tablets could be brilliant for math and engineering students is in inputting math equations, since it's clumsy to generate large equations with a keyboard and mouse. I don't know what the status of commercial offerings is now, but if anybody is interested in looking into this, we open-sourced our fourth-year design project to make a math recognizer. Get it here.
The goal was to recognize the major symbols use in math equations and recognize their placement in relation to each other, so we could typeset and send the equation to a computer algebra system. I feel we actually did a pretty good job with the time and resources we had available.
Since it was for Microsoft tablets we did it in C#. But anyone looking into iPad development can probably get something out of the algorithms we used for 2D placement recognition, at least.
As it is now the program is at about the point where it is good enough to be useful but not perfect by any means. We needed about 10-20 times more samples for training the symbol recognizer, so it will misrecognize many of them. We could also use better post-processing for ignoring stray strokes and resolving overlapping symbols. The 2D placement algorithm is actually really good though and will correctly parse most equations as long as you're a bit careful.
You can do so at your leisure. Outside the lecture hall.
Deleted
I really enjoyed using the Livescribe pen for taking notes in class. Best of both worlds... you still can hand write the notes, and also get an audio copy of the lecture.
But what does iPad have to do with this? Even if we ignore the fact that iPad doesn't even have a stylus, writing with such is laggy and just messes up the text. You write a lot better on paper. The technology isn't there just yet.
Quite right. It's not a "game changer". This vaporware is not even released. Even if and when it is, it's not using e-ink technology; there's no significant difference to any other tablet type device that is already available.
Dear Slashdot, can we quite with the obligitary Apple product placement in every story?
Can write cursive. Can't write shorthand, but can write cursive. But between writing rushed cursive for two hours v. typing, I prefer the latter and get much more information down.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Am I the only one that used both methods to take notes? I had a notebook for writing diagrams in, and used my computer. Whenever a diagram came up I'd switch to the notebook, and write in my computer "See Diagram 4b" or something like that. Semmed to work well enough.
I take notes with a Tablet PC...often course handouts for the lecture are in (horrors!) Microsoft office. I can take notes using One note or AutoDesk Sketbook to capture those pesky diagrams. Erasing is certainly a lot less messy than pen/paper. And I can still type notes too. It's a win-win for me.... If only the iPad was a real tablet pc....sigh....
And your students taking notes are probably delighted that you don't write at maximum speed.
You need exotic symbols and shift movements to accurately copy math.
Yes, it's a Microsoft product, but they bought it after it was already kickass, and have done very little to promote it, which sucks because it's an amazing product.
You can record audio of lectures, then text search for keywords later. That alone makes it the best thing I've seen for dealing with lectures, but throw in all of its prodigious abilities to organize and reorganize notes, bring in links, images, video, etc from other sources....
Sadly, it's not a Mac/Linux product, but if you're carrying a Windows laptop to class with you, I don't think you could do much better.
Dead battery during critical lecture.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Good god, I hated professors who did that, who told us to "sit and listen" because there was no need to take notes, they were already provided. It isn't even just that the slides provided where often terrible; it has to do with my personal style of learning. The very act of writing down lecture notes -- which for me involves summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating the subject matter being discussed -- is how I learn. I will probably never again look at what I wrote down either.
This was especially true for me in engineering or physics. Working my way through complex equations was the only way to really understand them; it was ten times harder to try to follow pre-printed steps for me. In law school, I would write analytical summaries of the material I had heard or read to retain knowledge. Worked fine.
And while I think it would have been just awful for taking notes in engineering (with all of the equations, diagrams, etc), the laptop was a godesend for the massive volume of notes taken during law school. I seriously wonder how many trees are slaughtered at the end of every semester when people print out their notes to prepare for finals. Most classes, I ended up with 50-150 pages of dense typewritten notes. While I didn't print those out like some did -- as I noted, I usually never look at my notes again -- I would still create and print out a 5-20 page outline of the essentials to study for each of my classes.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
OK I remember it being called "foolscap" in elementary school. Why the heck is it called that?
I am a strong supporter of the pen and paper approach, I have outlined the arguments in a lecture I held recently; I call it The write right rite, and it is available for download.
I'm a teacher (in a technical university), I've discussed this with my students some time after that lecture and asked them whether they apply my hints, and whether they find them efficient. I got really good feedback from them - which is not surprising, since I've been using those techniques myself when I was a student.
The recommendations I make in my lecture are "platform agnostic", they will work with any mechanism of writing data down. For example, I recommend that the text is translated from one language into another, after you remove the redundancy from it; also - you can transform it from one form into another (ex: what you heard in words can be represented as a chart; or a tree).
From my experience, with handwriting you can process the input data in multiple passes before you commit it to paper; the more you process it, the more you think about it - the better you understand it. In other words, it will take you less time to review the notes before an exam, and the data will stay in your mind long after the course is over.
A notebook is certainly not as fast as 'pen and paper'. A PDA - same thing: I used to rely on my Palm PDA a lot, and I was very fast with both of their text input systems, but I could only keep up with courses where the data were just text and where the teachers used a lot of redundancy in their messages; as soon as there were any diagrams or formula - a Palm just didn't work.
A tablet PC could be a good alternative - it is a sheet of paper of an infinite size + you get a lot of aids (calculator, search function, drawing tools). But it is bigger than paper, it consumes power...
The saddest poem
Personally, my main subjects have been law, languages and literature. I rarely had to draw diagrams etc, it was all text. In this case a laptop (or a PDA with a good folding keyboard like my original Palm Portable Keyboard) is ideal. It's just so much faster to type and it requires much less effort. As an added bonus, you can actually read the notes afterwards. I don't consider myself super fast but in most situations I can write down word for word what someone says. It doesn't require much concentration and I can sort of bypass the brain so I can reflect on the things said as well.
IAAAL - I am actually a lawyer