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Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom?
Krau Ming writes "After about eight years spent in research, I've made the decision to go back to school — medical school. When I last spent the bulk of my days sitting in lectures, I took notes with paper, and if the professor wasn't technologically impaired, he/she would have posted powerpoint slides as a PDF online for us to print and make our notes on. Since it has been so long, I am looking for some options other than the ol' pen and paper. Is there an effective way of taking notes with a laptop? What about tablet options? Are there note-taking programs that can handle a variety of file types (eg: electronic textbooks, powerpoint slides, PDFs)? Or should I just sleep in and get the lectures posted online and delay learning the course material until the exam (kidding)?"
Such a long time, did they already have pen and paper?
I can't remember, so much has changed.
If it were me, I'd stick to good ol' fashioned carbon on paper. I find my ability to retain information increases greatly if I write it down myself, manually.
Of course, YMMV, not everybody learns the same way.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I use Livescribe pens at work and I love it. I wish that the pens were available when I was in university because they are ideal for taking lecture notes. http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/
Sorry to discourage you, but I have found that using pen and paper is the best way to take notes. Why? Maybe it helps your brain process what your trying to learn. It could be that it is distraction free. I know that it is the simplest way to take notes, and often times, the simplest is the best.
Just wait until your buddy finishes taking notes, then take them.
So apparently the technology of the time of personal tape recorders. Not sure if this was his undergrad or law school, but I guess a lot of students rather than attending a long lecure would come in, drop off a tape recorder, press record, and then leave. Apparerently it got so bad that then one day he was late for class or something, and when he got there, the entire classroom was just a bunch of tape recorders recording, and at the front (I can only assume in protest) the prof had brought his own taped lecture and was simply playing it out of his own device!
A sort of analog information transfer...
The act of actually writing helps me to remember the information, particularly since I can't write fast enough to just copy down what's said verbatim and have to think about what to record. In addition, pens are cheap, easily replaced if lost or broken, and don't give you a very tempting distraction in the form of the Internet.
YMMV of course, but that's what works for me.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I used to write notes by hand (even when I was carrying a laptop) and that was usually enough to allow me to memorize the material. (Take the test, recycle the notes.)
I have a child about to attend college in the fall. I've already told her to take more notes on paper than with the laptop she's going to get soon. Why? I pulled out my chemistry, calc, and Pascal notes from college courses taken over 20 years ago and showed them to her. One look at them and she understood what I was talking about.
Drawings for chem experiments, flowcharts with notation for my programs, and clear notes with plenty of examples from calc made her understand. The stuff I did with paper and pencil back then would not be easy to replicate as quickly with a laptop. She understands now.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I find the livescribe system brilliant. It is pen and paper, but it records audio and you can transfer your scribblings to computer. The audio and your writing are synced up so you can touch on any part of your writing either on the paper or on the computer and jump to the audio at the time you wrote it.
As long as you can read your own letter afterwards this may be the best option. You can, at a later time, transcribe to a digital form for easy storage and search.
You may remember better writing than typing and you only need to write the highlights, strong points or references.
You know how you learn best. You know what you'll remember and what you won't. Just take notes like you always have. Use a laptop if you want, but that doesn't work for diagrams/graphs/etc (unless it's one of the laptops that you write on a touch-screen, and then why aren't you just using paper?). If it goes too quickly to take effective notes, record it - modern recorders are a lot better than the old bulky tape recorders - and go over it later.
I just got out of college recently, I grew up with modern tech, and even I realized how much better paper notes were. Sometimes the old way really is the best way.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Been following this for a few years - there's research going on to study "digital learning" (that's probably not the official academic term) versus old school pen/paper. Some studies suggest the physical act of writing helps us remember things (we have a general "page 5, top right corner I wrote..." that helps us recall) that we don't experience virtually. Things like eReaders don't have 'page numbers' like we used to so it's challenging to have additional memory cues. With the new students not ever having physical cues, I wonder if they simply adapt new learning mechanisms? That remains to be seen. You have an opportunity to learn about the new but should keep in mind that the paradigm in which you learned might make it difficult to transition to the "new" one.
mu
What, you don't use butterflies to write your notes? Get off my lawn, you petulant n00b!
Use the lecture as a way to get an introduction to a topic — you'll be doing reading on the subjects anyway, in more depth than you hear about them in lectures, so focus on taking effective notes from reading instead.
(I'm just finishing a distance learning masters, and have done just this; listen to the podcasts, and then focus on taking notes from the reading.)
I like gadgets as much as the next geek, but look: in the West, paper came into the classroom in the early fourteenth century. Sure, you see it earlier; but once it becomes available in bulk, its first use is class notes (also because the quality was not exactly archival). Paper replaced (wax) tablets. Why do you want to revert to a tablet?
Yeah, the new ones are super-cool, and they do a lot of things really well. But handling tachygraphy ain't one of them. Those photocopiers you remember from 8 years ago? Now they scan too. So drop the notes in the hopper, scan to PDF and load them on the tablet afterwards.
Manual Typewriter
That would work, yes, but usually, typing is a distraction. The way I'd use OneNote is by typing up all my analog notes from class at the end of the day (going over it once more and thinking about it while typing helps the brain encode it to long-term storage, and lets you review it and spot mistakes/unclear parts), and only then integrate powerpoints, recordings, etc, then file it into a notebook to use later.
Until tablets can reliably and instantly recognize my abysmal handwriting and understand my on-the-spot abbreviations, digital note-taking will be slower and more error-prone (for me).
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
If you're on Windows, Microsoft OneNote is fantastic. You can drag in other files as printouts, then write on them. The text of the printouts is searchable. The individual note pages can be organized in numerous ways (I have tab groups for semester, tabs for classes, then subtabs for each lecture). It can record and transcribe notes, does handwriting conversion, allows writing using a mouse or tablet pen (I use it on a ThinkPad Tablet PC, which makes it even handier).
With a tablet PC, I've used it to write mathematical and chemical formulas directly in my notes, or highlight parts of diagrams from lecture notes or even just dragged from websites (or cut with the snipping tool; with OneNote installed, you can use windows-S as a shortcut key to the snipping tool and past things into your document). You can also export your notes as PDFs.
OneNote has been remarkably useful in undergrad and now in grad school. I highly recommend it. I'm always kind of boggled that MS doesn't market it better; it just sort of 'comes with' Office and they don't really advertise that well.
Evernote is pretty fantastic for organizing notes and then, unlike with pen and paper, you have the ability to attach pdfs, websites, etc etc and search through all of them.
Only $85 at Walmart.com
At Cal, they used to give us the notes to the class so you spend your time thinking, not taking notes.
Pencil and paper is unbeatable as the main medium for recording notes. Pencil on paper feels nice and I like to think that writing things down helps me process the information better later on. I like using plain white paper (or engineering pads but those are expensive) since I like to take notes on notes and have blocks of notes all over the page with arrows pointing every which way.
I tried other things and the most useful companion to pencil and paper is a decent camera for taking pictures of diagrams or poor handwriting to be deciphered later. I guess you can just use a smart phone for that now. I also recorded lecture audio but almost never listened to them again. There are the rare occasions where typing on a laptop is better and emacs + org-mode would be my note taker of choice. But yeah, in general, pencil + paper.
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
Hands down if you're wanting a technological solution, an XP or Windows 7 convertable tablet (you want a real keyboard, and a proper digitizing pen) with OneNote. Yes it's proprietary and evil, but it's the best new thing that MS has release in 10 years.
You can record the lecture, while taking notes, and the notes get linked to the time durng the lecture. You can search the audio recording!
You can import all sorts of file formats and annotate them as you go. Those you can't directly import you can print into Onenote and then annotate. Imported images are OCR'd behind the scenes so you can search them.
Typing and handwriting work together. You can either convert your handwriting to text, or leave it as is, but still search it.
Note the emphasis on searching - you can in one shot search text, handwriting, audio, and images for a keyword. The last three use fuzzy algorithms - when it OCR's an image, it doesn't OCR it to an exact text, but rather to a set of possible texts, all of which are searched. Likewise for audio and handwriting.
I know Slashdot loves to hate the Tablet PC, but I went through college with it (physics + computer engineering) and graduate school now doing by (PhD computer engineering). I've also tried the iPad in my graduate work, since those didn't exist when I did my undergrad. So let me give you an idea of how I used both and how they worked out for me.
Tablet PC was a Dell Latitude XT. It has a capacitive multi-touch screen and an inductive stylus digitizer. It used Windows 7 as the OS, and my primary method of taking notes was Microsoft One Note. I digitized all my books, and bought digital copies where I could. During class, I had my books open, and when the prof. would reference diagrams or specific sections, I would clip them and paste them into my notes, annotating them there. When the professor had powerpoints available before hand, I would load them into one note and annotate there. The benefit was I could after the fact scan and recognize my handwriting (which I could train the computer to learn to a very high accuracy). Also, with one note you can put tags on specific sections or notes. These tags can be compiled into a summary, so I would typically tag equations or definitions and create quick reference study guides this way. This computer doubled as my work computer so I also installed word, excel, powerpoint, and matlab for homework and presentations. For presentations, powerpoint was especially useful with presenter view and inking capability.
The iPad was much less useful than the Tablet PC for me. I couldn't have two windows open side by side, so clipping segments from PDF to notes was not feasible. Also, the iPad doesn't have a digitizer, so it uses capacitive input for writing. The styluses are huge, and inaccurate, and your palm often causes inaccurate marks. Further, the handwriting recognition in most apps is either nonexistent or terrible. Finally working with fellow students was a pain with the iPad, since the file manager is completely closed off. We couldn't just pass around a USB drive or network our computer together, everything had to be done via drop box, and even then I couldn't open most of the formats they were trying to send me. Printing was also impossible on my campus with the iPad, and connecting to a projector can be problematic. You can't just screen share the iPad with an external display like you can a Windows computer; the particular app has to support that feature.
Now, I think if I were to do it all again I would get a Windows 8 device with a stylus like the Surface Pro. It will run all my windows apps like Office and Matlab, connect to all my devices, network with all the same computers, but have all the touch niceties and touch based apps when it's in tablet mode. The Surface Pro is pretty much what I was hoping the iPad would be, only 3 years later, and honestly if I were doing it all over again, that's where I would start (or a device like it from one of the OEMs). Price and battery life are still up in the air, but they're both most assuredly better than what I paid for my Latitude XT, which I have never regretted buying due to its usefulness.
I was bad in undergrad, furious notes scribbler I was. I got better in Masters, and listened more. By the time I learnt all these l lessons in Grad School, my diagnostics exam was over, and I did not have to take classes anymore :-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When my wife went to medical school twenty years ago every lecture was transcribed and a copy distributed to each student which obviated the need to take notes. My understanding was that was pretty much universally true in medical schools. I doubt that has changed and now that she is teaching in a medical school I know that all of the lectures are also videotaped and posted online.
That only works if (1) the lecture contains lots of visual material and (2) the professor is not annoyed.
Often in the case of powerpoint, the professor posts them on a website.
I bought a hundred-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I was sick of not caring.
The last three use fuzzy algorithms - when it OCR's an image, it doesn't OCR it to an exact text, but rather to a set of possible texts, all of which are searched. Likewise for audio and handwriting.
Huh, I never knew this... I just wrote a novel in a post below about how I used one note through college and grad school. The searching was by far the best aspect, and today I still use some of the notes I took because they were so thorough, thanks to one note's ability to combine different sources of notes. Usually, each lecture consisted of power point slides, handouts, recorded audio, and my own handwritten notes (which I never bothered to convert to editable text since it was unnecessary). This also made studying very easy, as any question I had could be referenced in the notes with keywords.
This is a bit high-tech, but I've had good results with it.
You're going to need a cylinder of compressed graphite, roughly .5mm in diameter and 5cm in length. Encapsulate it in some ablative material (preferably a renewable organic material) for better grip and structural integrity.
Use this implement to store data on a flexible two-dimensional lattice. The graphite will slowly be worn down as it is deposited on the surface - you will need to continually ablate more of the cover.
Data removal is handled either by disposing of the lattice itself (for bulk erase), or by use of a specialized tool (often attached to one end of the data write implement) for small deletes - although I will note that, after sufficient rewrite cycles, data may be unreadable.
This offers many advantages over traditional computer-based storage. It is far lower-power, functioning off a few milliwatts of energy. It allows for highly flexible unstructured data storage (sort of like NoSQL), and can be improved rapidly by agile development, as no data standards are enforced. I often use a system of my own design to encrypt data by use of an alternative character set (the Unicode committee has, unfortunately, declined to add it to the standard). It also allows more rapid and accurate entry of non-textual or rich-text data.
The only drawbacks are a rather inefficient system for video storage, and it can become rather bulky (while not as dense as the old computer systems, they often have similar or even higher mass). But those are rather minor drawbacks given all the advantages.
Combine old fashioned pen & paper combined with a digital copy that binds audio into a timeline for playback. You can tap on your paper and playback the audio from when you were writing something. Great for capturing surrounding context. The digital form also features text search where you can enter words and the software will find that word, in your handwriting, on the page. You can print your own dot-paper too! Gobs of storage capacity and fairly long battery life. Should be more than adequate for classroom settings. I tend to use it for business meetings nowadays. I first saw this device at a JavaOne conference.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audionote-notepad-voice-recorder/id369820957?mt=8 "...Each note acts as a link directly to the point at which it was recorded, taking you instantly to what you want to hear! Didn't take any notes during the meeting? No problem, you can add them later!"
I find that the best way to take notes depends very much on the specific nature of the class you are taking. For math courses, programming courses, (some) science courses, or anything else where you need to be able to draw or use numbers, pen (or mechanical pencil) and regular old notebook work best.
For classes that are mostly text based, such as social sciences, history, or English courses, I find that typing my notes out in outline format (on a laptop) to be preferable.
Not an MS fanboy at all but I have to say Microsoft OneNote is actually quite good I used to use it all the time to take notes on my laptop. Now I've gotten into the sort of stupid habit of just having a giant text file for each CS class I take that I edit using gedit on ubuntu. It's really sort of stupid but it's made me pretty damn good at doing on the fly ASCII art... When I did use OneNote though it was extremely organized and easy to use. I love how you can have different tabs and stuff for classes / topics. You can go really nuts with the organization if you want. It also saves the second you type something, and the automatic formatting and fonts it uses are very aesthetically pleasing. Although, I haven't used it in 4 years but I can only assume that if anything it's gotten better.
Have gnu, will travel.
https://trello.com/
Its interface is great for tracking all manner of tasks. Totally customizable. Works on Android phones, probably iPhones too, or any modern browser so you can manage your notes from whatever connected device is convenient. Free.
Using Onenote with Thinkpad X series tablet PCs myself at the moment... and it's awesome. Syncs with Skydrive absolutely seamlessly (open the same document on as many devices as you want at the same time, and they all update each other - reliably and without errors), and provides great pen input. Sorry for sounding like a shilll, but it's the only adequate replacement I've found for pen and paper so far. My productivity has gone through the roof since I switched to OneNote instead of pen+paper, and my back pain from dragging around huge piles of dead tree has pretty much disappeared. Hell, I carry a 15" Thinkpad in addition to my tablet PC (each with AC adapters and a 9 cell slice for the T520) and it's still completely painless compared to all the books and binders full of paper I used to carry around :)
At the moment, I'm hoping I'll be able to replace my X Series tablets with a Surface Pro - 6+ hours of usable battery life in a much thinner package.
In the market, there's FreeNote, which rivals OneNote, and it's just great. I usually put it into ideographic mode - it let's me write with my finger or a stylus in large text, and then it shrinks it to fit on each line. Allows for freehand drawing, image, hyperlink, typing, etc...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.suishouxie.freenote&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDNd
I don't even have a "real" android tab - I just have an HP touchpad - only downside is that there's no pressure recognition or anything, but using my finger works best for me so far...you have to use the larger point stylii with this type of screen, anyway.
I had one professor that posted PDFs of his powerpoints.
I've found that the best way for me to take notes is to find the medium that has the least friction and then to process the information before I put it down. What the latter means is that, rather than merely treating my notes as a form of dictation from the lecturer, I need to actually listen to what is being said and rephrase it in my own words before I put it down. By doing so, I've found that my recollection later is significantly better.
Regarding friction and the medium, were it my choice, I'd go with a laptop or tablet with keyboard if you can, since you can likely type significantly faster than you can write, allowing your notes to be more complete and better represent what was presented. I've also found that since I can touch type, I can maintain eye contact with the lecturer and can catch on to hand motions and other non-verbal aspects of the lesson, whereas writing requires that I look at the page most of the time, causing me to miss some of those cues. Plus, because I can type so much faster than I can write, I have more time to think about what I'll put down (i.e. more time to process).
That said, if you expect there to be numerous diagrams or other material that can't be easily represented by words, I'd switch to something like the LiveScribe that everyone else is talking about, since that would be easier to work with than a laptop.
I find it depends on the class. If the notes comprise of tables, diagrams, flowcharts and images then pencil & paper are probably best. If it's more of a text & speech only class (philosophy, history, programming, languages, etc) then I go for a pure-text application (vim being my personal preference). My personal way of taking electronic notes is to use vim for writing, then save everything in sub-folders of "~/notes/" which is git controlled so I can transfer everything around and even share them with others. 3 years worth of notes and it's still only 20MB so far (and that includes quite a few reference PDFs!)
:)
What I'd recommend is stick with what already works for your harder classes, then spend some easy classes (where you aren't recording as much) to try out alternate methods. If an alternate method seems to work for you, try it in a harder class.
One last thing if you decide to use a laptop, consider learning something other than Qwerty. I used to get finger cramps after typing for a couple hours and need to take constant "finger" breaks, then I switched to Colemak and I can type for 10 hours at a time (done this *numerous* times) without the slightest bit of discomfort. If you DO decide to switch away from Qwerty, do it NOW since it will take ~a month to get back to your previous typing speed, after that you'll just keep getting faster and faster
Wow! Jesus is way cool. I bet he can turn water into wine...
I've never been fond of wine. So I typically turn my water into coffee.
Generally, you only need to know about 10% of what comes out of the profs mouth. The rest is just extra examples and fluff.
Back in school I had friends who would write down EVERYTHING the prof would say without thinking. (Seriously, one girl I knew would write down what the professor said when greeting the class. I saw "Happy Wednesday, gang! Anyone seen my pointer?" atop one page.) These people took REAMS of notes and studied them for hours and hours. I took minimal notes and studied them quickly. I usually made much better grades. Not because I am a genius, but because I know WHEN something is important. THAT is the skill you need.
Also, sit in the front, you are forced to pay attention.
In the past my job was teaching students about note-taking. I haven't read the current research in a while, at least more than for fun, but here's the upshot as I know it. Take notes. Pencil and paper is probably best because it's the least prone to break and because it can be the most free-form. But the tool is not as important as what you do with it. Don't be slavish. Just take down the high points. Use the recto and the verso. The recto is for in-class, the "note-taking"; the verso is for after class, the "note-taking" most students don't do. This is for notes in which you interpret, summarize, and clarify. Basically it's for reprocessing and setting-up for further review. Then review material frequently at irregular intervals. In a given study session, work on the verso for that day, then review material from the same day a week ago and the same day from one month ago. Also, the best time to study is just prior to some sleep, either the night's sleep or a nap of at least 15-20 minutes. Now, in my experience, many students will respond: Oh no Dr. C____, I'm special/different/exceptional. I'll be more blunt here, in the interest of space: no you're not. At least there are no studies suggesting that any other methods than I've described are more effective. Feel free to supplement with tape-recordings, etc. But remember the main ideas of limited recording, reinterpretation, and frequent review at irregular interviews. (An added brief note: the research is building that, with very, very few exceptions, no one is a "visual" or "verbal" learner; that's mostly 70s touch-feely bullshit. But most people do learn well if they use multiple media for information storage and retrieval. This could be as simple as notes with words and diagrams. And that brings me back to the pencil and the paper.)
Usually my classes are taught by an instructor with a whiteboard.
I pay attention to and interact on the discussion, then periodically snap a photo of the whiteboard now and then with my cameraphone. With an 8MP or so typical smartphone, I can pretty much always crop the photo and read the board easily. The date and time are embedded in the image, so I can easily filter them by lecture (and cross check syllabus for topics) without doing any work. I usually review the image notes before an exam and that's about it. And I never have paper notes to file or dump at the end of the semester.
I find this enables me to pay more attention and interact more during the lecture, which is where I learn the best. Others learn well from transcribing the information; I don't and never have. YMMV.
Nothing beats pen and paper, except pen and paper then recopy.
Take your notes in class with pen and paper, then, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AFTER CLASS, sit down with your notes and recopy them, using reference material if necessary. This reinforces the info, and helps to clarify the notes. I did this in college and medical school, and found that doing this alone took care of 80% or so of my my studying. Something about hearing it in class, then immediately recopying it really made it stick in my brain, plus my notes were much better when I did go back to review them.
High school didn't really prepare me to study for college, so my first semester was rocky until I discovered this method and other tricks for studying. After I adopted this method, I got A's in all of the rest of my college (ChemEng) classes and had a 3.8 GPA in med school.
You take a laptop into class, and aside from being a social pariah, you're going to be annoying the hell out of everyone else in class with the typing. That may not bother you, though.
A tablet at least wouldn't bother others, but you'd still look like a dork.
Everyone learns different but for me it was best to pay attention to the class (professor and/or discussions). I'd write a few keywords for topics I need to pay extra attentions to - either I didn't feel I fully understood or thought the professor put greater importance in them. As long as the professor follows the book or hands out notes this works. I knew some people who wrote pages of notes that parroted the book and yet couldn't tell you what the last class was about because they paid attention to writing their notes rather than the subject.
A lot may have changed in classrooms over 25 years, but I still do the same in business meetings. I write more since I don't have a book to refer to, but I don't waste any time making sure my work doc is formated correctly and passes spell check (which other people do often in meetings.) and write down in pen/paper the key details I need to take from the meeting and who to contact if I need more info about anything or forget.
Focus on trying to understand what is being said rather than distracting yourself with trying to record a summary or the highlights. If there's something you need clarified or that doesn't seem to fit to you, ask about it. You'll be solidifying your own understanding of the material and probably helping about a few other students in the same position as you. Other reference resources such as passed out notes or a textbook will be available to you that you can peruse in your own time.
Well laugh all you can, but stylus might be the only computer-like noting tool I can accept. Else I choose paper.
I use a Thinkpad with Camtasia to record the audio of the lecture and do screen capture of the PowerPoint slides that are provided by the prof. I also edit the slides on-the-fly to emphasize important points. This allows me to listen & view the lectures repeatedly when necessary. Occasionally, profs will omit diagrams from the slides... yep, then I use pen and paper. I use an Ipad to reference the textbook during the lecture and to look up terms that I am unfamiliar with. Works for me... -Cos.
>>> Best Way To Take Notes In the Modern Classroom?
Take them from your classmate when they aren't looking. Then lend them back before the big exam. Of course, you will have to copy everything long hand...
... myself in these days is the front left hand seat of an aeroplane. Not a lot of scope for taking notes there, you just have to learn and remember. (Though it does help to have a pencil and paper, to write down clearances and suchlike.)
If Einstein was alive today, he would use Livescribe paper-based computing platform. It includes a smartpen, dot paper and software applications that changes the way people capture, use and share information.
I just graduated last May. For a humanities class (where notes were all text) you might have 10% of the students taking notes on a laptop. For science or math classes, it was below 1%. There's a reason for that. Paper and pencil is still the easiest, cheapest, and most effective method.
The only place I saw any significant number of students using laptops were computer science classes -- and then it was still at most five out of thirty students using them, and those five were either playing games/checking Facebook, or just following along with the slides not taking any notes at all (and I don't see any point to that...) The most productive way of using technology in class? I had a job doing freelance web development while I was in college, and when I was working on something big I'd bring my laptop to the more useless classes and do work. That way I was there for the 5 minutes of information I actually needed, but still productive for the rest of the class.
Is probably good now.
When I was in college I had a PDA (Visor Edge) that I took all my handwritten notes on. It allowed for backup to my desktop after class, lightened the load of carrying a dozen notebooks, and I could add spreadsheets and other data along with it. For any overhead slides I brought a digital camera. Why copy manually what can be copied digitally? The other students thought I was cheating, the professors thought it was ingenious.
These days I would probably find it hard to replicate the old Graffiti input since typing on my phone isn't quite the same (bluetooth keyboard?) but it worked for me and I would try to keep that paradigm as closely as I can.
I've been out of college 12 years now :p
I still take notes. In a note book. In black ink and use my red pen if I need to emphasize something.
This does two things. It requires I pay attention and sort out the important information from the mindless ramblings of a PHB and it allows me to note who said what and when. Funny how you pull out a book a month later when someone "forgot" to do something and you point out in black and white where you noted they agreed to something a month ago and they have nothing to argue against it. Also, when you get a chance to get back to your computer, type out your notes. Word or Notes works fine for most fields. MathCAD does wonders for those of us in technical fields where you need to write formulas. Re-typing your notes drives it into the grey matter again, plus helps you translate your scribblings while you remember what you scribbled.
Anyone suggesting using a laptop should be shot. Transcribing your professors words into verbatim text is NOT learning. The laptop fails in the lecture hall for many reasons. It is difficult to inject your own thoughts about the subject matter when you are too busy trying to get every last word the professor is saying, and it is far to tempting to do so. You cannot easily switch to a "drawing" function to draw down diagrams or annotate your notes. Also they are loud, large and annoying hearing the clicking of keys everywhere. If you are taking notes using a laptop, you are not taking good notes, period.
Anyone suggesting using an iPad with stylus should be shot. Steve Job's made it very clear that Apple tablets are not supposed to use pen input, and so pen input on the iPad is a shitty experience. The input resolution of the iPad is way too low, so you can't take anything better then grade school looking chalk lines and Fisher Price looking diagrams. iPad's on screen keyboard is horrible for any kind of note taking.
Most "other" tablets have failed to include decent handwriting tools. Pen input on tablets is too slow and inaccurate to match pen/paper experience. Electronic Pen input forces you to compromise, either due to the lousiness of the hardware or the shiftiness of the software.
Best experience is to use good ol' fashioned pen and paper. Why:
Slows you down, makes you think about what is being said rather then madly transcribing words. Using pen and paper you should be putting your OWN thoughts and words down about the subject matter, not someone else's.
Easy to draw/diagram/annotate. In a math/science course, you will dump using a laptop or tablet simply because the subject matter is just not easy to transcribe to text.
Easy to annotate after the fact. If the professor linked a point previously made it is very easy to go back with pen and paper to add additional notes at the point they where taken.
I have lousy hand writing so I always took notes twice, once in the lecture hall and then would spend a little bit of time after class cleaning up the notes. Forced me to think twice about the lecture and so could add/update the notes.
When I took hand written notes, I actually could remember when points where made and easily find them, even weeks or months later. Using a laptop I found one page looked exactly like another so trying to find some point made during a lecture 3 months ago was impossible.
While their is a certain appeal of using technology to take lecture notes, realize that the lecture process has not changed in hundreds of years. A boring old fart droning on about largely irrelevant information doesn't require 21st century note taking tech.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Livescribe is amazing! They have a great marketing department that spends many hours each day on Slashdot. You must try Livescribe paper-based computing platform.
This last semester I went from having notebooks to loose-leaf grid paper. It allowed me to share my notes with people without handing them the whole notebook. I could go back and insert notes where I'd missed something, or during review. Grid paper allowed better organization of the notes themselves. This simple thing thoroughly increased my organization and productivity in class. I went from 'chicken scratching' to people honestly marveling at how well organized and legible my notes were. This semester I'm going to try an android tablet with a legitimate pen digitizer. I've got an HTC Flyer and scribe pen, but it's only a 7" screen. I am playing with Quill as my program of choice. I will probably end up picking up an HTC Jetstream, which is a 10.1" device, though I'll likely keep the Flyer. I like the 7" form-factor for everything except writing on.
Dave Winer swears by his World Outline Tools. See: http://poets.worldoutline.org/
I discovered the same thing, but then I switched to a two color pen approach that worked well.
I used one pen (blue) to record/summarize what the lecturer said, and I used the other pen (red) to write my own notes/comments on the former. The latter forced me to (at least partially) digest what was being said -- that way I'd remember them better, and recording it made the blue notes much more compressible.
The question isn't "how" to take notes, but rather "if" notes should be taken at all. If you have a good teacher, don't insult them by writing down what they're saying. LISTEN TO THEM. If they're any good there will already be notes available to you in some form, on a class website, your textbook, or a handout of some kind.
I faced a similar question in 2005 when I went back to school for a PhD. I ended up using an HP Tablet PC with OneNote, and it worked well at times. As others have said, the search ability (including OCR) is the key to making those notes quickly useful. Sometimes I would take notes on paper and other times I would take notes directly in OneNote. Either way, they were transcribed into OneNote eventually (usually using Windows Speech Recognition to help with transcription). I still search my notes from my graduate seminars and from the notes I made for the courses I've taught.
I am now a professor, and I believe that different courses and different faculty require different approaches to study. For example, the recent trend of the "flipped" classroom where the content of the course is delivered between course settings and the problems / case studies are discussed in class might lead to a different technology set for working in the classroom. I also found that my statistics notes were quite different than notes from my seminar courses. Seminars were more for discussion of which schools of thought were more and less reasonable, and thus less amenable to note-taking.
Therefore, if I were to start again, I think I would prepare for multiple types of courses. One would be where note-taking would be necessary in class. Another would be where I use notes in class for contributing to the discussion / case study / problem sets.
Also, good luck. My advice to any graduate student is to read everything that is assigned, always go to class, and work harder than you ever have in your life. You've chosen to do this rather than earn real money... you might as well do it well.
If you're writing down so much that you can't jot it down quickly with pencil and paper and transcribe it (on your computer or whatever) after class in under five minutes, you're cheating yourself out of an education by focusing all your attention on taking notes. Stop that.
Leave your computer and phone and whatnot in the dorm. Pay attention in class. Listen to what the professor is saying. Watch him -- he might even use gestures occasionally. Try to understand the content of the course. Ask questions. Basically, behave as if you're in class to *learn*.
There will occasionally be things you need to take note of, but if you're doing it right your notes for an hour-long class period should fit on one side of a 3x5 card.
Every once in a while you may have a class that is an exception to this. Differential Equations, for instance, might require more note-taking. When this does occur, you'll know. It'll be obvious.
But for most classes, it's better to focus on following what's going on *during* class, rather trying to write it all down to try to sift through later.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Personally I would use a laptop, but keep pen and paper handy for when diagrams and such may need to be taken down, as it's far easier to sketch them manually than try and do it on a computer. You can always scan or take a picture of your handwritten diagrams later and insert them into your digital notes. I wouldn't bother with a tablet unless you're extremely conditioned to typing on one...I could never get by with one as my typing skills on a tablet are non-existent in comparison to my skills on a physical keyboard. Another good supplement would be to bring a decent recording device and record your lectures...that way you can pick up anything you may have missed in your initial note-taking later on.
Works pretty well for me. You can record your lectures and when you review your notes later, just tap a word to hear what was said at that moment. It does a whole lot more,too. Plus you can sync it to dropbox et. al. and have a PDF of your notes available from nearly anywhere. Add a stylus and you are in pretty good shape. I like the Zagg BT KB because it props up the ipad nicely. So I can flip from keyboard to stylus and back quick and easy.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/notability-take-notes-annotate/id360593530?mt=8
http://www.amazon.com/ZAGGmate-Aluminum-Integrated-Bluetooth-Keyboard/dp/B004FG16MG
I know this may sound a bit weird to some, but I always found Emacs org-mode to be the most effective way for me to take notes in class...
Here is a Google Tech-talk about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM
It's pretty much just plaintext, but the way org-mode handles it makes it very effective. It's one of the easiest parts of Emacs to learn, and it is known as quite a killer feature in the program. You can even export it to PDF (ala LaTeX), HTML, and a few other types of formats (Like GameFAQs style text document, complete with table of contents and headings.)
Since there really is no overhead, you are only limited by how fast you can type. It is also very easy to navigate after writing them.
The arch foe.
Slashdot - Taking Notes in the Modern Classroom
TL;DR - I found pencil and paper to still be the best way to take notes in class, but Notability and an iPad stylus work pretty well.
This past spring I sat in on an undergrad philosophy class that a friend of mine was teaching. I hadn't been in a college classroom for at least 10 years, and I decided to experiment with different ways of note taking. No risk if I messed up since I was just sitting in and not taking the class for credit. Here are the methods I tried:
The clear winner: pencil and paper. I thought carefully after trying each system about what did and didn't work, and why what didn't work didn't. Here's why I think pencil and paper wins out: there's no extra cognitive load when using pencil and paper. It's straight out of my brain and on to the page. All the computer and tablet based systems I tried required my brain to do extra work to get my thought recorded. With pencil and paper, I can put things where I want on the page without thinking about it. I can indent, underline, arrange text, and draw diagrams with no extra mental effort. With all of the computer/table based ways I tried, I had to not only thing about what I was putting down but also how I was going to do it. That effort distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning.
That being said, taking notes by hand using a stylus and Notability on the iPad came a close second to pencil and paper. Taking notes that way added less excess cognitive load than any other way I tried save pencil and paper. Handwriting on the iPad had a couple of advantages over pencil and paper.
On the other hand, because of the size of the iPad screen, writing directly on the page doesn't work very well, so I had to use Notability's zoom feature to write legible text. That means I couldn't see the whole page at a glance, so it was hard to tell exactly where on the page I was writing. I often wound up scrunching letters at the right edge of the page, or writing over the page divider at the bottom of the page. The extra cognitive load of keeping track of those kinds of things was more trouble than the advantages were worth, for me at least.
In 2009, I did the same search. Back then, HP was still making table PCs. A stylus-based tablet PC with onenote is a really good system for taking notes. It makes your handwriting searchable and it handles diagrams more cleanly than any regular laptop solution.
Now, with tablet PCs on the way out--HP doesn't even make them, last I checked--you could try a galaxy note, or the Eee Slate, though both of those options leave you without a keyboard.
I use Let Me Type (GPL, for Windows) for predictive text on Windows. I use it extensively to transcribe my medical class notes (for which I use a shorthand (tachygraphic) system). I find OpenOffice's predictive text system to be an inferior solution, as it also has a cap of 10,000 words (too small for medical terminology, which is more like 50,000 words).
Let Me Type will paste text in any application you're using on Windows, which is a great feature (it uses the clipboard for that, but you don't need to copy and paste - it does this for you). It has a great associative autocomplete. Say you are working on a hematology text. If you're studying, e.g., hemolytic anemias, then anytime you type "hemolytic", not only will it complete that word, but it will also offer you "anemia" too. You'll end up typing 4 key strokes ("hem" + number option). It also keeps track of date and frequency, so when your class is about macrocytic anemias, it will notice the change in date and frequency and offer you this new association.
I actually think I write faster with my shorthand system than I would with a laptop with a good predictive text system like LetMeType. As for "normal" typing (i.e., non-predictive), yes, I take notes far, far faster than my class mates (anemia = 2 swift pen strokes, hemolytic = 2 strokes, etc). My shorthand system (my own creation) relies heavily on line positioning (like music notation does). This, together with a rich prefixing and termination system (e.g., like for -nation, which is frequent for a lot of words) makes for very fast note taking. Right now, I write so fast my last class topic had 73 written pages. I have professors that speak over 100 wpm for 2 hours non-stop. here is a sample. See if you can find the tachygram for "syndrome" (there's an eponym right next to it). Shorthand let's me draw, something you can't easily do on a laptop. It's important for Surgery topics.
As I said, after class I transcribe my shorthand notes. which is a good method of committing the material to long term memory. Shorthand note-taking is a complex activity that is probably great for the brain because, like music, it involves listening + fast thinking* + fine hand movements. You're also constantly challenged by new vocabulary thrown at you - specially in a medical class (my first shorthand teacher was from the legal profession, and the vocabulary was very repetitive, in contrast).
In the future, I should like to develop some sort of machine learning software (but that will likely take a lot of time) to decode my notes.
* You have to assemble the tachygrams quickly. You know how big and complicated medical terminology is...My recent favorite being: oligoasthenoteratozoospermy, which was like a stress-test for my shorthand system, because you have to keep precision too.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I went to medical school 40 years ago and the only option was pen and paper. This seemed to work well since a lot of the notes are diagrams. We did have a note taking service (one student would take good notes and distribute them) so this helped a lot. (In fact, I was able to spend a month skiing thanks to this service.)
I do think I learn better when I take notes instead of just sitting and listening so I would probably do the same today.
I don't know of any technology which would help today... you just have to put the time in to listen, process the info and commit it to memory.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Learning how to learn vs. learning what to regurgitate.
You'll get a whole bunch of opinions one way or the other, but I choose to take my inspiration from Moneyball.
Most important factor when ranking note taking methods? OPP -- On Page Percentage
Roughly, OPP can be calculated thusly:
Some people are sluggers, rocking a computer with fancy note taking programs, audio/video recording, etc. But sluggers strike out a lot. They're expensive, run out of energy quickly, and tend to be heavy.
Others are good at small ball. They have a good eye. They may not be as flashy, but they get the job done, and are very reliable. It can be slow and messy, but also very flexible--performing well under a wide range of circumstances. Everyone else will think it's boring, but that only matters if your goal is to entertain others.
What method is best? The one that gets on page.
Note that this is also a function of classroom appearances. To maximize total notes, go to class. The best note-taking method is useless if you're not actually there to take them. Cribbed notes are next to useless.
Record the lecture (both video and audio) and write notes by hand on paper since there's a benefit to having to process information that way. Grab the notes online as well, and you have everything you could want.
When I returned to school for my graduate program that's what I did in my classes and it yielded a very good set of sources for review. I would re-watch classes with the video and audio sped up a bit - 1 hour of class time with the extraneous stuff taken out and sped up would take me about 20-30 minutes to review, depending on the instructor. This was 4-6 years ago so I only recorded essential classes, as storage was at a bit of a premium.
The only thing to be wary of is not posting the videos or handing them out to other students without the permission of your instructor. It's a good way to get them to ban recording.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
For my Phys I class (circa 2004) in college I used my laptop and a pad of paper. Anything the professor wrote on the board I would type (in word); any time he drew, I'd use a small notebook sitting next to my laptop to draw the diagram, give it a Fig number, type the Fig number into my notes, and carry on. Once a week I'd go into my notepad, go to each drawing, draw it out in Paint Shop Pro, then insert it into my notes. While it sounds convoluted, this process had a lot of benefits:
1) I could actually listen to the professor. I'm a proficient touch-typer, so as he wrote I would just wait for him to finish, listen as he talked, then quickly type it in. This was also handy when he said something I thought was useful and could type it in, instead of trying to somehow shorthand it. For the few classes where I had to write, I would be focusing more on copying the words clearly and missing what the professor was actually saying, to my detriment.
2) My handwriting would make a doctor jealous, and paper has no search feature if I'm trying to find a tip on something. This also made it easy to share my notes with others, something that many asked of me at the end of the term.
3) By having to go back through my notes to re-create drawings in PSP, it would force me to not only re-read my notes but actually understand what the drawing was about, as the aforementioned handwriting could cause problem with vector labels and such. Compare that to other subjects where I'd take notes and then never look back at them.
There were draw-backs, of course. I might forget to mark in the notes where a certain figure goes or if my battery drains I might lose some sections of the notes if Autosave didn't run recently. The biggest thing was math notation; I eventually figured out a system for shorthand in my typed notes--at this point I didn't know about any of the math-formatting assistants, Maple, etc.
I imagine you could recreate this system better using a tablet (PC), face-up, and a bluetooth keyboard (just reaching forward with a stylus) for better results; or a laptop and a small Wacom drawing tablet, etc. If you want pen/paper for sure, you're not totally out; there are a few devices out there that use a special pen or paper/reader so that you can write as normal and later upload the movements to computer for digitizing and (maybe) OCR.
(I also belonged to a fraternity and we had a crib system, digital and physical, to share notes and more, so having these digital was also useful.)
I finished law school last year. The first semester I took notes by hand. For the remaining five semesters I took notes using google docs. I don't need a lot of features for note taking, and most classes we were not permitted to audio or video record. Using docs meant I was device and operating system independent, it was easy to organize and edit, and you can upload any type of file to your class folder. On the few occasions the network prevented me from accessing docs, switching to a word pad program and pasting them in later sufficed.
For my brain, handwritten notes tend to solidify the material I write down -- I rarely have to actually refer back to my written notes to know what they said. However, two things made handwritten notes unwieldy: (1) the massive volume of text material covered in my classes, and (2) the fact that outlines were (usually) permitted for the final exams. Despite its advantages, the task of reducing an entire semester's worth of class notes into a usable outline was far more cumbersome when converting them from handwritten pages. Plus, I believe that most people can type much more quickly than they can transcribe.
That said, if my program hadn't been so heavily text-based -- it was not unusual to have to 1,000+ pages of reading material per week, 97% of which written in the style of an EULA-- I'd probably have tried to stick with handwritten notes throughout.
I've tried many things, and I've found that a blank hard-bound sketch pad (Canson makes a great one -- you can get it at a B&N store in the USA), a pen, and a laptop are the best tools for me.
The sketch pad is for the notes and the diagrams. The laptop is for Googling anything I don't understand during the lecture so that I can add more notes to my sketch pad. I also maintain a Chrome bookmark folder with the name of the class, as I run into some fascinating stuff while trying to understand the lecture. I keep two other tabs open to WolframAlpha and Wikipedia.
I write down only things that I did not understand before the lecture, or things that I think will be on the exam.
Sometimes I go to class with a 3 ring binder containing printed out lecture notes, and annotate important things. This is a good complement to the notebook and is very useful for review.
I've also tried to use just the laptop, as I type way faster than I can write. I find that I end up with wonderful Word documents (with pasted diagrams, wikipedia excerpts, etc) and remember nothing when I do this. I think there's something to the tactile reinforcement of a pen and the mental exercise of distilling stuff down to the main points on the spot.
Typing beats the crap out of paper for liberal arts electives where you just have to take a lot of notes.
No it doesn't. Shorthand beats the shit out typing (with the exception of stenography - but stenographic machines might have less precision). Can you type at the same wpm (words per minute) speed than someone speaks? No you can't. Yet people who use shorthand systems can. See my other post on how I use a shorthand system in my medical class (medical class is probably the worst-case scenario - they throw huge words with Greek roots at a very fast rate at you. Just so you know, any medical student has learned around more than 50,000 new words by the end of medical school).
It's too bad people are not interested in shorthand systems. For the English language, the best option would be the Gregg shorthand system, which is simply beautiful, IMHO.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I know there's plenty of people out there that will disagree, but for me a stylus would suck for something like this.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Not to mention the fact that 20 years later you could still access the information in its original format without having to hunt down expensive converters for out-dated technology. There's a reason paper has been around for thousands of years and is still in use.
It's sad to think that many will read what you have said, yet not be able to fully grasp it until they need to refer back to something they did a decade or two later. It took me only a few minutes to look in the box that has all my old notebooks in it to find what I wanted. The papers I wrote using my old Atari 1040ST and later an Amiga 2000HD didn't fare as well.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I just found workflowy.com - great for creating lists in a way evernote cannot. Seems like it would be great for taking notes.
Namaste
I prefer workflowy to evernote. it takes list-making to the next level
Namaste
Late to the discussion, I know, so I hope this isn't too redundant... but I have some opinions on this.
First: Using a laptop or tablet for note-taking is a REALLY good idea in med school; I would have HATED to go through med school without it. You'll need to memorize a ton of material, and a lot of the material will be presented to you more than once from different angles. You'll need to be able to go back and review old stuff in detail on a number of occasions-- like when you take the various steps of the USMLE. It was a great advantage for me to be able to hit control-F and pull up my old notes on a topic. I could also edit my notes for clarity, correct errors and misunderstandings (of which there were plenty), insert new mnemonics, and so on.
I don't think you need any special "note taking software". I just used Word. I had a little trick of using a special character (I used ">") to mark something as an index entry. So if I wanted to review (let's say) meningitis, I could go straight to the main set of notes on meningitis and not have to look at all the notes where meningitis was just mentioned in passing.
Laptops are also great for storing textbooks and, again, a simple search function will save you lots of time/frustration thumbing around in tables of contents. The downside there is that the textbooks are overpriced and half of them are absolute shit. I don't know how easy it is to buy (or pirate) used e-textbooks.
As others have pointed out, you can't always take notes while in class or on a rotation (wouldn't want to bring my laptop to Gross Anatomy...) and it's also possible that the rattling of a keyboard might bother others. Maybe a tablet would work better... I don't know. But at any rate, you're going to be doing a lot of studying/reviewing outside of the classroom, where a laptop works fine.
Your pen works just fine and you know it. You're just procrastinating by inventing dumb problems to ask slashdot about.
Try learning shorthand. You can try Gregg -- http://gregg.angelfishy.net/ or Pittman: http://pitmanshorthand.homestead.com/BasicsofPitman.html
the rewrite is not that great (some fragmented data remains), but it's better than having just a wo-rm system. Personally, I prefer the solution based on compressed graphite.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
You'll be making too many diagrams and formulas in your notes to be able to reasonably keep up on a laptop or tablet. On top of that pens & pencils don't run out of batteries or crash at inopportune times. Your paper won't makes noises when you don't want it to, and your pens are super cheap to replace.
If you really feel the need to get your geek on, get a digital voice recorder for the lectures, and then use Dragon to dictate the notes to files. You'll still be way ahead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I used pen and paper when I returned to school for some course a few years ago. I saw a lot of the kids with laptops in classes but when I looked most of them were surfing or posting on Facebook.
Plus side of pen and paper....you can quickly draw any diagrams or graphs your prof puts up. Try that with a laptop.
The typical person can hand-write 15 words per minute. A moderately-skilled typist can write 60 words per minute. You do the math on which is better.
Personally, I use Zim, an open-source note-taking application. I use a netbook with a long battery life and a decent keyboard. I back up the Zim notebook to Dropbox, and sync it to my phone as a backup device. You can embed images in Zim, and attach files, so that takes care of being able to handle powerpoint slides, etc.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Courses are mostly memorization, and I find that I promptly forget anything I write down. Forgetting == time waster. Why not remember it the first time you hear it? Never go to a lecture with a way of taking notes, and you'll be surprised how much you remember when you're motivated not to forget.
Added bonus: after a while you build a natural ability to remember a lot of stuff.
Get rid of the crutch, it only holds you back.
If you are in Medicine, you will be wasting your time taking more than a page of notes.
There is such an incredible amount of information in all things medical that you just have to decide what material to read that will match your Teacher's theme and topics. You can probably download somebody else's notes that highlights the important points, pharma doses, lab figures, etc.
You have to read, review, listen to videos and then read some more. Take a look at what Kaplan offers for example.
Find yourself a nice fountain pen, a good quick drying ink and some nice fountain pen friendly paper. Fountain pens are cool. I made notes in the margins of the professors preprinted notes. I found it tremendously helpful to write down a summary of what I was hearing.
While I agree with many others that writing / drawing the notes by hand is probably the best way to go, it doesn't have to be paper you are writing on. I'm using my old netbook (Eee 901) combined with the second cheapest tablet I could find at the time (Genius G-Pen F350) and an app called Xournal to actually take the notes (on a clear page or into the PDF) and I'm quite happy with it.
...) and it's also easy to organize the notes.
I have no problem with power (since the netbook can last about 8 hours) or space (if the table is really small, I can place the tablet right over the keyboard), I have even more freedom than with paper (unlimited number of colors, easy erasing, copy&paste for repetive drawings,
The only notable limitation is that the page size roughly equals the size of an A5 paper, making annotation or a A4 material a little bit problematic (your writing is too big compared to the rest).
Ok, I had a 4.0 for my Ph.D. (but then again who doesn't?). Results may vary but here's what worked for me:
1. Stay awake. This is not a joke and is easier said than done.
2. Go to ALL classes. Taking notes is difficult if you missed something from a previous class. You also build up a stronger tolerance for staying awake.
3. Pre-read all instructional materials BEFORE class. This allows for the course materials to be somewhat familiar, perhaps a bit more interesting and increases the likelihood of point number 1.
4. Contribute to course discussions, i.e., raise your hand and talk, ask questions. Helps ensure point #1.
5. Buy a decent audio recorder and use it. Hide it if the teacher doesn't like it. This helps with the review of long lectures and is a backup in case point #1 fails.
6. Highlight your notes & key points in books.
7. If in an online or hybrid course, post more than necessary. Be active!
8. Find relevance in the instructional materials, no matter how useless they may seem. Hold back your sarcasm and try to accept that highly educated scholars put together the curriculum for the purpose of educating you, not making the university money. Upper level courses typically have lower enrollment and universities often take a hit on them financially.
9. Do NOT take notes on your laptop unless you have EXTREME discipline! The temptation for solitaire, WoW, and Slashdot may overwhelm you.
Education is often wasted on the young so things could go very smoothly if you have gained maturity and discipline with age.
So, I'm still in the second semester of Med School but I have already tried a few things. iPad fails completely. Notebook does as well. Actually, even pen and paper do fail if you don't use them properly. What you should do is write what is really important down. Like stuff that you know might be hard to find on a book. You can get verbatim copies of everything your teacher has said from your colleagues, since there'll always be the one who writes everything down. But this material will be of limited usefulness when you're desperate before a test. What is actually rare is decent condensed material. You will seldom get this from your peers. Most people don't realise how important it is to figure out during the class what's important and what's not. If you know that, you'll get good grades and be a successful professional. It is useless to force every bit of useless crap down your memory if you won't remember it when you need it. It is far better to focus on what's important so you can properly retain it and study the bulky useless crap only close to tests as needed. If you really get the core of the subject, it'll be far easier to understand and memorize the rest anyway.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
My own $0.02 as someone who went to medical school after specializing in a tech field (graduate engineering degree and licensed professional engineer).
I found medical school quite different from engineering and had to approach it differently. Before med school, I would have agreed with most people here who said: don't worry about notes and just pay attention; you'll understand it better, and can review the textbooks. It worked great for engineering.
That does not work for medical school. There is an overwhelming amount of factual information to absorb, and most of it you won't be able to comprehend as a cohesive whole. Sometimes it's because the information is coming at you too quickly. Sometimes it's because you haven't learned the necessary background theory yet to understand it; sometimes it's because *medical science* hasn't learned the theory behind the phenomenon yet. Sometimes there *is* nothing to understand --the facts simply are. And you often can't fall back on textbooks, because often there *are* no textbooks to use, especially in upper years -- medical science advances too quickly for textbooks. Instead, you're going to get a lot of info from journal articles, seminars, and just hearing your peers and teachers converse.
Thus the goal is to absorb information as much as possible; you may be more able to conceptually connect and assimilate the information later, perhaps later that day, perhaps a few years down the road. You'll want to take notes quickly, and yet do it in a searchable manner so you can easily retrieve information later.
For me personally, and I suspect for the majority of Slashdotters, this would mean a laptop to take text notes. I would be able to quickly type and get ideas on text, while reserving most of my brain power for trying to understand what I could of the concept. If later on I had to look up something, I could always do a text search. In my case I would probably use vi because that's what I'm familiar with, and maybe identify keywords with a "#" (so I could, for example, look for "#hyponatremia" later on). But any software is fine as long as it's something you're comfortable typing on, including Microsoft Word For People Who Don't Really Care About FOSS And Just Want To Type The Damn Text.
But the software has to be DEAD EASY to use, the equivalent of paper and pencil. If you want something with more features, make sure they can be used in the blink of an eye, like one keystroke to bring the cursor to the end of the text and begin adding notes. If you have to do Alt-O Alt-B Down Down Down Enter just to start typing, you're going to lose your train of thought. Forget about grammar checkers and spell checkers messing up the screen, and pop-up windows that say "You have typed this 14-letter would 3 times already. Would you like to assign this to Alt-Ctrl-Shift F12?" You want something on which you can type without even having to look at the screen.
One advantage of text files is that you start to accumulate a corpus of notes which may last you well into the clinical rotations and possibly even in practice as a doctor. You'll easily be able to go back to very old notes and connect it with new information, allowing you to assimilate and organize your knowledge --something that I still do on a weekly basis as a practicing physician.
My own med school notes were on paper; if only I had a laptop and vi back then! It was a very sharp transition point when I started accumulating electronic notes instead of on that burgeoning notebook on paper. All I learned which I noted on paper is a vague fuzzy memory now; all I learned which I noted electronically is easily recallable and thus has probably been so recalled many times in the course of just doing my job.
In summary:
1. In med school, information arrives more quickly than can be immediately assimilated without taking notes.
2. Typing as text file has the easy of pencil and paper and the retrievability of electronic data.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A nonexpert opinion follows..........
Medschool is about Mneomics. The best book on that subject is Harry Lorrayane's "The Memory Book". It has been around and impressing people for decades.
Now, about notetaking.
The point of a lecture is to get things you will not by reading the text book.
To maximize the benefits of a lecture you will want to read and take thorough notes on the text before the lecture. Here you have the luxury of time to do a good job. Get a book on notetaking. The benefit of taking notes in this situation is that it helps get it into your brain permanently, in a "fun" way, by organizing the information and forming a map/shelving unit in your brain for organizing information that comes after it. If you are just copying points down, you are doing it wrong. You want to organize/outline the information.......the taking of notes forces you to think about the material in some way, hence gluing the maps in.
By the time you get to the lecture you will have a familiarity with the material and a framework for it. You can give your full attention to LISTENING to the profresssor, thinking about what he is saying and as a result asking questions that will help you.
You wouldn't have had a chance for this benefit before because you would have been too busy trying to get down everything he was saying. But now you have all of that already, so you can relax, LISTEN, and think about the relationships of things as s/he talks......increasing your command of the material.
My personal opinion is that learning a handwritten notetaking system is better. The point isn't to preserve the material in a record. You have your textbook for that. The point is to get it into your brain so that it stays there. The slower speed of writing your notes holds it in your memory and makes you process your material much more than if you recorded it, highlighted it, etc
I have an HTC Flyer and it is wonderfull. If you have classes where most of the material is in PDF's which you can annotate its probably the best way to learn. I have and it really really works. Sadly most classes dont lend themselves to just PDF annotation. The Flyer small and cheap but I think the Lenovo Tegra 2 tablet and the Samsung Galaxy Note tablets are probably superior.
So, ultimately, I brute-forced it. I thought a lot about the unique dynamics of law-school lectures and built a set of MS Word macros to automate the repetitive note-taking and case-formatting functions specific to the wacky law-school lecture tradition. I learned the idiosyncracies of Word's horrible Outline Mode and built a little implementation-specific macro interface around it to make it usable. And that worked pretty well.
I was dead-center academically during my first semester, and felt like kids 30 years younger were me whizzing past me in their Honda Fits while I was struggling to pedal my Moped uphill. But by my second year, I'd built a nice little UI on top of Word that let me take autoformatted, hyperlinked, lecture notes on the fly and quickly navigate through hundred-page lecture notes when suddenly called upon to present a case. Post-lecture review entailed minor edits for clarity, which I was able to do rather quickly. And I ultimately graduated with one of the top 20 GPAs in my class of 450. In fact, by my 2d year, wide-eyed students looking over my shoulder would occasionally ask me where I found my "law-school outlining tools." And yes, you whippersnappers, I did share.
I think the moral of the story is that it's not the tool, it's the strategy. Even software as abstruse as Word's macro and Outline Mode functions can be forced into something that does the job, and does it well. The generality and flexibility of the tool (aka "bloat" in some circles), not the iWhatever ease-of-use is what matters. Turnkey solutions often produce least-common-denominator results. And, when faced with a complex, subtle problem like this, it may not be useful to solicit advice from a younger demographic that may have little understanding of, or empathy for, your problem (see, e.g., the clueless, "humorous" responses here). What worked for me was to observe and to try to understand the subtle requirements of my situation, identify the functions I'd need and understand how they might be implemented in order to best fit my personal style, and then try to approximate those functions with a general-purpose tool, preferably one with which I was already familiar, and one that facilitates an iterative, prototyping design process.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but that worked for me. I realize that may not be the simplistic "use product XYZ!" recommendation you'd hoped for, but when you have trouble answering a difficult question, sometimes that means you haven't identified the underlying issue.
Hope this helps.
As for physiology ; well, we don't use that stinking oxygen stuff any more, do we? As Captain Jack says, the twenty-first century is when everything changes.
Is Gray's Anatomy actually wrong, in any way that would be noticeable to anyone with less than 20 years on the awake end of a scalpel?
OK, I'll cede that more lecturers may use computer-drawn slides etc and have access to printing/ photocopying budgets. Or even have the students print them out. But until you get on up into doing research, then you're pretty unlikely to be encountering anything that previous generations were not capable of handling with a sharp pencil and a notepad. Two sharp pencils, if the lecturer spoke fast.
So, rather than worrying about what appears optimal, simply use the process that you're most familiar with. Otherwise you'll waste half of your expensive lecture (and tutorial) time with the people you're paying to teach you, just learning how to use whatever system you buy / cobble together / code for yourself.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It is proven scientifically that humans learn better using paper and pencil and book. The speculated reason is our heritage on the savanna where 3D skills were the difference between life and death. I print out anything important to read and markup and form thoughts. Then I scan my mark up and type a summary into Evernote. Watch out for brainwashing in med school. Also, you will not pay off loans with obamacare cutting doctor income.
I am posting this mostly because it is so bizarre that even I have trouble believing it. I still take my medical notes (on a laptop with 2 128 GB SSDs in RAID0) in a 280k, $10 shareware DOS program called HyGen, developed by one of the early pioneers of hypertext, Neil Larson of MaxThink fame. It is a non-html hypertext program, where links in reference ASCII text DOS file names. Thus, with a simple DOS text editor (I use Qedit), you can take notes by typing, create new .TXT files, and link them manually.
I do occasionally use UltraEdit to edit the files to paste in information from Windows. but the DOS text editor is so quick on a modern laptop that I preferentially use it for taking notes.
This is perhaps the electronic equivalent of charcoal on papyrus, but I have to admit I've not found a more modern method that allows both creating and browsing hypertext fast enough to take notes in class. I did try Amaya and thought about converting it all to html but wasn't happy with the it compared to the DOS method. And yes, this old program won't run under Win7 command prompt, but it will run well in a DosBox.
An older version of this is available on SimTel:
http://www.simtel.net/free/Development-Hyper-Text-files-and-programs/hyplus-zip/46728.html
A zip file with Hygen and Qedit (both shareware, if no longer readily available) and my current ASCII text hypertext-linked files is available at:
http://www.conovers.org/ftp/Notebook.zip
Remember, you may have to run it in DOSbox.
Caveat: my medical notes are full of errors and you use at your own risk. And these are notes what I, as an experienced emergency physician, find useful, so you may not.
If anyone actually decides to use this for medical notes, please let me know!
Hi. I just finished my MBA -- a quite different type of degree -- by using my laptop to take most of my notes. Similar to other posters, I learn best when focused on the lecture so I take less notes than others. When I do take notes, I prefer my laptop. I type much faster than I write and can organize information better, making it much easier to find for review later. After each course is complete, I would move all my work and hand-outs to an archive on by server so I have them forever. This has come in very handy because I do actually refer to that stuff on occasion. The ability to get on-line during class can be helpful as well (it can be a hindrance too, if you aren't focused).
Mike
What is with the Starter Dot paper notebook ? Wouldn't it work on normal paper .... ?
Don't sit in front if you've been up late and your prof. speaks in a monotone. I think I fell asleep too many times with one prof. He wasn't too pleased.
How many times does this question have to be asked and how many times do I have to say: "OneNote on a Tablet PC"
People say you can type notes on an iPad. Who are they frikkin kidding? You ever tried typing notes on a glass surface while paying attention to a professor? When was the last time any professor gave a lecture that could be typed up in a linear fashion?
People say you can draw diagrams on an iPad. Again, are you kidding me? You gonna draw up multiple complex molecular diagrams with your frikkin finger. It's college not kindergarten.
You gonna write your thesis on an iPad too? Have fun with that.
A Tablet PC is a real computer with a real operating system. It is a laptop with a touch-screen AND a stylus.
OneNote allows you to hand-write your notes just as you would on a piece of paper. But it is not just lines in a picture. The handwriting is converted to text behind the scenes and you can search for it. Or you can convert the handwriting to text. You can copy and paste in anything. On top of all that, you can have it recording the audio of the lecture and then have it play it back later, automatically highlighting the text you wrote while allowing you to add more notes as you listen to the lecture a second time.
In short, this combination is the ultimate note taking machine. How anyone gets through college without them is beyond me.