Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

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> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

This is the problem.

Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast.

Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years.

Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding.

Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.

If I'd known to do that, I might have made my way through my EE degree instead of dropping out to the (easier) CS degree. 90% of the time I got about 40-50% of the way through transcribing the stuff on the board before the lecturer erased it because 'fuck you, you had 30 seconds'

Ditto, EE too. I bought a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun just for the great table of Laplace Transforms.

If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.

Then you'd be a terrible professor, because that attitude is not pro-learning. Students take their own notes because writing is an aid to memory. Students take electronic notes because those notes are easier to organise, edit, and search through. Many "decent" professors will not hand out notes, and the writings they put on the projector might be scanned and put online, but those writings have none of the benefits of actually typeset notes. Moreover, since you would ban electronics, students couldn't access those scans in a later lecture anyways.

Yep, I’ll be just like this guy.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...

You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

The act of writing them actually helps one to remember -- I never went back and organized, edited, or searched through notes I took, because I remembered most of the material, and what I didn't was in the book.

>You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

They also used to write cuneiform :p What's your point here?

>The act of writing them actually helps one to remember

Source for this, in comparison to typing?

It’s been widely reported for several years. Here’s the first link I found.

www.medicaldaily.com/why-using-pen-and-paper-not-laptops-boosts-memory-writing-notes-helps-recall-concepts-ability-268770%3famp=1

Well, I gave up entirely on taking notes in high-school because laptops weren't allowed, and I can barely read my handwriting if I'm quickly taking notes. Whereas in uni I actually used my notes, and have even referred to them years later since they're actually readable and useful. Granted, I would have them 1/2 typed while reading the material before lecture and did a final-draft cleanup after lecture, but typed notes were far more helpful than handwritten notes.

Assuming that everyone learns the same way you do is just false. Some people really like mind maps, I don't find them personally helpful but I don't tell people it's a useless technique or that they're wrong. If a student can't be trusted to have a laptop without spending the lecture browsing Facebook, then why should the lecturer care? That student is only hurting their own academic performance, it shouldn't stop others from being able to learn in a manner that benefits themselves.

Have you ever sat in the back row of a lecture hall and watched what the students are doing on their laptops?

What does that have to do with anything?

A lot.

Laptops are generally disruptive to the entire class, and (anecdotally, but I’ve done a lot of higher learning) almost all of their use is not for note taking or anything related to the class.

So why not ban them? Many professors do.

So when you get to the real world and everyone in the meeting is on their laptop? ...

Doesn't work that way in a lot of the real world.

>So why not ban them?

Because some students are using them to take notes, and banning electronics harms the learning of those students.

They are distracting other students using a computer. Why do you want to ban using a computer but keep permitting distracting other students?

Ridiculous. You're forcing your own preferences and quirks onto a class-full of students. They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best. As we can see from this very article what works for some does not match what works for you.

> They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best

They can, but do they ?

Given my experience as a student in the US long time ago, it rarely seemed so. I am all for treating them as adults as long as its not disturbing/distracting others in the class.

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