I will sit there in a meeting (or retrospectively in a university lecture) and regularly derive nothing of value at all from my notes, be they written or typed. It's the media that is wrong, not the note taking medium. You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle. Everything is immediate, transient. If you lose the pace, then everything after that point is wasted.
Lectures and meetings are broken, not the notes.
Now I will tend to write up my own notes in my own time on matters (in Pages for lack of any motivation to try anything else).
People learn in different ways and my experience is completely different: note taking, on paper, was critical for me to learn. Whether it is a differential geometry lecture (in college) or a test planning meeting having written notes is very important for me -- it allows me to think through the topics again at leisure.
The most important thing for me is to keep note taking at the "high secondary" importance level: not preempt thinking or participation in real time but high enough to ensure writing at least a couple of words or a quick diagram for each main topic. Break either and note taking starts to be a problem and not a help. Just my 2c, YMMV.
In school, I never got anything out of looking at my notes, but I had much better retention when I took notes. Now I take a lot of notes and actually use them, because I take down tons of information that isn't very interesting and can't be learned by connecting it to a conceptual framework but which I will definitely need later.
Same here, I would write down everything I heard and everything I understood, and I would draw arrows connecting concepts. A given lecture would probably fill up like 5 pages back and front in a notebook. I rarely actually read the notes - everything got retained simply by writing them in the first place.
I have long since come to grips with the reality that learning something is going to take some time. It is a challenge to put up with that time sink if what I'm learning is merely an intermediate step between now and a point in the future when I can do this third thing that requires that I understand something first. This is because the goal doesn't feel like it is getting closer while I'm wasting my time learning how to use a tool or technique for example.
That said, I have experienced many times where learning the tool or technique along the way to getting something done has been rewarded in a better outcome in the goal or a bit of knowledge that was applicable elsewhere. I use those memories of those rewards to mitigate the feelings of impatience or frustration with the time investment.
Did your lectures take attendance? My attendance rate throughout college was probably about 10%, and I certainly wouldn't say I learned any less than my peers. Naturally, this is more suited to some majors than others, but I never understood what compelled people to go to lecture.
I took notes a lot in college. But oddly enough, I rarely go back to look at them. It is probably due more to my reading and learning style than the lecture, though. I generally had a good mental memory, but the notes were only really important to fill in the missing gaps.
Agree 100%. I went to college before tablets and affordable laptops became ubiquitous, but the same problem applied to handwritten notes. After a few tries to keep notes and re-read them at my leisure I gave up, it was exhausting to take them and in the end I was missing too much.
The best solution is audio/video recording. I think every lecturer can record their lectures and publish them online later in the college's database or wherever. Cheap, easy and you don't have to worry about taking notes and missing anything
I went to college before laptops as well. Taking notes has two purposes. First to remember what was said in class, extras that are not in the book, and it's a good indicator of the exam questions. Second is processing what is said. Research has shown that writing down what you hear makes you better understand and remember what is said, then when you type it on your laptop.
Even if you don't use the notes afterward, they are still useful. Video is a very useful method, but then the video has to be edited, or do you get three simultaneous streams, one of the professor, the board and the powerpoint? Videos like on Udemy are made for the medium. Class is not made for video, and I wonder how productive those videos are.
And when you go to class, do you really go home and see the whole class on video once again? That's way too time consuming. The notes are a good summary, much faster. Yes and it is taking effort, exactly what is needed. It puts your mind to work.
lvoudour didn't seem to be arguing against the research so much as agreeing with cjsuk that the lecture model of teaching is ineffective for some population regardless of note-taking medium. The research shows that, of people who learn effectively in the lecture-style learning model, more of them learn better from taking notes on paper. But, there is a significant - I would never claim majority - population that doesn't learn well in lecture-style learning. For that population, they could use electronic device, paper/pen, clay tablet, or direct imprints to the brain and it wouldn't matter: they don't learn well from being lectured to.
I avoided taking notes for much of college, except of key things I wanted to come back to on my own. So many people try to capture the whole content of a lecture in notes, but to me that’s more like transcribing than processing. What I found was if I listen like it’s a conversation, I can enjoy the lecture but then also have time to make connections and think about things. My notes did not reflect the lecture content itself, but instead were my own associations, reactione, and things I found interesting. But we are indeed not all alike.
I'm curious whether the research you mentioned had the people who actually grew up writing or typing. If the former, no wonder: I spent all my school years extensively taking notes, and nowadays taking a note on paper is a reflex I cannot get rid of, even despite typing way faster than writing. How feel those growing up with typing as the major way of taking notes I don't know, but am curious to learn more about any research on them.
Firsthand experience, I was way better at typing than writing, particularly after they forced cursive only on everyone and permanently ruined my ability to block-write (while cursive never delivered any of the supposed benefits and looks way worse).
The cognitive act of /making notes/ (actual notes) on paper delivered the majority of the benefit. I usually never actually looked at them again.
Similarly, when preparing printed sheets of notes on a topic later, the act of creating those notes (the closer to the exam the better) again forced the processing and short-term memory storage of the information and I //usually// didn't need them.
Ideally there would be a copy of any slides (including snapshots of the 'boards' every few min / just before erasure) and an audio transcript to aid in taking a lecture again, and maybe a historical Q and A session so that the average quality of questions about the material could accumulate higher/more beneficial for the students.
Why is your professor not writing down or recording this important information? At worst, 5 people per lecture should be transcribing and merging notes and sharing with everyone else, not 100 people per lecture.
> writing down what you hear makes you better understand
Yes, you should handwrite a copy of the book/notes/whatever, at an appropriate pace for you.
Yeah I stopped taking notes after I realized I never looked at them. Even when studying for an exam, I'd always make new notes from scratch rather than rewrite or read old ones.
It doesn't work for all classes, but I found that listening closely to the lecture and maybe writing down some main points and then reviewing or studying later worked for me.
I've had a very strange experience: the act of taking notes helps, but having the notes isn't worth a damn.
I do benefit from note-taking, and I benefit more from pen-and-paper than typing. But looking back at my notes is rarely useful, and consistently worse than textbooks, lecture videos, or almost anything else. So I do the whole project just to boost my retention a little bit, and study from other sources.
I think this is key. There are studies that point to handwriting notes helping with the learning process, even if you don't end up using them later. I always found this to be true for myself as well — whether I'm in a lecture or doing some study on my own. I don't often go back to them unless I need to refresh on a single point. If I write them, I don't need them as much. If I don't write them, I'm usually having to study and read more and return to the references.
It really depends on how the notes were taken. Jotting down thoughts when you study on your own is helpful. But it's extremely common for your brain to just copy words from the board / screen to the notebook without any cognitive involvement.
I think this was a big part in why pen-and-paper outperformed typing for me.
I'm slow at handwriting; to keep up with a lecture I basically have to use shorthand and restrict myself to the most useful observations. But typing, I can just be a pipe moving every word from powerpoint to a text file. That distracts me from the content of the lecture and doesn't do anything for retention.
I find this especially true for my STEM classes, I can't for the life of me derive anything of value from lectures in math or anything math based unless we're talking about the broad overarching concept (like what an integral represents or what cache memory is for). If its the details of what some code does or how to do some operation on a matrix, forget it, I'm not going to glean anything more in that time listening than I would be able to figure out on my own with google in that same timespan. I find trying to follow examples to be simultaneously too slow to keep my attention and too fast when something was not apparently obvious to me leading to this effect where I'm either lost because I got what we were doing and my attention wandered so now I'm lost or my attention wanders trying to figure out the part that was not readily apparent.
One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.
It's been a long time since I've sat in classrooms on a regular basis but I do attend a lot of conference events. For the most part, I find presentations that get into a lot of very detailed step by steps and the like cause me to zone out. I'm far more interested in learning enough to cause me to check out something later and to understand some of the motivations, thinking, etc. It's also a reason I think that conference presentations are generally longer than is optimal.
Having said that, people do differ. And with a smaller and more interactive group, getting into the nuts and volts can make a lot of sense. But it should IMO be done sparingly in more of a lecture format.
> One of the corollaries to this, if you're teaching, is that your time should be spent NOT on the details––not, for example, on the step-by-step algebra to solve some complicated algebra to solve some integral––but rather on the bigger concepts (e.g., the general strategy of how to solve that sort of integral). Give students the rough path and let them fill in the details, rather than just giving the turn-by-turn directions.
I'll argue the exact opposite of this in math class. I preferred lectures here the prof walked through the problem step by step and I could copy those steps down to my notes, and then apply those same steps for other problems.
The textbooks always skipped a lot of steps in the middle, making them hard to follow along. It ended up being the beginning, a bit in the middle, some magic, then the end.
Right, its one of my biggest frustration with my university experience. Why am I paying you large sums of money for instruction that feels like it equates to a list of practice problems.
All of my math classes derived things and went through some problems step by step, and then often later a problem would be given and you have 5 minutes to try to solve it then compare with what was done on the board. It worked well and I don't see why you'd do it differently.
I had one professor in college who told us that when she was in undergrad, she would take pages of notes every lecture and then literally throw them in the garbage on her way out of the lecture hall. She just discovered through trial and error that this was the most effective way for her to learn the material. And she did well enough to become a professor at a top-20 institution.
Conversely, I never took notes in her class (or any other), and that didn't stop me from doing well.
The moral of the story is, people are different and find what works for yourself. There are a lot of oddball strategies out there that some people swear by, and I bet it really works for them, but you don't need to try them yourself unless you're unsatisfied with the effectiveness of your current approach.
In the time you're crystallizing the knowledge in your head by writing down notes, you're missing information from the lecture. Note-taking is great when you're in front of a textbook.
I rarely took notes for similar reasons (never looked at them again). But I still found note taking useful for memory recall. Having a slight photographic memory, by writing information/notes down on paper I could more easily visualize where and what I wrote and therefore more easily recall the information.
Also before tablets and ubiquitous laptops, but after PowerPoint hit: whenever I had the opportunity to have slide printouts ahead of time, they were a surprisingly nice scribble sink (many slides per page, not a big stack). Those short bursts of details, questions or clarifications both from the talk and from thinking while listening that would be useless riddles without the context provided by the rough timeline of the slide deck. These won't magically turn lectures into the hours that make you pass a test (where did people ever get that expectation?), but unlike many other forms note-taking they do increase the value of the "on topic entertainment" provided by a lecture.
I really, really wish more professors had provided slides up front; many don't change them year to year anyway, and it would have helped immensely to prepare for the lecture and be more actively engaged. Syllabi are helpful, but even these days I insist on having at least a purpose if not a full blown agenda for meetings, otherwise what's the point?
As I wrote in another comment, a lot of my experience is with conferences. If I had presentations pre-loaded on my tablet, I absolutely think I'd get more out of many presentations by taking notes on PDFs rather than (usually) typing a bunch of notes and snapping pics of slides that I may or may not get access to at some point.
It's very simple: students who get the notes up front are less likely to come to class.
Before you tell me this is silly, it's a fact that some students need help to decide to come to class. Should we reduce the absolute goodness of the class to assist less-than-perfect students? We already do in so many ways. Sigh.
To clarify, I too was before the time of laptops and recording technology being available. MiniDiscs had just come on the scene then and the notes are worth nothing without what appears on the OHP and the contextual timing of them. Video recording was impossible.
Really every lecture should be recorded and links handed out to students.
A big killer is that the lecturer has been doing the same lecture for 20 odd years and is complacent or prefers to defer feedback to the end. Everyone is lost then. Same with meetings. Questions at the end? Context gone!
One option available today is writing on tablets. There are apps available that let you record and sync any notes you take to the recording. This lets you highlight a key point and then go back to the right spot in the recording. There have been various attempts to do this with special pens and paper but the tablet approach works pretty well.
It's not super-useful for me personally--I tend to default to a laptop for various reasons--but there have been times when I think note-taking like this would have been very useful.
There was a note taking service I used. They hired students to type up lecture notes. Available the next day. On red paper so it could not be photocopied. It was money well spent during my undergraduate tenure.
I don't think your points apply to lectures like they do to meetings, at least for me. Meetings are more collaborative and most of my recall during a meeting is due to participation. If I'm not participating at all then I will most likely forget everything that happened during the meeting.
Lectures are different because I tend to use my notes as a way of interacting with the lecture (and usually you can't really interact much in a lecture unless it's a small class). Maybe it was my way of taking notes, but marking up lecture slides or essentially copying proofs/problems during an engineering or math lecture during my undergrad was most of my learning besides doing problem sets. Problem sets were very important, but they were only there to reinforce what I learned while taking my notes during the lecture. I ended up recalling much less whenever I didn't take notes and just tried to listen and participate as much as I could in the lecture.
Meetings should only invite people who will actively participate and provide their input. Anyone not meeting that description should not be invited.
You are describing a lecture, or perhaps a presentation, or series of presentations. Which classically have all the problems you cite of losing the thread and not being able to catch up again.
In meetings where you actively participate, give input, and ask questions, that shouldn't be a problem.
I hate the term "meeting" as that's merely a super-class of event. Technically a lecture is a meeting, a movie screening is a meeting, a concert is a meeting.
I find things are more productive when there's an actual expectation about what people do when gathered.
* brainstorming
* problem identification (a type of brain storming)
* solution identification (a type of brain storming)
* Question and Answer* (I tend to not find these very productive)
* Presentation (possibly of answers to submitted questions)
Your point needs to be applied to your first option. Brainstorming is a method, meetings should not be defined by their method but by their goal (and preferably with a known method to reach that goal).
The problem is more having people who don't really want to be there and won't pay attention, or having too many people sidetracking the discussion or making it difficult to reach consensus.
I wonder if the answer to meetings is making participation more meaningful? In some MBA programs, the purpose of the class is the discussion of some case that everyone has read. In this way, you get more out of participation by listening to other people’s thoughts and combining them with yours.
There is also a strong case to be made for the “radical transparency” that has made Bridgewater so successful [0]. This system has the capacity to accelerate learning if it were implemented more widely.
That's why lectures suck for me. I can't "listen fast enough", and I lost track of the lecture when I try to take notes. This is where something like Khan Academy is way awesome-r for my style of learning.
Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own. That way you know what to look out for, and your notes will be a concise revision. Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them.
Trying to write down everything the lecturer says is at best inefficient, and at worst a complete waste of time when you lose the thread.
Interesting, I have never heard of this, and definitely none of my professors instructed me to familiarize with the material before a lecture. So I never did. I suppose this could've been a useful technique.
When I was teaching undergrads I always told them that a good minimum target was 3 hours of work for every 1 hour of lecture. Roughly one of those hours was to be spent on the lecture material beforehand.
Think about it this way. If all you are doing is rushing to copy down what the lecturer says, you don't really hear it or have a chance to think about it. So you have to review anyway - if you spend that same time beforehand, you are ready with questions and already know what parts you are unsure of. With a short revision of your notes following also, you're in great shape.
How much lecture is there than? Here in germany 3 Seminars a day with 2h each are often the norm. That would mean 18h of prep and 6h of seminars a day.
That's a good point, systems vary. That recommendation was for a 3 lecture hour per week course (there are additional tutorials, etc), and a full course load would be 4-5 courses a term. So that arithmetic gets you to 50-60hours/week in total, which is about right. With an easier course load the expectation might be 40hr/week.
The expectation is you would spend some time in formal lectures, some in tutorial sessions (usually with graduate student assistants) and some on your own - in roughly equal proportions.
I did teach some courses with more time in formal lecture (per week) and less in tutorial sessions, in which case the ratio would be adjusted to end up at around the same place.
In law school it was mandatory to review the material before class and be prepared to discuss it, because you likely would be called on to explain a case or concept for the class. It's a bit anxiety inducing but forced me to learn the material, which is I suppose the whole purpose of a class.
> Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own.
> Its astonishing how many students resist this fact, even when it is clearly spelled out for them.
I've taken a lot of classes, I've been a teaching assistant for a lot of classes, I've observed a lot of classes, and I've never gotten the impression that the instructor expected the students to have already looked at the material. Certainly no one ever said that explicitly.
I will say that it is true that the handful of times I tried to structure my class differently and have students read material on their own before lecture, they were indeed resistant and it didn't go well. And I do think that would be a better approach. But my point is that this is overwhelmingly not what is generally expected of students, at least in my experience, mostly at state colleges in the US.
Fine, but then you are agreeing with me: most instructors do not expect their students to read material ahead of time and do not structure their classes as if that is the expectation.
In fact, in my experience it's not even usually possible to read material before the lecture because students are only given at best a vague idea of what specifically is coming next.
> In fact, in my experience it's not even usually possible to read material before the lecture because students are only given at best a vague idea of what specifically is coming next.
Really? That has not been my experience.
Every class I have taught had a detailed syllabus with chapter and page assignments. Generally, they were spot on until the class started getting behind.
For English classes, which book you need to have read is always listed.
If most instructors are failing at their job, that's a shame. There's no reason save ego for an instructor to assume that students only learn by listening to the instructor speak.
That's probably true in typical STEM lecture courses. In case-study type MBA and law courses and in various humanities seminars, it's certainly different. I'm not sure how adaptable that is to STEM subjects at scale. (Though it does work 1:1 or 1:few there as well.)
No they aren't. Half of my university classes weren't following anything I could review in advance, and a number of them tested on things that only appeared in lecture.
I had a single class where the professor handed us a sheet of paper with all the reading and assignments in advance. It was wonderful.
> Lectures as part of course are designed to be attended after reviewing the material at least once on your own.
It's easy to realize this in retrospect, but I think it should be pounded into students' heads starting at least in high school. You can use the sink or swim metaphor if you like, but human beings aren't robots that can just flip a switch to change behavior.
None, actually. If you know the material, feel free to skip my lectures.
The material I teach is generally considered "hard". Most students need my help to point out "This is the main path. Learn this. Let's go over this multiple times in different ways until you see the commonality. That stuff is auxiliary--ignore that for now. Once you have the main idea down, that stuff is just a little bit of extra work."
Every class is different. One class will get an idea very quickly while another will struggle--so my job is to tweak things for that in lectures. In addition, sometimes a class will have a huge gap that you will have to back up and fill.
Even with STEM subjects, teaching has a lot of art to it.
I get the impression that you and ska are very, very good teachers. Not to disrespect any of my professors, but a lot of times I ended up skipping lectures because I just wasn't getting anything out of them. Was I a model student who always reviewed material before lectures? No. But I definitely felt I got a lot more out of going directly to the source materials and working problems than I did watching a professor walk other students through problems.
As far as I understand meetings (and lectures) are to derive consensus. Slides are regularly available before meetings while reading is normally required before lectures. Lecture presentation is not the time for the details of complex unfamiliar derivations, but for familiar motivation of larger goals and big questions.
If you feel the need to take notes of every point rather than summarising the most salient/important concepts, or recording your questions/disagreements, someone is doing it wrong. At a lecture communication should be about conclusions, possibly single critical details, but not the entire texture and flow of every detail.
If the material is so unfamiliar and surprising that you don't understand and can't ask relevant questions, I would say it's a failure of the speaker or yourself. Certainly, after a convincing talk, question, and answer, you should feel like you understand both the material and the motivation/goal better even without notes.
When I was in college I preferred laptops for this reason. I can type way faster than I can write by hand. So it was way easier to keep up and write everything down. I read my notes on some other day to learn, but during the lecture it was all about writing down enough to be able to recall the lecture from my notes on some later day.
Completely agree. One time I faced a laptop ban and purchased a tiny tripod to take steady pictures in dim light of what the professor was writing on the board. For many of us it's mentally taxing to write with pen and paper what the professor is saying, banning technology is not the best way to get students to learn.
I'm of the same opinion. I realized in college that I can write or think about the material being presented, but I can't do them simultaneously. So, I stopped taking notes and relied much more on memory and text books. I'm still that way in the work world.
My major was math. It would have been significantly better for my learning if we spent class time solving problems rather than watching the professor write out a proof, which was often enough already in the text. Active learning is really critical for me.
I solved this problem by just buying a friend coffee regularly in exchange for notes. She used to take fantastic notes and they were probably the reason I even excelled in a lot of classes. However, there was no substitute for being deeply engrossed in whatever the lecturer was saying. My only regret is not having figured this out sooner.
> You can't rewind a meeting or a lecture. You can't pause to think. You can't review the text in the middle.
I disagree about meetings. I often ask to repeat a pivotal discourse in a multi-party meeting simply to emphasize it's being understood by all participants.
Also notes help to structure the meeting so you don't take 1hr to discuss 30m of content. I prefer to share my notes on screen (either as email minutes I'm taking or preferably something collaborative like Google Sheets). Notes, well used, can keep everyone on the same page. If the agenda is prepared in advance, it can turn a 1hr ramble-fest that achieves nothing into a concise 10m confirmation session.
> Lectures and meetings are broken, not the notes.
For as long I can remember, I have had trouble staying awake in lectures, meetings and watching videos. It has nothing to do with the content, nothing to do with how 'engaging' it is. It has everything to do with passively sitting and attempting to consume data. Having a way to take notes and edit them in real-time increases my retention enormously. It's also incredibly useful to me as I can org-capture a TODO item to look up references (from which I learn very well) later. If I could have afforded access to a laptop in college and org-mode existed back then, I can't imagine how much more I would have retained, not to mention having greppable notes, as opposed to my paper notes that have vanished over the years.
ETA: Lectures/meetings seem really inefficient and ineffective to me. It's a data stream you can't rewind, and if you wait for everyone to "get it", you'll never make any progress, and you can't pack enough information in to justify everyone being in the same place at the same time. Just record a video and make it really good (ala TED) or release your very well refined overview paper/slides with copious references.
I agree lectures are a waste of time. I'm imagining conferences when I think of this.
While I enjoy seeing a good presentation live I've mostly realized I can just watch the recording later. Of course I want to meet others between presentations/lectures but the lectures themselves can be more easily consumed on youtube at 2x speed and more easily skipped if the first 5-10mins make it relatively clear it's unlikely to be a good lecture/presentation.
A meeting on the other hand, actually discussing things, at least in my situations the notebook is required as reference for things in the discussions. If it's really just a lecture held in a meeting room (no discussion) then it seems like a waste of time.
The original article seems to be about lectures at school. Wasn't Khan Academy kind of founded on the principle that lectures are bad schooling? IIRC the suggestion was that lecture material should be something watched at home and classroom time should be for getting help with the material.
The value of taking notes is in my opinion less about going back to them (often I'll never look at them) and often more about the help in recall having to summarize the information is. Similarly, people remember books better if they go through highlighting stuff.
If you really want something similar, record your lessons (with a phone or whatever) and listen to them as you wish - maybe transcribe them. It's tedious but worth it.
Also I'd say you _can_ pause a lecture. Simply lift up your hand and ask a question: That's the great thing about person-to-person teaching.
Painting all lectures and meetings as 'broken' because one would prefer to have video for everything (that's how I understood it) is pretty hyperbolic.
I don't want a video. I want the material written down in a formal tutorial style that can be reviewed and updated and consumed at a suitable pace. That pace can be faster for the bits I understand and slower for the bits I don't.
That's basically a textbook, and lectures are supposed to augment the book, not replace it. From personal experience, and anecdotal supporting evidence, lectures are the hardest when you haven't actually prepared for them (at the other end of the scale are the lectures you did prepare for, but enough others did, and the lecturer decides to indulge them by re-stating what's already covered in the book instead of, well, lecturing).
Yes and no. The textbooks we were given were reference structured. Ergo the path through them was defined by the lectures and the course which was mostly undocumented. There needs to be a course guide that spans the entire material with independent guidance.
A good modern example of this is The Art of Electronics which is a textbook format. There is a companion book which is Learning the Art of Electronics which contains exactly the structure I want to see, which is your lectures, tutorials and labs in a structured format on paper. You can complete these with guidance, without guidance, with or without lectures and tutorials.
The lectures should be more interactive and be a result of the above. Build your knowledge on more than one pillar and some structure so to speak.
Some of the course ecosystems you see are very closed with respect to structure and you are carried through without being permitted to see the path.
I have a colleague who makes mind-map style notes, either on paper or via software. He doesn't try to capture everything that's said. Rather, he notes key ideas, and identifies/imposes structure to the conversation.
It can actually be informative to look over his shoulder as a meeting progresses, to see what loose ends are still dangling, and where people focus the most attention.
For myself, I've moved to markdown-style in my handwritten notes. It isn't as fluid as mind maps, but the bullet points and headings still bring out structure, and the number of sub-bullets under any given item can hint to me if I haven't understood how things are going at a fine enough or coarse enough level.
While not a direct replacement for lectures, I've been prototyping an audio media which does not have these same disadvantages, called push to talk. You can find the prototype here: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html
Click on the first track, and then use the arrow keys to move through the essay. Note that you can rewind, review, pause to think, just like with text. But it is speech.
This seems awesome. I can’t get it to play from my phone but the concept is really really useful. I used to want to make something like this for audio-based exams for people with dyslexia, for example. In Ireland people with reading difficulties have a person sit with them and read the questions in a whole other room. It’s expensive compared to just having a group with headphones working through on computers.
I just tested it and it works with icecat mobile but not Androids default browser. Which browser are you using?
Also, I haven't optimized for mobile with regards to "arrow keys" not being a thing on the cell phone. I'll probably have to add arrow buttons that are visible only on the cell phone or something. Perhaps a swipe...
Hard course (electrical engineering, laplace fun!), shit lecturer (complacent, dismissive of questions), skipped lecture (never although I probably should have just stuck my face in the course books).
Do Laplace Transforms get very difficult? I'm taking a course right now that teaches Differential and Integral Calculus, followed by Differential Equations and Laplace Transforms. Laplace Transforms have, so far, been the least challenging portion of the course.
If you get them crammed into one hour then yes. In your own time they are quite easy. I required a bit of tutor support if I'm honest but if you can get over the basic calculus hill you will be fine. There's a lot more material out there to support you than there was in the mid-1990s! No having to fight for the last copy of referenced text in the university library either.
I have literally never used anything I learned on that part of the course however.
I found integration to be nothing short of brutal, personally. Laplace has been taught over 3 weeks and has been fairly pleasant - pure algebra.
I'm doing this course as part of the requirements for a degree in Eng. Technology, focusing on Software. It's common to all streams, but none of the subsequent courses Software students have to take will use this material. Damned if it isn't fun though.
To be honest, I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework.
I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures.
I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking I could have just paid to take the exams and self-taught the rest of the material. In hindsight, I was really taking out huge loans for a few years of drinking, socialising and playing video games.
In the working world, I've found meetings to be similarly pointless. 95% of the time I'd rather hash out a problem on an email thread where thoughts are expressed clearly, re-read and understood by others in their own time.
I found that the usefulness of lectures depends very strongly on how good the lecturer is, as well as the topic being discussed. When studying physics I found that the lectures were incredibly useful, because it's quite hard to get in the "zone" of understanding the derivation being discussed when at home. However, with mathematics subjects the textbook was almost always a much better learning tool, because the derivation did not require a discussion of the physics that justified said derivation. Computer Science lectures were almost unilaterally a waste of time.
I had an engineering mathematics lecture where the lecturer was so bad attending was a net negative, as in, not only did he add nothing to the notes, but his frequent mistakes and side tangents led us down so many useless avenues we'd end up more confused.
It also depends a lot on the student - personally I tend to learn faster from a mediocre textbook than an excellent lecturer. But my wife is the opposite, she retains much more from in-person lectures than videos or books.
On the contrary, I found that mathematics was the one subject where attending lectures was actually helpful. Seeing the lecturer work through problems made it a lot easier to understand than trying to read the lecture notes.
Watching recorded lectures would do the same though, but they weren't recorded. They had the capability, but the maths department decided that they didn't want to, which I think was silly at best, and discriminatory at worst (e.g. people with mental health issues might be unable to attend lectures, thus being put at an unfair disadvantage).
> I found lectures to be a complete waste of time at University, with or without a laptop. You could just download the lecturer's slides and speaker notes outside of class and learn the material ahead of exams/coursework.
This was very much my experience too. My first foray to university was the traditional full time format. I really didn't get on well with the lectures - it felt too slow in some cases, too fleeting in others and beyond a few particular classes, not very illuminating at all. For what it's worth this was at Imperial so I guess a "top" uni.
In later life, I did a degree with the Open University which has no lectures at all (well almost, there's a few online and night schools but they are more like practicals than lectures). Instead it's all self-study from guidebooks and notes with regularly graded coursework which for many of the courses is a pre-requisite to pass the examinations. I greatly preferred the latter option and felt I had a much better understanding of the material.
It's been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, but audio/video recordings are a different ballgame all together for me. I actually really like lectures in that way. I guess it all boils down to the idea of tailored, self-service. I can review/pause/skip and repeat at my leisure.
The real value of a teacher in the same room is for immediate feedback. I'm of the opinion that lectures should be replaced with active study sessions where the teacher(s) walk the class through problems and/or help individual students through gaps in their knowledge.
Lectures can be asynchronous; rather than the teacher reinventing the wheel, let them assign students to watch the best lectures available online.
Reverse the current model, do most homework at school, and watch the lectures at home.
Agreed, I would on occasion skip class and read the text for an hour in grad school. It was amazing how much more I learned by reading and processing the ideas at my own pace instead of the lecture. The issue was you never knew when the professor would say something not in the text yet on the exam. I was in applied mathematics.
Meetings are equally pointless. Usually the most verbal people dominate the meeting. I've noticed how outspoken one is rarely correlated with critical thinking ability.
The sole value I got out of lectures was the ability to raise my hand and ask questions. Other than that, yeah. It's a pretty bad medium for learning, I'd say. And even the one benefit I mentioned is now arguably better accomplished via a good forum / community.
My experience at university was the reverse. Despite having very good slides and speaker notes, there were intuitions for how the material hung together which I just wouldn't have got without hearing how the lecturers spoke about it.
I found the discussion sections to be the real value proposition of university - after reading the lecture material, got to spend time with a grad student and ask questions about the material.
That is definitely true of sub top-20 universities. Even intros for the top-20s as well. This however is not true of that top tier for the average student.
My experience is that the bad professors are almost always the ones to ban laptops. Students pay attention to engaging professors and use their laptops for notes, and those good professors aren't phased by the laptops and rarely ban them.
But When students listen out of one ear and spend the rest of the class processing email, it's almost always an indication that the lecture is poor. That's what I've seen over and over in 7 years of post secondary classes. I don't know much about the professor in the article, but I would suspect improving his lectures will be more effective in helping students learn than banning laptops.
I have a counterexample - CMU's 15-112 bans laptops. The professor for it for the previous 8 years, David Kosbie, is one of the most highly regarded professors in the university.
His primary rationale for it is the "externalized cost" effect described in the article, which I can attest is quite true in my experience teaching.
When you look out at a sea of faces, you can see where the laptops are because of the reactions of people around them -- eyes keep flicking involuntarily to the interesting stuff happening on the screen, and then they peel themselves back to the lecture. It amounts to a long sequence of micro-distractions that have a pretty pronounced effect on learning. Humans are very attuned to things like motion, flickering, and changes in their field of view, and those are very present when browsing the web or reading facebook on your laptop in class. Second, laptop screens are backlit, which means that they may be the brightest object in someone's field of view in the class.
Zoning out on a kindle or printed newspaper has much less of an effect on the people around you. I don't care if someone ignores my class -- that's their choice. I used to not ban laptops, but I've become convinced that it's worth it for the other students.
Also, think about the numbers. It's very possible to have a lecture that's very engaging for about 95% of the class (which is a pretty impressive rate all-told). But the remaining 5% have about 10 students each in a field behind them that can see their laptop screen, so a very small number of students goofing off on laptops can have a disproportionate effect on the class.
People like Professor Kosbie drive me up the wall. Let me show you why. Here are the notes I took on my tablet PC for a week-long Tandberg TCTE+TMS certification class:
Admittedly, it's a big PDF because I didn't bother converting my handwriting to text, but it's still a pretty useful reference when it comes to video conferencing stuff, even though I don't do that kind of work any more.
Now here are my notes that I was forced to take on paper for a week-long ITIL V3 Foundation class, because the instructor thought he knew better than I did on how to learn:
''
Oh that's right, they were on paper, so I can't easily back them up, digitize, and share them. In fact, over the course of several moves, I've managed to misplace both the notebook and the PDF scans. I live and breathe enterprise IT operations management and support. It'd be nice to have more than my memory as a reference, especially since I think ITIL had some useful models for conceptualizing this stuff. None of the official ITIL materials are public, so instead of my curated notes, I have to make do with what I can scrounge off the web. In my mind this wastes the time and money I spent taking the class.
I realize that I am paying for my instructors' knowledge, experience, and insight---that sometimes I won't agree with them but need to trust them regardless. Conversely, as an engaged student I need them to stop actively interfering with the tools and methods that I've developed over my academic and professional career to teach myself and to retain what I've learned.
It's not about you. It's about the people around you. But you're right: I'm not willing to let you (bleep) up the educational experience for the people around you, because (in my class), everyone around you has also forked over $60,000 per year to be there.
But it's also about context: 15-112 is not a "dump facts at you" class, which the courses you're describing sound much more like. 112 is an intro to programming course, where half of what happens is in-class demonstration of how to solve problems with programming. Most of the real learning in the class happens in recitation and by students doing a lot of programming with a lot of TA support.
It's also a first-year student course. You're welcome to make a prediction about how many of those 17 and 18-year-old students are actually using their bright distracting shiny to take notes vs. having blingy bleepies popping up on facebook. (Answer: handwav-ily about half, where a lot of students attempt to "multitask" between distractions and note-taking.) I'm pretty happy with a blanket ban, because it improves the net educational outcomes in my classes. shrug (I still allow laptops in my grad classes. I may revisit it, but I figure in general that with experience comes some greater degree of self-control. That's a hunch, not a data-driven conclusion.)
The thread later on about the flipped classroom is the one to really look at for resolving this issue -- it's entirely possible that we should get rid of many of the conventional lectures and replace class-time with structured-activity time (which would involve laptops). The problem, however, is that in most flipped approaches, you have to get the students to watch -- often solo -- a video of the lecture material, and/or solo read it. The number who actually do so is somewhat low, even at a top school. The jury's still a little out, but the potential is high.
I would like to propose a different approach here that has in fact been practiced by some of my professors.
What if, instead of blanket banning laptops, you banned them to the last row. That way laptop users can only distract other laptop users. I realize this still isn't ideal for those of us who want to use a laptop in a way that may generally be perceived as productive, because they are still exposed to all those distractions, but they would still have the choice of not using a laptop and sitting somewhere else.
In the past I have generally chosen to sit in the back because for me the advantages of being able to follow the approach that works best for me have outweighed the 'visual noise' that I am mostly able to ignore, thankfully.
Another approach that I have personally witnessed was to ban laptops for everything but materials directly related to the class.
This may sound impossible to verify, but somehow one of my professors managed to do that. I suspect it was using the very signs of distractions you just described, eyes flicking over, maybe small expressions of amusement displayed by those browsing Facebook/Reddit/9gag/...
He consistently called out those people who were distracting themselves and others and left everyone looking at the slides in peace.
I doubt "externalized cost" is the real reason professors ban laptops because if that were the case, a simpler solution would have been used: reserving the first few rows for the minority of students to claim to be distracted by others' laptops. My hunch though is that professors use these occassional student complaint as a front for their own insecurity of being ignored when they talk (which bad professors are most likely to be susceptible to).
In my experience the laptop-banning professors are also the ones to practice other the other common destructive behaviors: 1) Deducting grades for missing class, 2) Dropping exam hints in class to encourage attendance, 4) Pop quizzes, 3) Not posting notes digitally. A professor doesn't need to be a charismatic entertainer to teach effectively, but they do need to somehow make their lecture a better use of students time than just reading the book or notes. Trying to make it HARDER to learn using any method that doesn't make them feel good (laptops in class, staying at home and reading the notes and book) may help their ego, but does not help students learn.
shrugs Again, my example has none of those, and my own classes generally don't either unless class participation is a graded component of the class (some classes are legitimately discussion-oriented classes).
I'm not defending bad teaching; I've experienced plenty on both sides of it. But I don't think it's fair to conclude that laptop banning is always coming from a bad motivation. As I said - it's a practice I've seen adopted by some of the best teachers I know, in addition to one that seems like it could be a crutch for some of the worst.
Agreed. It’s also an issue of time management. If I can find a YouTube video that explains a concept better in 5 minutes than the hour long lecture explains it, I would rather spend my time working during the lecture than taking notes.
You might be surprised at how uncomfortable it feels to talk to a room where 50% of people are looking at their laptops or phones instead of at you.
This tends to go in a vicious cycle. If people are bored for 5 minutes, they get our their laptops. Then there's no chance for me to unbore them in the next 5 minutes, because they're not listening to a word I'm saying.
In most of the classes I teach, there's a pretty comprehensive textbook, and uploaded lecture notes to supplement that. But for some reason, a lot of students seem to begin by frantically trying to transcribe everything I'm saying (often inaccurately), before giving up and looking at Facebook.
I don't ban laptops, but I'm certainly tempted to do so.
Ultimately, it's not really the job of a lecturer at a university to be entertaining or "engaging". It's not middle school. You have to bring some of your own enthusiasm to the class. You can learn from someone who knows the material, even if they're not particularly charismatic.
I imagine the "frantically trying to transcribe everything" comes somewhat from how we've been trained by grading-on-attendance and grading-on-note-taking classes. We're used to going to classes that are far less useful than the book, and getting nothing from it except a waste of everyone's time. Some schools are of course different, but IME the most-useless lecturers were also the ones who graded on attendance and/or dropped "secret test hints" to people who were there.
But I'll say a big THANK YOU for providing notes - it has always seemed stupid to me to have N people duplicating notes (often poorly), especially when they're expected to be learning things for the first time. It can be exceedingly hard to know what's useful and what isn't ahead of time, and you can't stop to write it down when you realize because the lecture goes on without you. Provided-notes (or a recording) are huge helps to people who actually need notes or don't absorb it the first time.
Ok, but there is no grade for attendance in my classes, and I keep reminding people that they don't need to take comprehensive notes.
The expectation that a class should be more useful than the book seems odd to me. In a typical undergrad class, you're teaching a subset of what's in a decent textbook (with maybe a little additional meterial thrown in for color). So I mean, sure, you could just read the book if you're smart and motivated. The only way to really make the classes more useful than the book for smart and motivated students is to do exactly what you don't want - grade the students on note taking.
Or abandon the attempt at lecturing what's already in the book, and spend most of the time on Q&A (i.e. interaction, the stuff that actually benefits from having the teacher in the room). Bonus points: more people come to class having read the material, and people who already read it and don't have questions don't bother coming.
The few I've had that did this were amazingly useful - alternate derivations for people stuck on the book's approach, side explorations on things hinted at but not covered normally, etc. Many would get the homework out and puzzle through it in class too, and come up with Qs part way through. I wish we had this in other classes with a couple days between Qs and As, where you'd be left wondering what you actually understood if you weren't totally confident.
If your class is essentially a book-reading-but-verbal, maybe it shouldn't be a lecture / doesn't need the book? Some people learn better verbally, so a reading is definitely valuable, but not for all.
That can work with good students, but at most institutions, students don't do the reading and hence most learn nothing through this approach. It's the kind of thing that people who were good students tend to suggest because it would be ideal for them, but we have to think
about the other 80% of the class.
The course I'm currently teaching has, in addition to lectures, weekly two hour seminars where people are supposed to do homework/reading and then ask questions about it. (Not my design, that's just how it's timetabled.) But students don't do the homework or the reading. So, I seriously doubt that switching the whole course to this approach would work.
Yeah, it is a struggle for people who don't read before the class. Which is also why "nobody read it" tends to turn into "ok, so read it now" which does tend to bring up questions within about 10 minutes. But I've seen it convert a sizable number of people into readers, since it's an abnormality and takes a few classes to adjust to. Obviously YMMV though, it depends on everything, and nothing works for everyone in every situation.
Re last paragraph: I mean that I don't understand the point of spending a full lecture on exactly the same material as is in the book, unless the goal is almost exclusively to help people who don't learn well from reading, but do from listening. Which is a valid goal, but so far I've only seen an extreme minority claim this as their goal.
My experience (Mechanical Engineering) was that laptop banning was only an indicator as to whether the professor was "old-school."
IMO, some hardcore practice-until-you-bleed cornerstone topics benefited immensely from an "old-school" professor (Thermodynamics, Mechanical Design, Heat Transfer, etc) whereas softer, more conceptual classes (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics, Mechanics of Materials, etc) benefited from "new-school" professors that were savvy to the benefits of interactive software and additional visualizations and knowledge multipliers afforded by a computer.
I didn't learn how to use pen+paper for notekeeping till I was a professional, way out of college. My digital note skills were superior when I was in college (just a simple collection of notes I typed up every now and then during lectures).
Honestly, today's student should do the following:
1. Take pictures of the damn blackboard. Way easier than copying. Cellphones are cheap, everyone has a camera (even if the camera is of shoddy quality, it should work indoors in a lecture hall).
2. "Stream" notes in some format. It doesn't matter what your "streaming" note format is. It was computer keyboard for me, but today I can "stream" notes faster in pen / paper.
3. The most important step: Rewrite your notes into a better organization.
"Streamed" notes have low density and poor value for studying. The importance of "streaming" notes is to have a comprehensive outline of the professor's major points. Many professors provide subtle hints about what the tests are going to look like, so comprehensive note taking is the key to picking up on these hints.
"Organized" notes require conscious effort that takes too long during a lecture (or meeting, or anything really).
4. Ask questions -- Seriously. Professors make mistakes sometimes, but more commonly, the student's brain moves a bit slower as its learning from a lecture. If something smells "fishy", raise your hand and politely ask the professor to explain it better. Most professors are just happy someone is even listening to them, and often will comprehensively answer your question. Win/win for everybody.
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With regards to "secret note taking skills", its really the split between "streaming" notes and "organized" notes. Heck, keep two notebooks for every subject. (Or really, just one "streaming" notebook which you copy into "organized" pages elsewhere). You really should keep the steps separate.
In my case I think a small N might more likely be the issue if there is one (only ~50-70 professors for me). I am very keenly aware of every professor that has banned laptops (after struggling through an entire semester), and none of them were the star professors. Interested to hear if others find the good professors allow laptops and the brutal ones are quickest to ban.
NY times makes an amazing discovery: being distracted from whatever it is you're trying to do isn't good for productivity.
The idea of 'multitasking' is a foolish thing, and I think most people have discovered now that to be successful at any task you need to focus without distractions. Singletasking is much more productive than multitasking. I might even argue that multitasking isn't possible, since humans can't switch context as fast as computers.
Agreed that this seems to be a no-brainer. But then again, if you look at the responses in this thread, apparently it's not a no-brainer to some people.
On the other hand, if you read the article in full, the debate isn't just about distractions and multi-tasking. Even when not being distracted, the use of a laptop to take notes is less effective than hand-writing notes. This is because laptops encourage a note-taking style where you don't necessarily need to actually process the information before typing it out:
> The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.
In another study[1], it was found that this happens even when students are warned against this "transcript" style of note-taking.
It all very much depends on the person doing the note taking, the information being taught, and the person doing the speaking, but in general it appears that laptops encourage bad note-taking and bad listening habits that hand-writing notes don't.
This was a thoughtful response, thank you. I'm not sure why you're down voted here, but you make an interesting point that laptop "transcription" is so much worse then pen-and-paper transcription. I wonder if there's some note taking tablet app that wouldn't have this issue. Maybe because free hand drawing promotes connections and associations in a way that typing/outline-focused notes doesn't?
That's great for some situations (like some college lectures or a daily scrum meeting) but simply doesn't fly in others. At my job, for example, missing a single detail in one of our interviews can be the difference between the success and complete failure of a project. Retaining just "a lot more" of the information isn't enough, you must retain (or record) all of the information. In such situations, note taking is mandatory.
Those are the same situations that encourage the "transcription" style of notes though, which as discussed above, presents its own problems. It's all about finding a balance.
I'm sick to death of old school instructors making me put my tablet PC away on the assumption that I lack self-control or won't pay attention or can't take good notes. The whole point of a device capable of drawing stuff is the synthesis of digital recording and writing/drawing. Dunno about anyone else but OneNote has made me a way better student as a result, plus it makes my logs and notes available (and shareable) in ways that no paper lab notebook can replicate. By all means let's encourage students to not simply take dictation during lectures, but let's also not simply throw away a great tool in the process.
While I worked at Google, laptops @ meeting were pretty much the norm. A note-taker (in our case the oncall person, or build master) would open a Google Docs document, or continue from a long going one (well known to everyone) and start typing notes, agenda, action items. At the same time the rest of the team can join (especially useful, if meeting is happening in more than one room, with people working from home, remote offices, etc.). And everyone can correct, fix, assign, comment.
Now there is a time, when the manager would say - please close your laptops, there is something important, sensitive, etc needs to be discussed.
I've never seen more productive use of them. And the oncall person for the week can respond to alerts, msgs, etc. - the build master person can check updates. I mean technically you can do whatever you like, as long as your attention is not needed.
People can leave if they see that this part of the meeting no longer concern them, or any other reason.
I can second this; at Google I've found that meetings are unusually productive because of the practice. For the most part, regular meetings will follow a fairly strict agenda, which keeps them moving and stops them from going off on tangents (not always, sometimes tangents do happen, for better or worse, but I've found that it's for better significantly more often than at previous workplaces). And the presence of laptops helps here -- people can add bullet items to upcoming agenda items to ensure that they are discussed, without having to interrupt the conversation currently in progress, and the use of a single document means that the historical record is easily accessible.
For meetings that are more oriented as design sessions or free-form discussions, the laptops tend to go away because they are not useful in that situation, unless you're at a point where data that can be quickly acquired can be useful.
To a degree, the same happens with a design doc - you may start it with a peer, or have manager oversee it, or pull someone from a team, from which you rely on specific technology to gain more confidence for you, and whoever later reads the design doc that all important bits are covered... For example decision to use system A (from your point of view) may be good idea, but owners of system A may no longer support it, or may have in plans to deprecate it soon, but haven't announced it yet, so adding key personnel there would help for sure.
I'm trying this new model at my new workplace, but I'm already seeing pain doing this with Outlook (the desktop version), the Mobile version is much better in this respect, though the comment system need some features, that I got used to (assigning action-items). The other approach would be google for business, but I'm not a decision maker here.
That sounds like not everyone needed to be in that meeting.
My old work banned screens in meetings (except for the note taker), it made it painfully obvious to me which meetings I didn't need to be in. Sometimes I'd sit there for half an hour with my eyes glazed over.
On the plus side, eventually I started being more assertive when questioning whether my attendance was necessary at certain meetings, or asking to leave once the relevant part of the meeting was over. There was no point in me sitting there while the iOS team discussed some specific issue that I couldn't give any input to.
I love the collaborative style for remote meetings. I'm still waiting for an opportunity to try it for meetings in a single room. I believe it could be nice.
As a former economics professor, I did exactly the same thing these authors were suggesting. While some students did use their technology effectively, the vast majority of whom were just distracted, not to mention probably taking far worse notes.
One small story, I was teaching a class during March one year and I had a student obviously not paying attention. Then, all of a sudden, this student's hands went in the air and an audible "Yes!" came out. I then asked him if there was something important - "Kentucky just won in a buzzer beater!" The vividness of this memory and the difficulty I had in containing my rage is still at the forefront of my mind.
For me, the impact was that while students should be able to do what they want for the most effective solution, it becomes a problem when activities disrupt the learning of the students around them. Someone not paying attention and watching cat videos is infectious as there is a lower percentage of participation and others start to watch the offending student's screen.
My perspective is (although unproven) is that the real reason laptops don't work is because of the temptation to do something else, not necessarily because of the medium.
If you want me to remember more than just some big picture, let me write it down. And if you let me write it down, please let me use my tools.
Just teach people how to use tech right, the younger generation is surprisingly much better at this. I have a full screen white on black text editor and turn off the display while not typing (sometimes I even keep it off while typing).
And yea, lectures... just gave me the stream so I can play it at double speed and repeat the interesting parts.
The only things I need paper for are geometry, layout and surprisingly: math. With math for me it's super valuable to keep something like nested contexts. I write things down to free the brain for more, but need to be able to jump back in on demand. Easier on a 2D pane than in a linear way.
With OpalCal/Soulver i tend to do more on the PC though, variables are damn nice.
Laptops are tools that can be used to help you with your tasks, or to waste time. I'm sure the article is correct that many people use them poorly, but that doesn't mean banning the tool is the right answer. Maybe training better usage of them would be wise.
It's not the laptops that are the problem, it's the lectures. Check out flipped classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom - watch lectures/read a book/etc on your own time and attend problem solving with teachers / TAs available.
Wow! Yes, this seems much better. The key opportunity of being all together in a room is interactivity. Large lectures mostly waste that: the time gap between having a question and getting it answered can be large. (E.g., having to wait until discussion section puts a gap of hours to days between the Q and the A.)
But when I'm trying to apply the material, I'm not in passive listening mode. There, hopefully my feedback loop with the material is in the seconds-to-minutes range. If I'm stuck, being able to get a question answered can keep me in the zone of fast learning.
200 people in a class, I can't even get my questions answered. True story, miss one sentence, and you're lost at a point of no return. It makes sense for me to learn it on my own pace outside of class and visit during office hours. Let me use my laptop in class so that I can still continue to be productive during the hour. (doing other work)
Whether I take notes or not should be up to me as a student. Banning electronics does not guarantee learning. If I don't want to learn/listen, then I won't. You can take a horse to the water, but you can't get it to drink.
From the article: "The strongest argument against allowing that choice is that one student’s use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them. In a series of lab experiments, researchers at York University and McMaster University in Canada tested the effect of laptops on students who weren’t using them. Some students were told to perform small tasks on their laptops unrelated to the lecture, like looking up movie times. As expected, these students retained less of the lecture material. But what is really interesting is that the learning of students seated near the laptop users was also negatively affected."
> Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.
This seems to be the key point -- when taking notes by hand, you have to think about what you're hearing and writing down. In a way, you're translating the lecturer's language to your own, and that seems to help retain the information better.
There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentences.
I find writing better because you can freely draw on your lecture notes. The benefit is twofold: one, you don't have have to slavishly transcribe everything your professor says if it's already in the slides. Two, the mental overhead is very low as your thoughts go straight from pen to paper.
If you type from scratch, you end having having to 'transcribe'. If you annotate the slides on your laptop, you have to deal with the high overhead of textbox and geometric shape manipulation with a keyboard and trackpad.
If my lectures didn't have so much diagrams or equations(unlikely in an engineering major), I think a purely text based notetaking software like org-mode would be pretty good.
The other important finding is the "negative externality" of laptop use on other people that are not using it. Even if someone is taking notes on paper and the student next to him/her is using a computer, research has found negative impacts on both the student using the laptop and the student using paper (akin to second-hand smoke).
I think that this is important from a policy prospective because students can make whatever choices for themselves, but the instructor should step in when those choices are impacting others' learning.
I have long known this to be the case for myself, and switched back to pen and paper for taking notes. I also learned shorthand to reduce the amount of time and mental effort I spend on taking notes, though I sometimes revert to longhand when I need something to be more readable. It is also great for diagrams, math notation, etc. Touchscreens may someday get there, but so far I have found that even the best touchscreens/tablets (yes, even the iPad Pro) still wind up slowing me down.
Research on disfluency implies that you might be better off with longhand after all. Increasing the mental effort in taking the notes has a positive effect on how well people absorb material (subject to a few caveats).
if I am taking a course on a new unfamiliar subject I copy relevant material from the textbook into a handwritten journal before each lecture, which makes it much easier to pay attention to the teacher and catch all of their side comments (such as caveats on when to use various methods)
I always allowed laptops in my lectures. I encouraged the kids to google things and challenge me when they thought me wrong. If i was unsure of a fact id have them look it up. That back-and-forth kept them engaged, and made my life much easier. If your lecture isnt more interesting than facebook you have to up your game.
This story was posted 5 times within the past 3 days (never by me). I was wondering why it never took off because it’s one of those HN stories. Anyway, Monday morning at 7am EST seemed to do the trick.
For anyone wondering why their stories don’t initially gain traction, timing is important.
It's pretty common where I work to bring laptops to meetings. If the meeting is engaging they close, and sometimes in deep meetings they are asked to be closed. In other meetings it helps to have many hands on keyboards updating the sprint board in jira and entering new tasks, or the meeting is rolling attention and people are there and do work until they are needed by the meeting. This is often what happens in all hands on deck situations or launches.
People who are holding meetings where I work realize when they're wasting time and generally dismiss people if they're not needed and everyone is generally free to just leave if the meeting isn't of use to them.
Interesting how many people prefer videos, my experience is that some professors are bad but the others are good, you can skip writing notes and just listen and later xerox the notes from others or get the book from the library.
The advantages or the lectures is that you can ask questions, the professor gets feedback and provide more examples then needed, the professors will tell some interesting side story that you will remember it forever and it will help you remember the concepts.
I am wondering if the people that hate lectures are more likely to have paid for the university studies so maybe they resent the entire institution and prefer learning from internet.
I am not sure about meetings since I do not have much experience with them. But if you do not want people to use laptops during lectures
1. Record your lectures and make them available later (course website, internal network anywhere).
2. Create PDF of your own notes and distribute them BEFORE lecture.
3. Ideally, though this is a huge amount of work, so not always possible, write down in detail the steps in your lecture like a book chapter and distibute this BEFORE lecture. Alternatively, assign a book chapter pre-reading.
In short, if you want people to pay attention to the content during the lecture, remove the incentive to take notes during the lecture.
Oddly, I've found that I pay better attention if I use a laptop during a meeting, but not for taking notes. Rather I will either lightly browse related information, or look for the answer to a question that pops in my mind. It can't be intense usage, but just simple. It seems to keep my mind more alert and I'm able to absorb the meeting better. I also can tune out if they are talking about something I already know. If I don't have a laptop or phone, I tend to zone out or fall asleep.
On the other hand, I get pissed if someone is in my meeting using a laptop and isn't paying attention at all. It's a weird thing.
and it seems that PowerPoint kind of "solved” the first half of interactive classroom information exchange: presentation (output). Note taking (with laptop or tablet) can be think of as the second half of the problem (input).
Perhaps we need to rethink the challenge of "realtime face-to-face group interactive information exchange" in a more integrated way and come up with more revolutionary solutions.
I prefer a notebook to a laptop in business meetings, but then I have to spend time afterward transcribing the notes so I can share them (something expected at my workplace).
I'm experimenting with using Evernote on a tablet computer along with a Bluetooth keyboard. So far this is working well - there's no laptop screen separating me from my colleagues, I can sketch diagrams and the notes are instantly available.
I have no disagreement that paper is better for learning. Computers were first starting to be available in lectures when I was an undergrad, and while I could type like mad I wouldn't retain as much information.
It's unfortunate to see laptops conflated with "all electronics" here. I benefitted greatly from using SoundNote on an iPad in grad school, which allowed me to make recordings of lectures that I could then annotate in real time. Rather than taking a transcript or feeling I had to record all key concepts, I could stick to noting where in the lecture was an especially important concept, or where I had spaced out and should re-listen. More valuable than any written notes I could have taken.
It seems like the more obvious conclusion from the facts stated in the article would be: lectures are more efficient when people can dedicate their brain to understanding the content instead of having to write down everything being said/shown. I never understood why some lecturers thought that making students write things down would be a good way to teach them anything. Certainly did not work for me. I got much more value from mentally following the lecture and thinking about the topic.
For a very long time in university, I never took notes and suffered nothing for it. Near the end, the only exceptions were classes taught from very succinct paper material where a lot of supplementary examples were only treated in lectures and so complicated as not to be (easily) found on the internet.
Beyond that I always got a much better return on paying more attention to the lecture, and trying to see how what is told fits with what I know rather than how to fit it into my notes.
I have such terrible attention problems that I have secretly recorded just about every class, meeting, and discussion in the last ten years. Legalities and ethics aside, afterward I'll listen and make detailed notes, then depending on the content, destroy or keep the audio. The legalities and ethics will always trouble me but without the audio I get very lost. The medium has never made a difference, nor the delivery method.
I think an effective strategy depends highly on the subject matter. Also, appropriate use of technology by the lecturer makes a huge difference.
For mathematics (my field) or something similar like theoretical physics, the pace at which the lecturer can write on a blackboard with a piece of chalk is just about the right information rate for the audience to absorb. Not to say one cannot teach well using more modern media, but it has to be done with careful thought and planning to be effective. (Same applies to lecturing at the board; we just have more practice at it.)
As for note-taking, I used to write everything down in class when I was in college & grad school. Sometimes this worked, sometimes not -- what's right for a course in abstract algebra isn't going to be right for a course in computational neuroscience. What I think is very effective, but requires some discipline, is:
- take minimal notes (or even photos) in class
- reconstruct lecture after class
- go to office hours and clear up any questions that arise.
It would be hard to do this for everything. For the subjects you really care about, this might be a useful approach.
I didn't get much value from notes until I started using fountain pens and focusing on my penmanship. Once I did, I had to slow down and take more concise notes to avoid falling behind, which in turn lead to my needing to actually understand what was being presented so I could write it in fewer words instead of just writing down key points verbatim.
I think banning laptops is a good idea, but I think it should be coupled with other study aids, like fully recorded lectures to let students learn in their own way.
One of the best lecturers I had at university passed round a printed copy of the lecture summary at the start, allowing students to concentrate on making their own notes & transcribing the lecture that the article talks about.
Many, many other lecturers objected though to lectures being recorded (by individual students, e.g. dictaphone, we didn't have campus-wide video/audio recording).
Most meetings are completely different beasts to lectures, I think — e.g. if you have ten people round a table in a room, people should be participants not audience members; the dynamic is completely different. That said, I would agree with banning laptops from meetings for the most part!
Little late, but my two cents as someone who majored in a humanities field (although working in tech now):
Our lectures were almost always intended to be heard after doing the readings. They were comprised of helpful info professors knew from academic experience, not easily found in any print material. Relevant historical context was especially hard to pick up without knowing what exactly to look for.
I felt like my humanities lectures were more analogous to demos and labs in my STEM courses, learning that relies on a certain spontaneity and physical presence, even if not all of the material is strictly "necessary". As for a counterpart to my STEM lectures, I too would've been bored out of my mind listening to most humanities professors read our readings to us...
I took notes in college in org-mode on a little eeepc and graduated summa. Instead of banning laptops to cater to the least common denominator, why not just tell the kids not to surf the web during lectures? Have the TA sit in the back of the class or make a video recording from the back if it's a problem.
It's hard not to imagine that the ones who surf the net on their laptops are the same ones who would be busy doodling in their notebooks otherwise.
And I'm not too sure about the study they cite that claims that other people are distracted. The assumption seems to be that people using laptops are ipso facto on Youtube and Twitter all the time. And the questionnaires they gave the test subjects beforehand practically begged them to be distracted during the test.
It's not just about distractions. Laptops also encourage a note taking style where you simply are transcribing every word that the lecturer says. This is a less effective way to learn material, as you can go on "auto pilot" where the words flow from your ears to your fingers without you really having to synthesize any information or really understand it. Studies[1] have shown that this happens even when students are warned against doing this.
Hand-writing notes, on the other hand, encourages you to process the information you are hearing and summarize it into your own words, improving understanding and memory of the information.
Anecdotally, my entire school (the business school at UT Austin) banned laptops in all classrooms, and I think it was hugely beneficial to my understanding of the materials. In other, non-business classes that allowed laptops, I tended to have to spend a lot longer re-reading my notes and textbooks before I felt like I really understood the information.
> The researchers hypothesized that, because students can type faster than they can write, the lecturer’s words flowed right to the students’ typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing. Students writing by hand had to process and condense the spoken material simply to enable their pens to keep up with the lecture. Indeed, the notes of the laptop users more closely resembled transcripts than lecture summaries. The handwritten versions were more succinct but included the salient issues discussed in the lecture.
I mean, that's possible, but my experience is if I'm using my laptop during a lecture I'm more likely to start surfing the Web and not pay attention to the lecture.
I'm so glad that I attended university before it was the done thing for students to be on laptops during lectures. If nothing else, it's simply a distraction to have all the other peoples' bright and animated screens in your field of vision.
I don't think taking notes is the most important part of learning from a lecture. For me, throughout the years, actively participating in lectures through asking questions or discussing the concept being talked about, either with the lecturer or the person I'm sitting beside. Compared to taking notes, this has lead to me gaining a deeper understanding than when writing or typing everything that is being said during the meeting or the lecture. Usually, the only things I write down in meetings and lectures are words or concepts I don't already understand so I can research those later, or specific tasks that I am going to do as a result of the meeting or lecture.
I've never understood the thing about taking notes myself (mind you I never did any higher education); what is the lecture explaining that isn't in the textbook? The textbook should be all the notes and information you need, maybe supplemented with online; not keeping notes will allow you to focus on the lecture itself, which should be an extra on top of the book.
The actual act of taking the information and processing it into your own words, and then also the act of actually writing those words down, has been shown to improve memory retention and understanding of that information over what you would get from simply reading the same information in a textbook.
The idea that we can't use laptops in meetings is outdated. You can do active listening while taking notes, as long as you practice good note-taking instead of verbatim transcription. I typically use a concept-mapping tool such as CMapTools from the great folks at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Florida. That lets me capture the essential concepts from the meeting and the relations among those concepts.
One of the arguments against laptops is that even when people are aware of the fact that they shouldn't take verbatim transcriptions, they still tend to do so when using laptops. Hand-writing notes tends to make it almost impossible to write verbatim transcriptions, which forces active listening and processing the information as it comes in.
It's very much a "YMMV" thing, as it's certainly possible to take great notes and listen well while using a laptop, but for the average person, laptops encourage bad meeting/lecture habits.
If I have my laptop or phone our during a meeting it's because I've either already had this meeting with whoever if giving out the information and don't need to pay full attention to it or I'm in a meeting that I shouldnt be in because I have nothing to add.
I assume everyone else is the same way and It's a really easy way to tell who does and doesnt need to be in future meetings for me.
I've found (full-sized) tablets to work out better in these environments than laptops. Both in terms of focused-usage as a information recording or reference/retrieval tool, and the favorable reception it gets from other participants when used for such purposes.
I’m at university and often find myself ignoring the lecturer and reading through the slides in my own time, making my own notes. The only reason I show up is because the lecturers often give extra information they don’t put on the slides, so I always keep an ear open.
I don't mind laptops being used in meetings, so long as their use is relevant to the meeting. But I find it highly distracting when somebody is pounding away on a keyboard while paying no attention to what the rest of us in the room are trying to accomplish.
I think my preference is a table with a stylus followed by pencil and paper over a computer. I never found computers to be useful in meetings but something I can write on and get handwriting recognition has been useful for me.
I dislike the style of note taking described in the article, i.e. mindlessly writing down what the professor is saying.
I don't believe however that this is necessarily tied to typing rather than writing with pen and paper.
I have a lecture where no notes or textbook is provided and it is required that you copy everything written on the board. Personally I'm not great at writing fast, so I usually lag behind a bit with writing which makes it that much harder to follow along with what the professor is saying. In a situation like this, writing with pen and paper may be worse than typing (except the specific course I'm talking about is maths and short of writing LaTeX in real time, handwriting is necessary).
From my personal experience as a student the most effective way for me to take notes is to annotate existing material, i.e. slides or lecture notes.
In some classes where material is available beforehand that would be possible by printing it all, bringing it to class, annotating it and then digitalizing it again to make it searchable (and create backups).
However I feel this is highly inefficient and a massive waste of paper. Suppose there are roughly 60 slides per lecture, 8 lectures a week across courses and I can get roughly 4 slides on a sheet of paper in such a way that I can work with them comfortably; that is 120 pages of paper a week!
For many lectures where material is not provided in advance, but only at the beginning of the lecture, presumably to prevent students to only selectively attend the lectures it would be impossible to work in the way I find to be best for me.
That is not to say, the problems described in the article don't exist. I remember many instances of people browsing social media rather than following the lecture. Ignoring any detriment it has on themselves (it is their choice to not pay attention after all) we are left with the negative impact it has on others.
As I outlined in another comment, there are approaches to combating this that I feel to be more appropriate than a blanket ban.
One is to have people using electronic devices to sit somewhere else, usually behind people not using them, so they can only distract other people using electronic devices. This offers people the choice of either using their devices and being potentially exposed to visual noise or not use them and be free from these distractions.
I also had a professor that disallowed electronic devices for everything but slides of the lecture and related material. I can only hypothesize how he managed to do this consistently, but I believe he was able to tell by the expressions on peoples' faces and if people sitting nearby stole glances at other screens.
I bought an iPad Pro 2 this september and it immediately replace my laptop for meetings. Light computing when I need it, but primarily a note-taking advice. Really great.
What software do you use on the iPad? I also have one but have things scattered between Nebo, GoodNotes, Apple Notes, Bear, Pages, and Evernote. I really need to pick the best app and focus everything there, but each one has different strengths.
yeah they're all kidna terrible. I started a roundup review but gave up due to costs of downloading each app.
I've settled so far on Linea. It has plenty of problems but hit my key points. I was aiming for a paper-like experience to replace my favorite tools: a technical pen/pencil and a nice graph paper pad.
- Use finger to erase (like a whiteboard).
- Focus mode with no toolbars / chrome.
- Good-looking graph paper background.
- Technical pens and pencils.
- Zoomable.
All the apps have layers - that's table stakes. Linea does NOT allow you to make selections and move components individually. I think I might do better design work with a few technical restrictions.
Really down voted ever worked in properly run organisations with proper procedures ISO 9000 or BS 7570? even more so in parliamentary based orgs having to lug around 4 or 5 ring binders of paper gets old quickly
The problem here lies not with the laptops or with their use. It lies with the continued existence of such radically and absurdly inefficient and pointless traditions as 'lectures' and 'meetings'. They were started because physical co-location was necessary for knowledge transmission. Physical co-location is no longer necessary for, and indeed is severely hampering of, knowledge transmission.
Anyone who proposes an in-person meeting is planning to abuse the frailties of human biology rather than meet with you honestly. They intend to use bluster and charm to convince you of ostensibly objective claims - and it will probably work. It usually does. That's one of the reasons they fight so hard to avoid being put on an actual even playing field where their ideas must stand or fall solely on their own merits.
Lectures and meetings are broken, not the notes.
Now I will tend to write up my own notes in my own time on matters (in Pages for lack of any motivation to try anything else).