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Comment by preben | Hacker News Reader

Slowing down to a pace comfortable for you means, at least in my classes, that you'll miss the next thing in the presentation. Notes are not for immediate learning, they're for assisting in learning later on. As an physics engineering student, I take notes with a combination of LaTeX and OneNote on my Surface 3.

Additional benefits by using a laptop to take notes is that they are searchable, archived and accessible for however long you like, and sharable between classmates. Hand written notes can obviously be shared and archived as well, but nowhere near as easily.

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>> Slowing down to a pace comfortable for you means, at least in my classes, that you'll miss the next thing in the presentation.

That's exactly the point: you get a free exercise in divided attention, plus you are forced to digest your notes to only essentials, not full transcript of the lecture. That process is what makes handwritten notes superior - it forces you to focus and think, not just mindlessly type.

And for things that you didn't have time to note you still have a textbook. Handwritten notes are just outline, a basis to build upon.

> I take notes with a combination of LaTeX and OneNote on my Surface 3

I wonder how you do that - I can't imagine I would be able to make notes in LaTeX in real-time. To me, paper is just faster than any computer solution. Also sometimes you need to draw a diagram or arrow in the notes.

> Slowing down to a pace comfortable for you means, at least in my classes, that you'll miss the next thing in the presentation.

I was thinking about this recently. I teach (assembly programming) in our company using slideshow. But most teachers at my university used blackboard (for math). I am beginning to think that using blackboard is better, despite more effort, because it also forces the teacher to slow down.

One of my favorite electrical engineering professors gave incredibly well-planned lectures via overhead transparencies. He was quick to adjust the pace of an individual lecture to the audience, but also provided his presentations as PDF downloads. His presentations were supplemental to the textbooks, but served as amazing base notes. In his classes, I found myself writing prompts for further review and stray observations, rather than attempting to summarize as the lecture progressed.

Having worked on online learning applications since then, I still think that his was the best system for transferring complex knowledge in a classroom setting.

An example PDF that I found through a quick Google search: http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~jstiles/312/handouts/312_Introductio...

Can you really write LaTeX equations fast enough to keep up with the lecture? I'm impressed.

When I was in school I was often hard pressed to keep up with simple paper and pencil.

Seems like an exaggeration. I really doubt there's anyone taking realtime notes in LaTeX.

It's totally doable. I type fast and know my LaTeX. Only time I feel like I'm at a significant disadvantage is when new symbols are introduced that I have to look up.

Only math is done in LaTeX, for clarification. They're rendered as images and imported into OneNote (via EqualX, if anyone's looking to do the same).

You're only supposed to write 20% of the time (so, like 5% of the material) when you hand-write notes.

This doesn't work well in certain classes (e.g. math classes where you have to copy every word of a proof and analyze it later).

Being a human photocopier in maths/physics lectures was the worst thing about university, when you're 6 blackboards behind. That was in 1999, hopefully it's changed now.

I don't see the point in making notes that fancy. Writing them down (or typing them) is primarily just an aid to remember the content.

If you're at a computer looking for a reference then there are better sources available than hastily typed notes.

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