8 ms·

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this.

by setquk 8y ago

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well. Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

Rainymood 8y ago
>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>. I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.
- setquk 8y ago
  > 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.
  - madengr 8y ago
    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.
    - andrepd 8y ago
      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.
      - srean 8y ago
        > 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.
    - ivanbakel 8y ago
      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.
      - madengr 8y ago
        Yep, I’ll be just like this guy. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-news/ku-professor-removed-from-teaching-class-after-telling-student-to-learn-english-/1835483764 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...
- matwood 8y ago
  > >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.
  - setquk 8y ago
    I can understand why people don't do it. We weren't taught how to learn at school or college and when we turned up at university we were expected to know how. It took me a semester of alcohol fuelled hedonism, followed by screwing up, panic, then introspection to work it all out. I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way. My eldest wants to be a doctor so I've tried to share as much of my experience with her on how to learn so she doesn't have to make my mistakes as they still don't teach them any of this today, at least in the UK.
    - dhimes 8y ago
      This is exactly what I have observed among today's students also, and I am desperately trying to help! Smart students actually get hit harder because they cruise through high school and hit the wall in college. Then they may have a seminar or something on how to take notes and basic time-management (usually delivered through a first-year experience program or something similar), but if they want a real understanding of how to learn they have to get it on their own.
  - Rainymood 8y ago
    I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying that they are not going to do it, the majority at least. Most people take the path of least resistance, if your path of least resistance is retyping your notes consistently every class more power to you, you are not an average student then. I never typed up my notes, I made flashcards based off them which worked for me, but OK. I'm just saying that if you think the average student diligently types up his notes after every class you're sorely mistaken.
- dspillett 8y ago
  > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. If that is the case, then I fear little from the upcoming students chomping at my old ankles in the jobs market! Transcribing my lecture scribbles to neater notes later in the day (or sometimes later in the week depending on scheduling) was important in solidifying the knowledge or, more importantly, realising that something hadn't twigged in my head as I thought it had (giving me chance to look up the matter and/or ask the lecturer for clarification next time, instead of being surprised by not understanding when new information was built on that part or it came up in an exam).
  - ranc1d 8y ago
    My handwriting is terrible,and worse when it comes writing down formulas, this could be a useful way of writing up notes a lot quicker. Also useful for cheat sheets or summarising notes
    - dspillett 8y ago
      I have no objection to taking quick notes in lectures using electronic means instead of pen+paper (though the latter would still be my preference). It was the implication that people don't have and won't make time to review, tidy, and, where relevant, expand upon or question those notes afterwards, that I was responding to.
    - zrobotics 8y ago
      My handwriting is also awful, but what the parent suggested isn't at all incompatible with taking typed notes: I would type a first draft while reading the material before lecture, add during the lecture, then finish the final draft afterwards. I regret I didn't learn this method of note-taking earlier, and it works for both hand-written and typed. It also doesn't take that much time, but the last step of reviewing and cleanup is critical for actually cementing my understanding of the material. Another possible method would be taking written notes during lectures, then typesetting them afterwards. However, I found it was preferable to revise my notes soon after the lecture, at least 1-2 days following, while my memory was still fresh.
- joppy 8y ago
  This method of writing notes still seems like a downgrade from using a pen - my optimal way of taking notes would be with a pen, but with some sort of handwriting recognition on a tablet so it could immediately translate it to prose + LaTeX mathematics. Something that does both nicely seems difficult to find though...
klodolph 8y ago
I would never write short hand with mathematics, it’s too confusing… do you mean long hand?
- setquk 8y ago
  Sorry I should have used a different word. Write the name of the equation down / bullet points. Don't write too much. Just enough to jog your memory later or cover anything you don't think you understand.
2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
If this works for the guy how can you ‘disagree’?
- setquk 8y ago
  Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet. A lot of people get to the end of their course and realise they have thousands of pages of useless words and diagrams and have a nervous breakdown. It takes a lot of discipline and time to write very high quality notes and to study. I spent more time thinking about things and experimenting with ideas and writing notes than I did in lectures or tutorials or labs.
  - gjulianm 8y ago
    I did take LaTeX notes for most courses on my math degree, and I passed all of them. In fact, the ones where I dedicated more time to the notes were the ones that I could study more easily as I put in more effort to understand and review what I wrote.
  - sannee 8y ago
    > Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet. I am fairly sure he passed more than one course with this approach. The blogpost says that he started using LaTeX to take notes during his second semester. The screenshots show introductory complex analysis, which is usually taught somewhat later.
  - jjuel 8y ago
    Don't you think you could be an edge case too where you went back and studied extra and experimented? Very few college students I know actually did anything like this, and I know I didn't. Obviously it would have helped, but I did not do that then.
    - setquk 8y ago
      No because we formed study groups and did it collectively.
4thaccount 8y ago
Agreed. Paper and pen is hard to beat when it comes to equations and improvising. Hats off to anyone with that level of Vim & LaTex skill though. Now that I'm in the workforce I use OneNote, Notepad, and Confluence for notes and documentation for the most part, but I still use a lot of pen and paper as well... especially when doing complex coding where I need to map out how all the data structures work before hand.
- setquk 8y ago
  Run away from OneNote quickly. Microsoft are not shipping OneNote desktop any more, preferring the horrid UWP app. Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims! Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...
  - 4thaccount 8y ago
    Thanks for the tip. OneNote is one of a handful of things Microsoft has done that I like. Is it really not on Windows10? I haven't upgraded from 7 yet.
    - setquk 8y ago
      It does ship with windows 10 but it's a UWP app and it's rubbish. It's missing on Office 2019. See: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-missing-after-installing-office-2019-or-office-365-1844ba87-7248-4bd8-a735-66a52f98e6e5 https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-mis... This one totally caught me by surprise for ref when I upgraded, perhaps foolishly. I installed OneNote 2016 and am sticking my fingers in my ears until I have some time to deal with it.
      - 4thaccount 8y ago
        That's awful. I probably have hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Time to mass PDF export.
m_mueller 8y ago
Fully agreed. We had two guys in university that would type to Latex the mathematics lecture notes and produced a neat script that everyone else used. They failed the course.
lastUsername 8y ago
It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj_kKjkjpPhAhWKYlAKHVanCEgQFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw19dtGllcPSg-4UT7Yg_Rwq https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...
- setquk 8y ago
  Totally agree. Also handwriting is better for your handwriting! About ten years into my IT career my skills devolved into chicken scratch and I can't even read notes I wrote recently now. I need to do something about that.
- gjulianm 8y ago
  I want to highlight that part: "Participants using laptops are more likely to take lengthier transcription-like notes with greater verbatim overlap with the lecture" In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking notes on a laptop if you don't copy everything verbatim. If you force yourself to process the material you should have no problem.
  - 0xCMP 8y ago
    But they noticed that most do not go back to their notes as much as they should so a general advice, while typing is easier hand-written helps you learn and retain better using less exposure. Assuming a class isn't already being recorded (many/most at my university were), the best solution is probably to record audio on your phone and take hand written notes. Then go back and transcribe the hand written notes while referring to the audio in to the computer.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      If you're going to do that, your best bet is probably to take handwritten notes on a tablet while recording using an app that syncs the two. I sometimes do this; it's also nice that I can snap a photo of a slide with the tablet and insert it into the notes. TBH, I mostly type notes, in part because my handwriting is really bad and, if I'm going to write something up about an event cutting and pasting is easier. OTOH, I sometimes prefer to have fairly cursory notes knowing that I can always go back to exactly what was said if I need/want to.
ordu 8y ago
People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree. I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture". I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine. And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.
- wholinator2 8y ago
  On the point of writing greek letters and symbols I've taken to practicing a Greek letter possibly hundreds of times when I first encounter it. Just write it, write it, and write it again. At first it's just to understand how my hand has to move to write it efficiently, then I move on to attempting to write precisely. Finally, I write it over and over pushing myself to get it to the speed at which it will not interrupt the rest of the notes when it happens. This approach has be wildly successful for me and while it does take some time it is always time well spent. Recently, I ran into § and just had to figure it out. Honestly, I was out of my depth in the Wikipedia article and I don't even know what it represents. It was fun, though.
  - coliveira 8y ago
    > I ran into § This is the symbol for section, it means that a new section is starting, or it may be a reference to a section number.
- adrianrocamora 8y ago
navneetloiwal 8y ago
I use pen and paper notes for meetings & discussions. While I love the act of physically writing, not having notes accessible and searchable at the tips of my fingers means I am not able to get the most out of them. This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?
- ghaff 8y ago
  I've never used standalone smartpens but I semi-regularly take handwritten notes in an iPad app using Apple's smart pencil. Some apps attempt to turn cursive into text but TBH my handwriting isn't good enough for the transcription to work reliably.
cyphar 8y ago
While I agree with you on the notes aspect of this (and have always used pen-and-paper notes), I do think that the setup described here would be quite useful for authoring papers -- I've always found it is way too painful to write out math-mode equations in LaTeX.
sevensor 8y ago
I object to this for completely different reasons. Do whatever you like to learn the material, but when you're sitting in a lecture, please don't have a laptop open -- it's terribly distracting for the other people in the room. You may stick resolutely to note-taking and have no messaging programs, games, or video playing. Even so, your constantly updating screen, your tapping keys, are a magnet for others' attention. And that's a best-case scenario by far. Few students are disciplined enough to stay off of Facebook during a lecture. Laptops have no place in a lecture hall.
akalin 8y ago
Over the years I've audited a lot of math classes and tried various ways of taking notes. I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us. I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures. Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!
meko 8y ago
I did live TeXing for about a year, after only having ~a year of emacs and latex use. It's not as hard as it sounds but yes like you mention, it takes your head out of the lecture and into your editor. However, the idea of 'rewrite your notes at the end of the day', who has the time for that though?

by setquk 8y ago

Rainymood 8y ago

>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>. I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.

setquk 8y ago
> 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.
- madengr 8y ago
  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.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    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.
    - srean 8y ago
      > 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.
  - ivanbakel 8y ago
    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.
    - madengr 8y ago
      Yep, I’ll be just like this guy. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-news/ku-professor-removed-from-teaching-class-after-telling-student-to-learn-english-/1835483764 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...
matwood 8y ago
> >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.
- setquk 8y ago
  I can understand why people don't do it. We weren't taught how to learn at school or college and when we turned up at university we were expected to know how. It took me a semester of alcohol fuelled hedonism, followed by screwing up, panic, then introspection to work it all out. I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way. My eldest wants to be a doctor so I've tried to share as much of my experience with her on how to learn so she doesn't have to make my mistakes as they still don't teach them any of this today, at least in the UK.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    This is exactly what I have observed among today's students also, and I am desperately trying to help! Smart students actually get hit harder because they cruise through high school and hit the wall in college. Then they may have a seminar or something on how to take notes and basic time-management (usually delivered through a first-year experience program or something similar), but if they want a real understanding of how to learn they have to get it on their own.
- Rainymood 8y ago
  I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying that they are not going to do it, the majority at least. Most people take the path of least resistance, if your path of least resistance is retyping your notes consistently every class more power to you, you are not an average student then. I never typed up my notes, I made flashcards based off them which worked for me, but OK. I'm just saying that if you think the average student diligently types up his notes after every class you're sorely mistaken.
dspillett 8y ago
> As if the average modern day student is going to do this. If that is the case, then I fear little from the upcoming students chomping at my old ankles in the jobs market! Transcribing my lecture scribbles to neater notes later in the day (or sometimes later in the week depending on scheduling) was important in solidifying the knowledge or, more importantly, realising that something hadn't twigged in my head as I thought it had (giving me chance to look up the matter and/or ask the lecturer for clarification next time, instead of being surprised by not understanding when new information was built on that part or it came up in an exam).
- ranc1d 8y ago
  My handwriting is terrible,and worse when it comes writing down formulas, this could be a useful way of writing up notes a lot quicker. Also useful for cheat sheets or summarising notes
  - dspillett 8y ago
    I have no objection to taking quick notes in lectures using electronic means instead of pen+paper (though the latter would still be my preference). It was the implication that people don't have and won't make time to review, tidy, and, where relevant, expand upon or question those notes afterwards, that I was responding to.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    My handwriting is also awful, but what the parent suggested isn't at all incompatible with taking typed notes: I would type a first draft while reading the material before lecture, add during the lecture, then finish the final draft afterwards. I regret I didn't learn this method of note-taking earlier, and it works for both hand-written and typed. It also doesn't take that much time, but the last step of reviewing and cleanup is critical for actually cementing my understanding of the material. Another possible method would be taking written notes during lectures, then typesetting them afterwards. However, I found it was preferable to revise my notes soon after the lecture, at least 1-2 days following, while my memory was still fresh.
joppy 8y ago
This method of writing notes still seems like a downgrade from using a pen - my optimal way of taking notes would be with a pen, but with some sort of handwriting recognition on a tablet so it could immediately translate it to prose + LaTeX mathematics. Something that does both nicely seems difficult to find though...

klodolph 8y ago

I would never write short hand with mathematics, it’s too confusing… do you mean long hand?

setquk 8y ago
Sorry I should have used a different word. Write the name of the equation down / bullet points. Don't write too much. Just enough to jog your memory later or cover anything you don't think you understand.

2muchcoffeeman 8y ago

If this works for the guy how can you ‘disagree’?

setquk 8y ago
Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet. A lot of people get to the end of their course and realise they have thousands of pages of useless words and diagrams and have a nervous breakdown. It takes a lot of discipline and time to write very high quality notes and to study. I spent more time thinking about things and experimenting with ideas and writing notes than I did in lectures or tutorials or labs.
- gjulianm 8y ago
  I did take LaTeX notes for most courses on my math degree, and I passed all of them. In fact, the ones where I dedicated more time to the notes were the ones that I could study more easily as I put in more effort to understand and review what I wrote.
- sannee 8y ago
  > Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet. I am fairly sure he passed more than one course with this approach. The blogpost says that he started using LaTeX to take notes during his second semester. The screenshots show introductory complex analysis, which is usually taught somewhat later.
- jjuel 8y ago
  Don't you think you could be an edge case too where you went back and studied extra and experimented? Very few college students I know actually did anything like this, and I know I didn't. Obviously it would have helped, but I did not do that then.
  - setquk 8y ago
    No because we formed study groups and did it collectively.

4thaccount 8y ago

Agreed. Paper and pen is hard to beat when it comes to equations and improvising. Hats off to anyone with that level of Vim & LaTex skill though. Now that I'm in the workforce I use OneNote, Notepad, and Confluence for notes and documentation for the most part, but I still use a lot of pen and paper as well... especially when doing complex coding where I need to map out how all the data structures work before hand.

setquk 8y ago
Run away from OneNote quickly. Microsoft are not shipping OneNote desktop any more, preferring the horrid UWP app. Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims! Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Thanks for the tip. OneNote is one of a handful of things Microsoft has done that I like. Is it really not on Windows10? I haven't upgraded from 7 yet.
  - setquk 8y ago
    It does ship with windows 10 but it's a UWP app and it's rubbish. It's missing on Office 2019. See: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-missing-after-installing-office-2019-or-office-365-1844ba87-7248-4bd8-a735-66a52f98e6e5 https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-mis... This one totally caught me by surprise for ref when I upgraded, perhaps foolishly. I installed OneNote 2016 and am sticking my fingers in my ears until I have some time to deal with it.
    - 4thaccount 8y ago
      That's awful. I probably have hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Time to mass PDF export.

m_mueller 8y ago

Fully agreed. We had two guys in university that would type to Latex the mathematics lecture notes and produced a neat script that everyone else used. They failed the course.

lastUsername 8y ago

It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj_kKjkjpPhAhWKYlAKHVanCEgQFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw19dtGllcPSg-4UT7Yg_Rwq https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...

setquk 8y ago
Totally agree. Also handwriting is better for your handwriting! About ten years into my IT career my skills devolved into chicken scratch and I can't even read notes I wrote recently now. I need to do something about that.
gjulianm 8y ago
I want to highlight that part: "Participants using laptops are more likely to take lengthier transcription-like notes with greater verbatim overlap with the lecture" In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking notes on a laptop if you don't copy everything verbatim. If you force yourself to process the material you should have no problem.
- 0xCMP 8y ago
  But they noticed that most do not go back to their notes as much as they should so a general advice, while typing is easier hand-written helps you learn and retain better using less exposure. Assuming a class isn't already being recorded (many/most at my university were), the best solution is probably to record audio on your phone and take hand written notes. Then go back and transcribe the hand written notes while referring to the audio in to the computer.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    If you're going to do that, your best bet is probably to take handwritten notes on a tablet while recording using an app that syncs the two. I sometimes do this; it's also nice that I can snap a photo of a slide with the tablet and insert it into the notes. TBH, I mostly type notes, in part because my handwriting is really bad and, if I'm going to write something up about an event cutting and pasting is easier. OTOH, I sometimes prefer to have fairly cursory notes knowing that I can always go back to exactly what was said if I need/want to.

ordu 8y ago

People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree. I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture". I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine. And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.

wholinator2 8y ago
On the point of writing greek letters and symbols I've taken to practicing a Greek letter possibly hundreds of times when I first encounter it. Just write it, write it, and write it again. At first it's just to understand how my hand has to move to write it efficiently, then I move on to attempting to write precisely. Finally, I write it over and over pushing myself to get it to the speed at which it will not interrupt the rest of the notes when it happens. This approach has be wildly successful for me and while it does take some time it is always time well spent. Recently, I ran into § and just had to figure it out. Honestly, I was out of my depth in the Wikipedia article and I don't even know what it represents. It was fun, though.
- coliveira 8y ago
  > I ran into § This is the symbol for section, it means that a new section is starting, or it may be a reference to a section number.
adrianrocamora 8y ago

navneetloiwal 8y ago

I use pen and paper notes for meetings & discussions. While I love the act of physically writing, not having notes accessible and searchable at the tips of my fingers means I am not able to get the most out of them. This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?

ghaff 8y ago
I've never used standalone smartpens but I semi-regularly take handwritten notes in an iPad app using Apple's smart pencil. Some apps attempt to turn cursive into text but TBH my handwriting isn't good enough for the transcription to work reliably.

cyphar 8y ago

While I agree with you on the notes aspect of this (and have always used pen-and-paper notes), I do think that the setup described here would be quite useful for authoring papers -- I've always found it is way too painful to write out math-mode equations in LaTeX.

sevensor 8y ago

I object to this for completely different reasons. Do whatever you like to learn the material, but when you're sitting in a lecture, please don't have a laptop open -- it's terribly distracting for the other people in the room. You may stick resolutely to note-taking and have no messaging programs, games, or video playing. Even so, your constantly updating screen, your tapping keys, are a magnet for others' attention. And that's a best-case scenario by far. Few students are disciplined enough to stay off of Facebook during a lecture. Laptops have no place in a lecture hall.

akalin 8y ago

Over the years I've audited a lot of math classes and tried various ways of taking notes. I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us. I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures. Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!

meko 8y ago

I did live TeXing for about a year, after only having ~a year of emacs and latex use. It's not as hard as it sounds but yes like you mention, it takes your head out of the lecture and into your editor. However, the idea of 'rewrite your notes at the end of the day', who has the time for that though?