There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentence

There's no reason why one can't type notes the same way as well, first listening and understanding before distilling that information into a few choice sentences. I find writing better because you can freely draw on your lecture notes. The benefit is twofold: one, you don't have have to slavishly transcribe everything your professor says if it's already in the slides. Two, the mental overhead is very low as your thoughts go straight from pen to paper. If you type from scratch, you end having having to 'transcribe'. If you annotate the slides on your laptop, you have to deal with the high overhead of textbox and geometric shape manipulation with a keyboard and trackpad. If my lectures didn't have so much diagrams or equations(unlikely in an engineering major), I think a purely text based notetaking software like org-mode would be pretty good.