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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Note-Taking Device For Conferences?
First time accepted submitter Duncan J Murray writes "I will be attending a 3-day science conference soon, consisting mainly of lectures, and was wondering what people thought would be the ultimate hardware/software combo note-taking device, taking into account keyboard quality, endurance, portability, discretion & future ease-of-reference. Is a notepad and pen still king? What about an Ipad? N900? Psion 5mx? A small Thinkpad X-series? And if so which OS? Would you have a GUI? Which text-editor?"
Just a pen and paper.
No other device can keep up, and you get bogged down with operating the device, missing key points.
Pocket recorder as backup.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Does technology *always* provide a better solution? I own an iPad, but really, a yellow pad and a pen and pencil are what I use at meetings and conferences...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Pencil and Paper (if you want to digitize it later, use a sheet fed scanner or just a regular scanner).
keyboard quality: full travel keys
endurance: 8 hours on 4 AA batteries. Replacement batteries are cheap and ubiqutous
discretion: no flip up screen
portability: 3 pounds
future ease-of-reference: plain text files are the easiest to search & archive
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which is why a smartpen like the Livescribe helps. It is just pen and paper to operate, but it lets you upload your notes afterwards, makes them searchable, and records sound to go with your notes in case you do miss anything. Knowing that means you don't have to write every little thing down, but can stick to key points and jump to the relevant part of the audio simply by pointing to the note with your pen on your paper notes, or clicking on the uploaded version on your computer later. It can even automate most of the conversion of written notes to text.
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
What you will need to do is make contacts, do a bit of social networking and get to know the other people there (who are presumably in the same field that you are). For that, nothing beats a short written note - technology is far too clunky and it doesn't impress anyone, these days.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Many people don't understand the value of taking notes during lectures, especially since many of them these days are accompanied by downloadable or hardcopy slide decks which would seem to make the activity superfluous.
The reason physical notetaking works is that it forces the listener to engage the speaker actively rather than passively, and reorganize/rephrase the speaker's material in his/her own mind in real time, with room for possible challenges to the speaker's POV. At least 90 percent of the value of the notes is achieved by the end of the lecture, so if they turned out to be illegible, or the airline loses the bag on the flight home, you still have the overwhelming portion of the value. You've listened well.
I wasn't happy with OneNote on a standard laptop, but I used it for a while with my convertible tablet and it's almost a dream. Seriously, I complain endelessly about virtually every piece of software I use, I use different OSes at work and home in part so that they piss me off in different ways instead of all the same way... and I had virtually no complaints about how OneNote worked. A couple "this would be awesome" feature wishes, but that's different.
So my standard answer to this question is a convertible tablet + OneNote.
Benefits over paper&pencil is shareability, backup-ability, and (surprisingly good!) searchability. Drawbacks are high cost, heavy weight, and you have to deal with battery life.
Two more advantages of a smartpen: 1) it's less distracting for others than a laptop or tablet. Most people just think it's a fountain pen. 2) It's less distracting for me. I can't check my email on it.
A: A scribe, held in thrall.
We don't NEED April fools. With the real stories posted today, it's clear that fiction cannot compete in absurdity, shock, disbelief and ultimate dismay.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The best note-taking device for conferences is a graduate student. They do good work and only require a modest amount of feeding.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
If it helps, I made up some ridiculous stories to fool your friends with:
Duke Nukem Forever released
most of game involves jokes about Half-Life 2 Ep. 3
Kim Jong Il, Gaddafi Dead
mad, mad world now almost 7% less mad
Apple now biggest computer manufacturer
HP says it never liked PCs anyway
Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Laden
then finds, kills Higgs boson
Windows, Ubuntu adopt new kindergarden UI
OS X still ignoring touch revolution
Newt Gingrich Runs For President
convinced he'll find his base among moon-men
Liberals Protesting Unemployment, Poverty
Starbucks shares sharply higher
Steve Jobs Dead
meets with Apple board three days later
My Little Pony Now Cool
teenage boys squee in delight
NASA Ends Space Shuttle program
asks if they can bum a ride with anyone
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I will also try not to sound like a smartass, but you were doing it wrong. Effective note taking doesn't mean transcribing what the lecturer or presenter is saying, it means noting the key points and tidbits of information that are interesting to you and will remind you of the rest of the material when you review it later.