Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking?

First time accepted submitter spencj writes "I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides. One of the problems I've considered is that we learn about the same topic in several arenas. For example, if I consider some disease like coronary artery disease, I will likely learn about this topic in cardiology, radiology, pharmacology, and then in outside study resources such as Kaplan guides, online resources, etc.. Further, it will come up in August, October, March, April, etc.. My dream app is some combination of Excel, Visio, Word, and a blog where I could tag selections of text. If I then 'filtered' by certain parameters, it would collapse all the information I'd collected from different resources. For example, say I create a flowchart in Visio, take some notes in Word, create a table in Excel, and save from text from a web resource. I tag each item with 'coronary artery disease,' then I want to quickly query for all of my items with this tag. Is there any kind of app or resource that can pull this off? Medical students everywhere would be grateful."

Comments

pen and paper

[intermodal]

Nothing I've yet discovered is as flexible, reliable, and controllable. every digital attempt I've seen/tried has been inferior. You might try recording the lectures as you go in case you need to go back for context at some point, especially if you go back and type them later.

Re:pen and paper

[eggstasy]

I concur. It's worked pretty well so far, why would it need to change...? Is there a specific problem you're trying to solve?
Do bear in mind, from my own painful experience with note taking, you should try to actually pay attention to your class. It's different for everyone, but I found excessive note-taking counter-productive. That's what people did before they had easy access to all the information in the world.

Also, get off my lawn you damn kids.

Re:pen and paper

[larwe]

This. Not only this, but the OP is seriously underestimating the workload overhead of tagging CONSISTENTLY, and adding all sorts of meta-information to documents. It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what? It's extremely hard to maintain consistent tagging rules for a large body of individual notes. As for digital note taking, there is no solution that works as well as paper. In the course of EE studies, I have tried everything under the sun. Tablets, PDAs, laptops, digital ink pens, etc etc. If you're taking lots of text notes, a keyboard is king... but probably no faster than handwriting. If your notes include diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formulae, etc, you can pretty much forget keyboards (though I have seen some Mathcad mavens enter math proofs "live" off a whiteboard since they know all the keyboard shortcuts for everything). Stylus-based screens don't have the resolution nor the responsiveness of paper. The best solution I ever reached was paper notes which I then scanned, so I could carry all my notes on my laptop/tablet. Forget about this frankly OCD-sounding desire for neatly aligned banks of metadata-encrusted Faberge eggs of notecraft. It's far more important to focus on listening to what the hell is going on in the lecture, and comprehending it, which oftentimes means participation back the other way to clarify points being made in the lecture. You won't be able to get that clarification offline studying at home. If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal. Wasting effort on the Quest for Perfect Electronic Notes is a more appropriate activity for someone whose goal is, say, clinical informatics specialist. In summary: Grrrrr.

Re:pen and paper

[Colonel Korn]

Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.

Do you want to spend your time swapping between apps, waiting for apps to load, trying to draw with your laptop's touchpad, and otherwise concentrating on the technology rather than concentrating on the discussion?

If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you. But for simple flexibility and reliability, paper is the answer.

Write on it. Draw on it. Re-use it in another class. Archive it. Paper does all the things asked for in the article.

OneNote and a tablet with an active digitizer is searchable pencil and paper. It's not any more cumbersome than a notebook but it's far better for finding old notes.

*golf clap*

[MagicM]

A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.

Re:Paper, Pen, and...

[gstoddart]

. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote (sic) rehearsal = good).

Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.

Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something. ;-)

Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.