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Comment by cjsuk | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

People learn in different ways is the answer. Different people have different ways of cementing understanding in their heads.

My ideal form is to record the meeting, and then later review it and write notes.

Ideal for learning yes but very time consuming. Do you feel it's worth it in that way?

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.

I never took notes, I doodled. All my learning came from doing after the lectures were done.

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

> publish them online later

Note that you also need to have someone add captions to them for accessibility.

Most professors are experts at delegating the menial tasks to others :)

They are however terrible at remembering to delegate them from experience!

Sure, but that requires a budget

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!

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 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.

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.

Very true and unfortunately all to frequently ignored.

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.

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.

Turn by turn is what "the book" and it's handful of reference examples before the actual test questions are supposed to be about.

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.)

> 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.

Problem-based learning is a highly effective form of learning for some materials.

I'll have to dig for a citation, but I thought the act of writing the notes was educational (helps with retention) in and of itself.

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 met a professor who acknowledged hammering the class with fast-paced talk to purposely frustrate note-takers.

His purpose: 'If you want to pass my exam, don't miss a class. Getting notes from others would let you "cheat"'

..asshole.

I can't edit my initial comment, but here's a link with citations that support my comment. In particular, the "Why do we take notes?" section... https://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/notetaking_0.pdf

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.

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.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

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.

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.

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.

> First to remember what was said in class,

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.

Did you read the article? Verbatim copying is exactly what is less effective than having to translate to your own words.

The best way to understand something is to have to explain it. Writing your own summarized notes is a light version of that.

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.

> On red paper so it could not be photocopied.

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

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.

You are not describing a meeting.

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).

What's wrong with inviting people who wish to observe the input provided by others, and subsequent discussion?

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.

If this is a work context, they should probably be actually working instead.

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.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...

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.

Wow that sounds intensive. What does a 2hr seminar usually consist of in Germany?

Could be a cultural difference in seminar style?

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.

exactly!

If you already know the material, what's the point of attending the lecture?

Because reviewing and being familiar with material is different from knowing it, and even if you know a topic, surely you can learn more.

It's unlikely that you fully understand the material from a single read.

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.

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.

> 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.

This is simply professors acknowledging reality.

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

> 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?

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

We are similar and I studied math as well.

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.

Same for me. I could take notes but then I would just be blindly copying what was on the board.

The ability to stick your hand up and ask a question is orders of magnitude more valuable than a rewind button.

> 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.

Why are you wasting so much meeting time on non-pivotal discourse?

Where are you finding meetings so regularly effective that they don't need management/facilitation? I'd love to work there.

My setting is sales/consulting with customers including multiple parties.

> 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.

Try changing how you take notes. I felt the same way until I discovered mind mapping.

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.

That's what private lessons are for.

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.

Note taking exists to combat what you're talking about. You can improve your note taking, and how you use your notes, on paper or on a device.

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.

> Simply lift up your hand and ask a question.

That scales poorly- O(n) cost per O(1) benefit

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.

Agree with this.

I rather like HyperPhysics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html

I agree.

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...

I’m on chrome on iOS

Sounds like ADHD.

Or a too hard course. Or a bad lecturer. Or you skipped the previous lecture and it's all gibberish again.

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.

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