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This is somewhat tangential to what you're looking for, but I often get a lot of questions in classes about why I'm never, ever taking notes. It's firstly not q
by tel 16y ago
This is somewhat tangential to what you're looking for, but I often get a lot of questions in classes about why I'm never, ever taking notes. It's firstly not quite true and secondly something sometimes difficult for people to understand.
I think what people often use notes for is as a surrogate memory. There's a desire to search through them for that one gem which will trigger you to remember all that you once knew. Or worse, it's a search for that part where you can just relive whatever experience you thought should have taught you it the first time, but didn't. To this end we have organizers and smart pens and the like. I might be jaded but they all seem like so many fancy gadgets that all seek to solve a very orthogonal problem.
I disagree with the "note taking habit" greatly because I think it's in your best interest to learn instead of memorize. By which I mean that if you're truly studying something, the goal must be to enact some sort of change in parts of your life far beyond just what you can regurgitate. It's starkly contradictory to a lot of what everyone seems to practice in education, and my adherence to it has cost me in graded performance, but it's also placed me far above a lot of my peers in both comprehension and success.
My goal when learning is building my own, real mind maps. Every thing I ingest has to be processed, extended, applied, and connected to other things. You have to act, not just listen and listen more than notate.
In classes that translates to a lot of questions that go beyond the scope of the material and great conversations with professors (in our own time). In information consumption, it translates to a much slower rate of consumption (helped by a lot of filtration) where action items are not just stored up but actively performed while things are still fresh and exciting.
In short, I try to maintain a distaste for what you might call "consumption mode flow". Learning is atomic and it takes effort to decompartmentalize the things you read into real effects in your life. That decompartmentalization is the best notation method possible, though. If you want to remember something important, make sure it rubs up against everything you do every day. If it's not so important, why write it down?
(Also, for voting purposes, pen and paper is best. I find this style of thought is aided by not being able to erase.)
- jarin 16y agoSame here. I never take notes for general concepts (application architecture, features, design, etc). I only write down things that I know are very specific and that I won't be able to recall from memory later (IP addresses, phone numbers, URLs, passwords for other peoples' accounts, etc). I find that not writing down the high level concepts helps me to both remember them better and tackle problems with a fresh mind, unencumbered by unimportant details.
- alinajaf 16y agoI would agree that in a university lecture, taking notes isn't the most constructive use of your time. > I think it's in your best interest to learn instead of memorize This doesn't necessarily make sense. Memorization is a first step to learning, nothing more. I don't believe you can learn the higher level concepts of any subject without memorizing the details of its primitives at some stage of your study. Also, I would add that in my experience note-taking is one of the worst possible ways to memorize anything. > My goal when learning is building my own, real mind maps. Every thing I ingest has to be processed, extended, applied, and connected to other things. You have to act, not just listen and listen more than notate. Agree 100%. I've found this to be true in pretty much anything I've applied myself to, specifically language study, martial arts and programming. I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it.
- leif 16y ago> This doesn't necessarily make sense. Memorization is a first step to learning, nothing more. I don't believe you can learn the higher level concepts of any subject without memorizing the details of its primitives at some stage of your study. I vehemently disagree, maybe because I understood the original statement differently. In classes, I've watched students diligently write down everything on the blackboard and yet find themselves incapable of answering the simplest question on something just explained (but not written down). They spend all of their mental capacity putting ideas down on paper in front of them, rather than putting those ideas in their brain and playing with them, as they should. They can regurgitate what was just said, sure, but give them new data and ask them to apply a concept just explained with different data, and they're lost. That's the difference between memorization and learning. Memorization is something you can do at home with a textbook. In fact, textbooks have already "memorized" facts for you, why are you doing it at all? When you come to class, you shouldn't be worried about that. Personally, I'd much rather be in a position to explain (for example) a formula I can't write down exactly, and say what it does and means, and why, than have a thousand formulas memorized which I don't understand. > I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it. Heh, I do the same thing. cat > /dev/null seems to be my brain's swap space.