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Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades
Meshach writes "A study in the journal Computers & Education found that students who took notes on a laptop got lower marks then student who took notes the traditional way with pen and paper. The study's author hypothesized that using a laptop leads to multitasking (i.e. surfing the net or checking email), which reduces concentration."
Is the problem.. Common sense
remove Freecell from the laptop first, dumbass.
Taking Notes on a Facebook Machine lowers your grades.
10 Bucks says that the manufacturers are so dependent on getting their machines in schools that they simply release locked down and crippled 'student edition' machines.
what about students that don't take any notes ?
I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.
Cut and paste or typing on a screen knowing you can save it to disc for easy recovery later does nothing for the memory - indeed the whole act is designed to save data to magnetic storage rather than brain cells!
Need to not get the 2 confused.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A computer is not the best device for note taking. Using a LiveScribe pen you can transfer your notes to the computer, including a recording the voice of the lecturer. The pen makes your notes hypertext because it is linked with the audio at the time of note taking. It makes it easy to navigate in the audio recording.
Perhaps they should have learned the difference between 'then' and 'than'.
Another hypothesis, arguably more difficult to empirically explicate, would be that the brain treats the two tasks differently memory-wise.
I prefer writing by hand. When the lecture is good, I do my best to get it verbatim. I find that an hour after the lecture has ended, I can cite the professor pretty accurate. However, when I write something on the computer my mind immediately blanks it out.
Consequently, writing by hand is more efficient _in studying_ because my brain at least remembers some of it. I'd think people are different when it comes to this, but for me the difference is considerable.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
1. People who take hand-written notes often later transcribe them digitally, thus going over the notes one more time than people who just record them digitally in the first place.
2. Studies have that reading harder-to-read fonts assist in recall/retention. Hand-written notes certainly fall in the category of harder-to-read.
Involving more skills probably means the brain is more engaged in what's going on thus making the content of the notes easier to remember
If you would have given me a laptop in school while sitting in some "boring" class I would have been lucky getting a D-
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"...got lower marks then students who took notes...."
A memory trick I once learned (for remember names or phone numbers, for example) is to write the item with your finger on a roughish surface like your pants 3 times. This often works for me.
There have been studies (like this one) that seem to show that writing something down by hand reinforces learning. I'm surprised the author didn't think this might be relevant.
Taking notes in general is just distracting. Better to listen and think, and use the book when you get home.
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I find that taking very sparse notes, or none, depending on the subject, I will get more out of a lecture. As long as there is a good textbook or other reference I can use it to clarify confusions later. I find generally that when writing or typing, the info isn't being stored in my brain as well.
Of course, I often also find it helpful to have a book on an unrelated subject and to split my attention back and forth to it and the lecture to control my short attention span, so I'm weird.
My GPA went up one full letter grade when I stopped taking notes in class - period. It was far more instructive to actually pay attention to what was being said and to think about it while it was being discussed, than to simply focus all of my cerebral effort on transcribing what was being written on the board.
And people who write summaries use the wrong words more "than" some other people
the multitasking sample got the lower scores, not the laptop using sample as a whole
But half were also asked to complete a series of unrelated tasks on their computers when they felt they could spare some time.
Multi-tasking is a plausible explanation, but I can posit another one quite easily.
If instead of focusing on writing the content you're trying to do any form of formatting, layout, entering equations, trying to do diagrams -- you are already multi-tasking and part of your attention is on the device instead of what you're listening to.
I've tried taking notes on a laptop, and I found it distracting and more trouble than it's worth. If you can see the Prof is drawing a quadrant or a graph, you can do that by hand far faster on a sheet of paper.
Maybe someone can do it, but for me, I find that good old fashioned paper is still the most effective way for me to take notes and commit stuff to paper and I can annotate it later.
I just don't think the input techniques we have available to us are anywhere near as effective as pen and paper.
My guess? Give someone a laptop which has no internet connectivity while they're taking notes, and with only the application open they're directly using -- and they'll still do worse.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You'll get my Freecell when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
what about smaller classes vs big lectures?
theory based classes vs more hands on ones they need to look into that as well. I say lot's of people in theory classes it's based more on how is good at test cramming
I used org-mode in emacs to take all my notes (latex for formulas). The ability to create todos anywhere in the notes + deadlines and scheduling made organizing coursework extremely easy and enjoyable. Graduated with honors in CS from ETH Zurich (consistently ranked one of the top eng schools in the world for those of you in the US). So I guess how you use your computer also makes a difference.
No one I went to undergrad with used a laptop. Granted, my undergrad was chemistry and its hard as hell when 3/4 of the notes are diagrams of complex reactions.
I take that back. There was one girl who had a convertible laptop with a stylus.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
While I suppose having the web at one's fingertips would be distracting, it's not as though people who hand write notes have no distractions. I remember doodling or jotting down non-course-related musings in my notes. Even without a laptop there are distractions, other things the hands/eyes might be doing. Perhaps a laptop increases that distraction, but let's face it, if the student is surfing the web, they were obviously weren't paying attention anyway.
1. Students who used laptops did worse
2. Soriano deal paying off for the Yankees
3. Cowell's fiance settled divorce with old hubby
4. Students who used laptops did better?
5. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs - perfect casting
If you have no calculator, you need to master mental arithmetic. If you have a calculator, you just keep a-pressing those buttons, and don't even notice when something goes amiss (like when you (think you) pressed 5 * 7 6 3 = and got 4578).
If you rely on a wordprocessor to type your work rather than a typesetting language, you can just tap away until things look about right, whereas with non wysiwyg methods you need to have a greater understanding of how the document is set out.
If you can recall your notes from your laptop via Spotlight or from some database, you don't need to learn to organise your notes like you do with paper.
These and many more examples are the problem. Pen and paper rewards a disciplined mind in a way that mindlessly tapping away on a laptop doesn't. (When writing my PhD thesis, I first handwrote pretty much everything, then typed it up in LaTeX. When helping someone set out precise diagrams in Microsoft Word, I ended up having to print to postscript, preview in gv (this was circa 2000) and then move things around in Word so that they looked wrong in Word but right on paper.)
Laptops reward non-intelligent laziness in a bad way, and people who use computers should be encouraged more to learn to do things in a harder and more manual way to learn the self-discipline, and the need for sufficient practice to maintain this discipline, before fully relying on a computer to make life easier.
There is a well known saying in mathematics: once you've learned to do things the hard way, people don't care if you're sloppy. Learn things the hard way first.
John_Chalisque
Writing things down on paper helps you retain them, it's a basic fact. We were even taught that, i think, in grade school, might have been middle school. Want to study? Write your notes out, say them out loud, etc etc, but writing them out by hand was always something you should be doing.
something as simple as taking notes on the laptop, them transcribing them by hand, would help.
I'm only pretending to take notes.
The effect was observed not only on the person using the laptop to take notes, but also on the surrounding students who weren't, presumably because the laptop was a significant distraction.
To me the greatest advantage of digital notes over pen and paper is that I can extend a topic when I acquire additional information on it (whereas on paper there's usually no physical space to do that), reorganize them by merging related notes into a single unit and also search through them.
Also, I type much faster than I write and I can shape and transform my notes very easily with Org-mode.
But actually I'd prefer if there was some collaborative note-taking going on instead of the huge duplication of work as it is now. Something like wiki-notes, where the purpose of taking notes would be not to recreate them each time but to make them better over time and update them.
Lock the laptop to a word processor of some sort. No apps, games or internet and see if that changes things.
This study wasn't about the difference in performance for those who take notes on a laptop versus by hand. It was about people who surf the 'net while in class. Unsurprisingly, people weren't able to focus on the class as much when they did that. Derp.
I always take notes on a jotter pad with a pen - it's so much faster for sketching out diagrams, linking up bits of text with arrows, adding annotations all over the place where and whenever necessary. No scrolling or saving necessary.
Of course my handwriting has become so awful after 20 years in IT that I have to get any really important stuff implemented or typed up as soon as possible afterwards, as pretty much only I can read it and even that's not a certainty a few months down the line.
It is interesting to see how people here define 'Taking Notes'. There seem to be the two polar extremes of 'feverishly transcribing everything' and taking no notes whatsoever. There is a good middle ground of listen, learn, document your understanding. Apart from the distraction, laptops are poor because you just cannot sketch a diagram or simple flowchart as quickly as you can on paper. Even formal logic symbols, set notation or any of those visual representations of relationships are hard to come by quickly. Scribbling down your understandings as they come to you is more efficient than just listening, because translating the discovery into your own words and writing it down are two powerful mnemonic devices. You also get to choose the words that best describe the understanding you have gleaned, rather than using someone else's words.
It looks like the entire thing was just wrote memorization which is darn close to completely worthless. People took notes and then did a multiple choice exam to repeat back the information in the notes.
Honestly, with or without a computer I find it very hard to pay attention or care in any memorization based class. The experience is pointless since memorizing the information gives you nothing on how to really use it, how to evaluate if you are within bounds for something, out of bounds, at an unstable point etc.
That is why I like my engineering classes. They give us real problems on exams and expect us to solve them in a more realistic way at least. The exams are normally open book, notes, pretty darn advanced calculators etc and the problems are hard as hell. If you don't understand how to approach the problems, how to figure out how to do them you have no chance of solving them in time. You can't learn from the book as you go. However, during the exams you need to figure out what information you need that is not provided in the problem, look at up in the books in charts, tables, equations etc.
As a result your hand is not held at every step. You are not told you will need certain values from the steam tables, others from phase diagrams, other relationships or equilibriums etc. You are expected to figure that out just like you do in the real world.
During our classes laptops are great for notes. Most of our lectures are on practical problem solving and being able to look things up, use MATLAB or Excel to work on the problems etc is a huge gain and you have those later to refer to. One of the things our professors emphasize is to LOOK IT UP. If you do something from memorization and it is wrong you can get people killed in engineering. It takes almost no effort and time to look something up so look it up every single time.
The important things to learn in class are how to setup the problems, why you set them up that way, what boundaries you need to watch for, what does the answer mean etc. The actual mechanical cranking of solving the problem is something that you pretty much just hand to a computer now. Being able to solve a system of 40+ ODEs by hand is not a useful skill. You will screw that up and you will waste a lot of time getting stuck in the details instead of learning how understand the system and how stable it is.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
They compared people taking notes (with a pencil) to people taking notes WHILE surfing the web, as instructed.
To see how taking notes on a laptop compares to taking notes with a pencil as per TFS, they should have compared either:
only taking notes (with a pencil) vs. only taking notes (with a laptop)
and / or
taking notes (with a pencil) while surfing the web vs. taking notes (with a laptop) while surfing the web
What they actually compared was "taking notes" vs. "surfing the web and taking notes".
They just assumed that anyone with a laptop has to surf the web in class, thereby learning something amazing - multitasking reduces performance.
That's an amazing new discovery!
How cute.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Actually, the reason has to do with how we learned to learn. As children, we learned by writing. As teens and adults we are introduced to computers. Hence typing is not as ingrained behavior as writing. This means it takes more effort. More of your brain is required to type because it is not second nature. I imagine some people would have a similar problem if they has to take notes in other forms which aren't trained to the same extent. Also, writing involves holding something and fine motor skills, where type involves more muscles and gross motor skills (at least for me). When kids are taught initially via keyboard and throughout their learning, the opposite may be the case.
I don't see any information on how the students were taking notes on their machines. Just "taking notes on laptops" may mean anything.
I wouldn't be able to take any notes in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. But in Org-mode I actually take notes more efficiently than I can do than on paper.
How is that news? I weep for the future. More evidence that the finger-on-the-button US is as stupid as everyone thinks.
Bullshit, I hypothesize that it has nothing to do with the note taking system but instead the type of student. This type of student want easy breezy spoof fed education and thinks a laptop will help.
I got a 3.3 GPA in my undergrad while using paper notes and a 4.0 in grad school while using a computer. Not exactly a balanced comparison but...
While going through grad school I found that I did best if I played a game that required little mental activity to keep my mind from wandering away from the lecture (Eve Online mining or mission running was excellent). Then for notes I did better if I didn't take a note for everything but instead listened to everything the lecturer said and then summarized during the breaks.
Just my bent $0.02...
As a person that took notes all through college on a Tablet PC and OneNote, I can tell you it is the greatest thing ever, I still go back to my notes from my computer science classes if I ever had a question about an algorithm. (Had to write my own sorts a few times). I think it comes down to self-control, when I got to class I would purposely sit where others could see my screen if I was in type mode and turn off the wireless. That way if I would go online or do something else others in class would see it and that in turn would get the attention of the teacher that I was on the web. When in tablet mode, I could not surf the web because using the onscreen keyboard would take too long and I hate looking at webpages in portrait mode. .99 cent game and ruin your life on in, too many times in the workplace I have caught coworkers on iPads playing candy crush or angry birds. To me I think the tablets are worse to take notes on because you don’t have the handwriting precision or tactile keyboard, this coming from a person who uses both an iPad and an old Thinkpad tablet pc.
I really think the problem is iPads and tablets, where you can go and get a
The word is "than" as in "lower grades than students who..." not "then"
surfing the net or checking email [...] reduces concentration
Surfing the net or checking email defies concentration.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
IMO, it's gaming in class during lectures given by ancient professors who could bore the paint off the walls on topics of study that are genetically predisposed to cause blindness by its very nature due to sheer boringness... Essentially you bring a device into class that has the potential to make your class less boring, but only in the sense that it keeps you from having to endure sheer boredom to the point where you force yourself to learn the material.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I've often taken notes on laptop at seminars and scientific meetings, and I've found it helps me concentrate on the talks. Taking notes on paper is distracting primarily because it requires constant glancing down at the paper. Further, I can type much faster than I can write. Rather than transcribing exactly what the speaker is saying, though, I find myself putting things in my own words, which keeps my attention from straying. But it's essential to be typing by touch and not looking down at the keyboard or the screen, which is as distracting as writing on paper. Typing errors, sometimes approaching one per word, can be corrected later, and in fact provide a convenient opportunity to review the material. If the study excluded surfers and included only touch-typists, I'm confident the laptop note-takers would do better.
TFA says the problem is multitasking (or being around someone multitasking.) NOT just using a computer. People multitasked in classes before computers were invented, actually. But they didn't test people doodling or writing outlines for classes in other subjects or simply writing paper letters, did they?
The other problem is classes that do not engage or hold attention, encouraging multitasking to occur. (I'm going to give you a really boring lecture, all of which is easily found in your textbook, and I expect you to simply regurgitate what I'm telling you and do no thinking of your own....) I had several classes back in the mid-90s when I used my laptop and I played solitaire or read a donwloaded "newspaper" built up from CompuServe. Know what difference that made to my life? Well, it made the classes more bearable. But nobody today really cares that I got a C+ in Philosophy instead of an A.
One of the best things I did as a college freshman was to take an optional study skills workshop offered by the university.
I was taught that the optimal way to do things ( yes, I realize the optimal way isn't always possible ) was to take thorough notes from the text book before the lecture, then use the lecture to listen to the professor without your attention being distracted less with the need to write things down. This frees you up to think about the material while s/he is speaking, ask yourself questions about it, ask the professor questions, and get the material reenforced by hearing it twice.
Makes sense, the textbook is a static resource you can access anytime. An opportunity for a live interactive talk isn't.
Plus if you go in already being introduced to the material you already know what isn't clear to you and you can take advantage of the opportunity to have a live expert to clear up questions you have.
THAN! Not THEN! Than is a comparison, X is lower than Y. Then means subsequent, X happened then Y happened. I usually ignore this on twitter and forums, but when a news item gets it wrong then I get annoyed.
In my CNC class I sit up front and photograph the whiteboard using my phone.
Other students began doing it too and it's worked well for them.
I'm also politely vocal about finding hand-written "anything" an abomination and point out the instructor could simply do one set of "notes" in PowerPoint for class use and student download. He has started doing that amid much rejoicing. Handwriting is righly obsolete elsewhere and the sooner it's replaced by printed text the better. Text offers faster visual recognition and there is no reason to write again what has once been written when it could as easily be transcribed into text.
An example I cite against handwriting is medical prescription error. How DARE anyone want handwriting when important information must be conveyed precisely? I grew up with the usual classes devoted to making pretty cursive writing and was never impressed. Calligraphy is for hobbyists, text is for communication.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This must have been typed with a laptop ;)
I want to see a study that compares students that take all notes by hand and students that are given the notes before the lecture and then make supplemental notes. I always found note taking distracting from thinking about the lecture but at the same time I always wanted to have a reference so that I know what a professor deems important. From personal experience, I believe being given a set of notes / detailed PowerPoint slides with the option of adding to them is more conducive to retention and understanding.
As a university instructor who encourages the use of laptops in class, I feel it is mostly a matter of focus. (I am teaching intro stat and operations research.) I tell the students to bring a laptop, but it is a tool and we will be looking at how to use that tool to solve problems. (I also tell them that if they want to watch youtube or hulu they should sit at the back of the class and use headphones to keep the distraction down for the other students.)
Many of the math graduate courses I've taken had no followed textbook or even official course notes, and in those classes it was essential to take notes. I remember going back through my notes at the end of the day or the next day to rework them, and that helped a lot in understanding. I think the pace of the classes were fast enough, at least for some of them, or my knowledge at the time incomplete enough, that the pace of class was too fast. So I had to "preserve" it, perhaps without understanding all the details, and then review. Come to think of it, I think I've only had one to three courses that diligently followed a textbook. Math is a funny subject to learn, I suppose, as powerpoint I feel is very bad for it. Sometimes you can learn entirely new things just by taking with another person, and I think that is the coolest thing ever. No writing ever done! All the visualization is done in the brain. However, to really understand the material, you need to work it out, as your brain cannot keep all the necessary information in your head at once.
... some of the participants didn't even adhere to the instructions for their group, i.e., they surfed and screwed around when they weren't supposed to. And then did poorly on a quiz. Gee, who saw that coming?
Sit in the back of a big law school class. You will usually find at least 20% of the girls looking at clothes and 20% of the guys looking at sports. And probably closer to 90% of the class is checking email or facebook during the class.
You fail.
They got lower marks THAN students who took notes by writing.
A is lower than B
not
A is lower then B
I remember thing much more clearly when I write them by hand, especially mathematic formulas, to the point where I can "see" them in my head. It doesn't happen with typing. Hand-eye coordination tracing vector memories or something. Easy to remember. I would reinforce that by using different colored pencils.
They wasted money on that? And got it printed in a journal? *Obviously* people with any device that just *yells* out, "the internet is right here! And all your favorite time-wasting games!", are not going to pay as much attention to lectures, especially lectures that aren't very interesting. I say as someone who totally intended to take notes in all sorts of classes that I ended up playing a lot of Nethack in instead.
Headline should just read: "Goofing off in lecture and not paying as much attention lowers grades." Which, duh.
...to record the audio from the lesson while you play farmville or whatever hell kids play these days. Problem solved.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
I'm sick to death of reports on these 'studies'. The headline conclusions are based on a very simplistic premise, failing to acknowledge the simple fact that life is complicated. Worse, reacting to the conclusions can often make the problem significantly worse.
Take this study - the headline suggests a correlation between those using laptops and lower results. The simplistic conclusion? Laptops are a problem.
The flaw in this conclusion? For some people, verbal delivery of information (e.g. a lecture) is a lousy way to learn. If I focus all my concentration on the speaker, I can understand little more than 75% of what they say. But try to remember it, type it, or worst of all write it down, and that plummets drastically. If I use pen and paper, I have to stop listening entirely while my hand is moving - I may as well be completely deaf. Writing, like listening, requires all my concentration. If I type, it's still bad but not nearly so much. The fact is, my marks will always be lower than others when information is delivered verbally. A laptop is my best hope, but my performance will be relatively weak nonetheless.
If we followed the summary conclusion of this study, we'd bar the laptops and I (and others) would be completely sunk. The author states that this is not the intention, but that's what many will take away from it. But the real conclusion IMO: stop relying on verbal delivery of information!
I would like to see this study re-done with a third group who uses a note taking appliance such as the Surface Pro with OneNote and a stylus. Does the stylus and the act of 'writing' instead of typing change the results? I would imagine someone with an organized method in a program like OneNote that is purpose-built for note taking would have a leg-up on the paper/pen crowd.
The best note-taking device I ever used for classes was the old Apple eMate.
For those who are not familiar: it's basically an Apple Newton in a subnotebook shell.
It had a note-taking app that worked either with the built-in keyboard or with the stylus.
Now, my first job out of high school back in the day was as a word-processing secretary, back when very few people used computers directly. As a result, my typing speed is very fast compared to many of my peers. When the note-taking is the sort that is easy to accommodate with typing, I can work pretty fast.
But not all note-taking is suitable for typing. Sometimes you've got a diagram. Sometimes you've got equations. Sometimes you've got accented characters or the phonetic alphabet.
On the eMate, I'd type away, and when a diagram came up, I'd just pick up the stylus and draw it, exactly as I would on paper. Then I'd go back to typing. Flowing back and forth was seamless. It was awesome.
(The battery would also last for days, sometimes even weeks, and the display was perfectly readable in lighting conditions from full sunlight to complete dark. Why? Because it was a monochrome LCD, which with sufficient lighting doesn't need the backlighting that color LCDs require.)
Another factor: there was absolutely no wireless connectivity at the time, and the device didn't multitask (from a user interface perspective, that is; it did have full background processing, but one app controlled the display at a time).
There was no temptation to multitask. There were no distractions.
Couple that with the rich tagging and indexing built in, and it was an extremely useful.
(Today, I use an iPad and bluetooth keyboard for note-taking, primarily because of the lack of multitasking (again, from a user interface point of view). And I'll often throw the device into airplane mode while doing this. I might still use that old eMate, if not for the blasted Y2K10 bug...)
was long ago shown to improve long term retention. This is not a surprise at all.
I was in college just at the cusp of people starting to take notes on laptops. It never appealed to me. Even today in meetings, the information just doesn't sink in like it does with hand writing notes. I take notes in meetings that I know I will never read, just because it helps pound it into my memory.
I can never keep notes on the computer organized either. Not that my paper notes are super organized, but at least there is an indestructible (unless I rip pages out) linear timeline to everything. You know everything is there somewhere and if you can't remember where the other things you were taking notes on at the time can help you zero in.
Your lecturers should have been giving you a reading plan ahead of the lecture so you all could read up, make notes if necessary, and try and understand and learn something. Then spend the lecture reviewing, refreshing and discussing the points to see if anyone was too stupid or lazy to be in that class. That way in class notes are minimal and everyone has plenty of time to think about the concepts in the material.
There is something about writing and drawing that merge ideas and make them easier to recall later. Perhaps it doesn't work for non-technical majors, but I've always drawn diagrams in my notes to show relationships for engineering, physics, chemistry, astronomy, EE and nukeE problems. I can't imaging being able to do accmoplish the same things with a computer - visio, OneNote ....
Further, I was taught to rewrite my notes a day or 2 later after my mind has a chance to think, ponder, consider the ideas. Sometimes entirely new connections would happen, so the notes would show those that were unknown during the class.
Some profs would provide great photocopied notes, but I wouldn't be forced to think about each relationship when using those. It took longer to learn the concepts AND put them together.
Writing + drawing is a way to learn faster for complex subjects, especially if your interest (aptitude) is not in that subject.
did you take notes in English class on a laptop ? :) (pls don't mod me down, the irony of the post made me do it )
The game of user interfaces time and time again is one of distraction and eye candy. However like the abusive use of fonts in "Wired" these look fancy devices are instead derisive.
University researchers need to research constructive task oriented interfaces and how they can be restructured to be more productive.
Oh wait the researchers are distracted and will never finish...
Each time the OLPC folk crank the hardware and software engine I am impressed up to a point where the issue of teaching and work flow run over each other. It does get better but inventors need to teach more. A new invention without teachers notes and not just Cliff notes is the tree that fell in the forest and no one heard it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
It took me two years of college, and a stint working in the real work, to realize that if you're not sitting in the front row, you're not getting your money's worth*. Partly, for me, was a slight decrease in my visual acuity (I went from 20:15 in HS to 20:40 at the end of college before I finally got glasses), but mostly it's a matter of focus. This would be true if people are surfing on laptops around you - being in the front row means not having a screen in your line of sight. It also means that the teacher or professor is seeing your reaction and more heavily gauging material absorption based on your speed.
It's funny (and not in a humorous way) how we denigrate students who voluntarily sit in the front and participate in class through all of our "free" education, and then once we start paying several thousand dollars out of our own pocket realize that the front row really is the "value" proposition in education.
*Unless the class is easy, you have a friend taking it with you, and you like to heckle the professor...in which case I suggest middle of the audience for best effect. (Grad Statistics, best class ever)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I remember taking notes on a computer in comp sci. It was great. By the time the lecture was over I had finished the assignments for the next class and emailed (Pine?) myself the annotated code. The prof was really attentive, too. So if you were playing a game or IM'ing, he'd shut you down, or worse, make your chat window visible on everybody's screen. Fun times.
Pencil and Paper is for Pussies. Pencil can be erased. So much for doing things the hard way. So much for all your posturing about discipline and how you are all so superior to everyone else.
How about chiseling on stone tablets? Now that takes discipline and true mental toughness. Better understand everything clearly and PERFECTLY before you chisel the next character, or oopsie! all that work and time wasted. How about that, tough guy?
Better yet - just memorize all your data, calculations, results and writing. Someone wants it - they have to listen to your lecture, or ask you questions. They couldn't memorize your information instantly? Sucks to be them.
Tools are Tools. Discipline is a series of methods, and can work with all sorts of tools. In another way, discipline is just another tool, and can work perfectly well with memory, sand, chisel and stone, pencil (or pen!) and paper, and yes - computers, tablets, neural implants, etc. Etc. Etc.
TLDR: Get off my lawn you Luddite Elitist!
PS: A computer or other assistive device is sometimes the perfect tool for a disabled (or non-disabled) person, and I guarantee many of them are far more disciplined and accomplished than you. Ever hear of Hawking?
While correlation does not always show causality, a sufficiently large study will tend to flatten all of the other variables. To say the study is flawed implies that you can demonstrate how a bias exists (writing-based learners were more likely to get computers). In fact, having a computer - for you - is clearly a hindrance, by your own admission. It sounds like you should have an audio or AV recorder for the lecture and then transcribe notes at your leisure afterwards.
I'm much like you, but for most engineering coursework a keyboard is horrible for note taking. The interesting stuff is in equations and diagrams. I find that pencil and paper allow me to verify that I understand the material real-time, provided it is delivered slowly enough to transcribe. Handouts of the professors notes are nice, but I don't get nearly the retention as if I do the work myself.
I'm in private practice now, and I find I take very, very few notes when on sites. Mostly I listen and watch, building an engineering model of the situation in my head to evaluate the gross physics, then write my initial findings down immediately following a review of a structure. Others are different - they measure everything and make sense of it later.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
WOOSH!
The kids who WROTE things down were better at the tests of what they memorized than the kids using computers.
Thus the entire thing was just wrote memorization.
Just because you don't get the sophisticated humor of engineers is no reason to display your own ignorance, lack of reading comprehension and attention to the details.
Study subjects, although young, grew up processing and producing hand written information. Once "generation iPad" takes their place I bet the outcome will be the opposite.
I found that the act of writing itself helps me to memorize material, especially when I'm condensing my notes instead of writing things down verbatim. I used to study by re-writing and re-condensing my course notes in university at the end of the semester a couple or three times, until I had an entire course down to 1-2 sheets of bullet points.
Reading textbooks or just rereading my notes didn't work nearly as well. I think the difference is that when you're condensing material, you're actually thinking about it instead of just browsing/skimming it.
Worked for me...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Perhaps the grades are lower because the notes are not as helpful.
When I was in college, I always found that laptop notes were of little to no use when taking notes for anything other than text. If I wanted to copy a graph, I couldn't do so without wasting time or taking my focus away from the prof. If I needed to draw a diagram, I couldn't do it very well on my laptop's small touch pad. And finally, if anything involved non-standard text (subscripts, mathematical symbols, etc), then I encountered even more difficulty. Using a stylus and a tablet may be easier than a laptop now... but that is still just writing and I would rather do it on paper in most cases.
-Me
Everything you said is true but we can't be complete masters of every base concept before moving on to more complex ones. Eventually we have to be able to take our tools for granted in order to make more advanced tools to take for granted. There will be plenty of things you do that someone else will call you lazy and sloppy for not learning base principles for.
I used a tablet to take notes and actually DID take notes. I usually sat in back of the class (I'm a little agoraphobic) and could see most students in front of me. The people who were using their laptops to type out notes were never able to stick with it for long. It was too compelling a distraction. My guess is it's a combination of the utility of surfing/goofing in combination with the impracticality of note-taking on a laptop.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I find it much easier to understand and remember something if I write it down on paper.
Much better than typing it out or drawing diagrams in EA.
Okay, I'll reply to you, representative of the other comments because I think everyone is missing the mark.
Here we go!
1. The Paradigm is wrong. It's like asking if a car is better than a plane because the plane is "clunkier" to use proportional to training. But no one seriously wants to drive time-efficiency-wise if they really have a big goal. Same here. Computers are the greatest informational processing system ever designed, yet it seems many people are having trouble matching the "old school" pencil&pen on paper. (I use both - Blue Pen = AutoBold, pencil prevents scribbles.)
Paper is indeed powerful. But then the problem seems to be how to *match or exceed* the power of paper, on a computer.
2. The format is wrong. Lectures should be provided pre-recorded as Audio-Visual files *for reference*. I'll leave for another day whether before the class or after, etc. But the point is to take out the whole silly pressure/fear of missing info, so indeed you can then sit there and concentrate, and/or have already prepped the lecture the day before if that's your thing. So then notes quit being desperate attempts to catch it all once, and you can process it. Play the pre-recorded version four times! Then go to class and ask why you don't get equation five.
This touches into silly issues like copyright, but also professor laziness. Give the Hacker Club two months and $3000 of materials and you'll have an auto-recording whiteboard, even maybe if a little grainy.
3. Software
I completely agree a million text/rtf files are a mess trying to take notes. But I am now an advocate of a Tree database note program. You take structured notes in your hierarchical tree, and you can move each note all around as you learn more you just go back and update the note.
THAT is the game changer for me. It's the only software that for me has exceeded pen and paper, maybe coupled with spreadsheets for the math side of notes & data crunching.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Who needs conjunctions and plurals when you make submissions using your laptop!
I use a treadmill desk, and when I really need to think deeply about something (for example, intricate code logic), I end up stopping walking while I think through the details.
*shrug* Try debugging something on a treadmill and let me know how it goes; of course, your mileage may vary.
I take it walking and talking are not considered two task at once. Unless you mean high-level tasks (ie the ones we are conscious about, not like walking and such).
It says that those using laptops suffered 11% while those nearby suffered 17%. So I should bring my laptop and surf... the curve will take care of the rest!!
As to item 2, i do not agree on the recorded lectures. The personal presence and interaction is needed for many people to put them into the right frame of mind and often to allow them to reach the required level of concentration. Ever had your microphone fail while you were explaining a complicated construct to 200 students? In any reasonable lecture hall you can reach 200 students without PA. Now that is real concentration and focus by the students. Of course, it is taxing and it requires s strong sense in the students that their time is spent well, but I have had that experience as a lecturer several times. A recording never gets you the same. It is a bit like life music and recorded music. Life music commands attention, while recoded musing is often listened to only casually, and listening to it with full concentration takes discipline and training. Sure, some people can do it, but for the average student, the level of skill and determination needed is too high.
As to item 1, I find it just is not there yet, also because I can write very and a lot of the notes I took at university and still take today is symbolic. For other subjects, it may work.
Item 3 sounds a bit like a Wiki-like thing. I have used wikis to organize my notes when learning new things on my own, and that works pretty well. Putting a fast wiki on your computer could solve part of the issues with text-files. What I would really like is a pen-interface and display with paper-like quality (fast, > 1000 dpi, very readable), and then the structuring possibility on on top of it. Not there yet. And of course, OCR-to-LaTeX for anything symbolic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I actually use my netbook to take notes in my approximately half of my classes. I actually chose this half so I could check the performance difference. I've found that I've done much better in those classes (note classes not subject, so I could avoid subject bias) which I took computerised notes in. Although this could be explained by the fact that I hardly ever connect the machine to the internet and have few games on there for me to distract myself with. Additionally, I find that I can type far faster and more accurately than I can write, meaning there are less gaps in my notes, and the ability to search through my notes when it comes to revision is not to be sniffed at!
That said, I can easily see how other students on my level (A-Level UK) could easily be distracted by the use of computers. You just need to make sure you lock them down enough!
We actually have software that will allow data collection on tablets and laptops - heck, even cell phones - for observations by MDs when they do clinical workups on patients.
But - when they use it they get too caught up in the data entry and validation, and observe less than doing the same task with pen and paper on forms.
So, even though we could use electronic data capture - remember, this is clinical observation of subtle physical and psychological aspects of a patient, not stocking an Amazon delivery cart - we don't capture the raw data by electronic means, but do that after we have all the MDs and clinical research staff meet in consensus as to said observations.
Sometimes, paper and pencil are the best approach. Although I prefer pen.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hi there.
Thanks for the reply.
The recorded lectures are a backup, not a substitute. You'll still go to the main class. But then for example the official recording is available later as a file you can play over 3 times a month later because of that hard section in the middle you just didn't get. It takes away the fear of "get it now or forever hold your peace".
Meanwhile, the Tree program is not quite a wiki, though that's not a bad model either. The main difference is the Tree program creates ordered nodes that explicitly shows the structure, so you automatically create your outline like the three items I listed, then you could chop up your reply and mine here as sub info per section. Then what happens is that each section grows on its own. It's not unlike what happens here at Slashdot, except it keeps an index pane on the left summarizing things.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I agree with the above .. note taking on a computer helped my class grades alot. Even in non-CS classes, like a French language class, I'd
spend spare time in the class (and outside) typing in the vocabulary for the following week and having it given to me on a random answer quiz that it would keep re-drilling on the wrong ones.
I had it for the main test require fill in the blank -- which means I had to get the spelling and accents correct. If I didn't get it, I was told the right answer, and later given the same question again to see if I remembered.
It worked GREAT! up until the vocab lists became longer than I could type in / week...;-(... But 1200 words+ / week was a bit much... if it had been
my only class! -- yeah those were NEW words. The test could drill me just on old words, but also had the ability to fold in words from all or selected previous weeks.
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Also on computer -- I can do handwriting and drawing....Drawing
might be useful.. but handwriting.
My notes were always "write-only"... I had such trouble reading my own writing that it made them next to useless as a study aid.
I could touch type considerably faster than I wrote.
> humans cannot do true multi-tasking.
Can computers do multitasking ?
CAPTCHA:whipped ass