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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."
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
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.
I was told this when I started at university but it took me until my final year to truly grok it.
Each one hour lecture should take 3 hours of your time. One hour in the lecture itself, one hour within the next day or two (at most, ideally same day so things are fresher in your mind) when you annotate the notes you had taken, redraw bad diagrams, look stuff up etc. Don't hope or expect to get 'perfect' notes from the lecture itself. Then finally one hour before the exam to go over that hour of lecture time.
As others have said, pen and paper is king for that first hour in the lecture itself. Anything you try to do with technology should concentrate on the second hour.