Laptops Are Great, But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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).
I have literally never used anything I learned on that part of the course however.
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.
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.
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.
That scales poorly- O(n) cost per O(1) benefit
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.
I rather like HyperPhysics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html
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
Note that you also need to have someone add captions to them for accessibility.
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!
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.
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.
The classroom time is for general theory and the QnA part for debugging errors in the understanding of students.
(In High School I found it way more useful to spend most of the in-class time doing homework... even if for another class.)
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.
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.
His purpose: 'If you want to pass my exam, don't miss a class. Getting notes from others would let you "cheat"'
..asshole.
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.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best way to understand something is to have to explain it. Writing your own summarized notes is a light version of that.
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.
Rediculous. Luckily today we have computers that can scan and color-correct. And social media so students can organize and cut out the middle-men
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.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...
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.
My ideal form is to record the meeting, and then later review it and write notes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could be a cultural difference in seminar style?
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.
However, if you can convince yourself that you do then by all means skip that lecture. You'll find out how accurate you were on the exam.
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.
> 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.
If I taught my class to those who "previewed the material" I'd be teaching to 1 or 2 students ... maybe.
In reality, the best students do exactly this.
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.
Which classes would you be referring to?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
My setting is sales/consulting with customers including multiple parties.
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.
Writing and linking concepts is almost like putting chapter markers in a video or flags on a page. It helps you recall what was said in what context.
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 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)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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Meetings, on the other hand...
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.
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 find most of my learning happens through books on my own time.
I don't understand how that follows. Why wouldn't we notice when good professors deviate from the norm?
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.
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.
https://shared.irtnog.org/Tandberg-TCTA-TCTE-TMS.pdf
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:
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand your last paragraph.
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.
btw, laptop for notes is a joke. A pen+paper is way more effective, cheaper and usable.
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.
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.
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.
1: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/taking-notes-by-hand-...
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.
You're assuming that the people using the laptop are multi-tasking but I don't know that that's necessarily true.
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.
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.
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.
(Or some other cool product - EtherPad?)
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.
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/ACAMP2015/ACAMP+2015+Ho...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'll never ban them in my classes. Students know what they need.
This helps a lot the learning process, because summarizing makes you understand better the content, and the relations between concepts
That's not to say it cannot be entertaining, at times, but there's also a lot of POHW: plain old hard work.
For anyone wondering why their stories don’t initially gain traction, timing is important.
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.
In short, if you want people to pay attention to the content during the lecture, remove the incentive to take notes during the lecture.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745202
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'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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
1: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/taking-notes-by-hand-...
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 also glad I finished before laptops (and even www) became a thing.
For me, the clicking and clacking of the keyboards would drive me bonkers.
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.
Either the lecture was designed to take "notes", i.e. the prof would literally explain and write a nice recap on the board that he wanted us to copy.
Or we got prints of the slides, where we could just add a few comments were needed.
Or we just got a printed "textbook" that the prof wrote, and the lecture was just to get an overview and see which parts are important...
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 searched my notes for test and the audio of the professor was right there.
Had to repeat Art History and do a Freshman Course due to a mess up from the registrar's office = Civ 3 but still got an A.
I agree the value is in the teaching itself and learning in the moment; however, I would still like to go back and access that lecture/class.
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'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.
Many students sat in the back row and played it in the lectures.
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.
Here's a competing citation that disagrees with you and suggests that people pay more attention in-person: https://www.maritzmotivation.com/~/media/Files/MaritzInstitu...