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When I did some pedagogical stuff for teaching at a University, we were told that overwhelmingly the evidence pointed that writing notes led to better recall th

When I did some pedagogical stuff for teaching at a University, we were told that overwhelmingly the evidence pointed that writing notes led to better recall than when using computers for taking notes, and it was thought that it was because it requires some degree of processing - many people are able to type fast enough to almost verbatim copy down what is being said in lectures but almost nobody (aside from those who can do shorthand proficiently) can do so with writing. So people have to select the important parts to note, and in doing so that seems to help people remember it better.

makeitdouble 5y ago
We are in a field where we get to experience these ideas head first. For instance I remember having to learn how git works, and followed online videos on the base concepts, tutorials with commands to type etc. Most importantly there was no paper nor handwriting involved at any point. I personally don’t feel like it was holding me down and it would have been a royal pain to introduce a non digital media in the middle of it. I’d wagger I’m not the only one, and the majority of us got to terms with digital learning and how to be efficient with it.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  That's quite different to taking notes in for e.g. a lecture on something though, which was the sort of environment I was talking about.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    It might feel foreign to a lot of us, but looking at primary school kids lessons recently, they don't take any "notes" proper. They get prints, and go through the concepts one by one writing on white boards and rewriting mindmaps node by node to see how much they remember. They still have to write a lot, but outside of the white board stuff it's mostly small essays. Same way as I don't think we're taking full notes when going to seminars, as we get the slides and potentially full recordings of the talks. We'll right down pointers to core concept we might want to get back to again later, but at no point we're writing down as a learning exercice or to persist whole blocks of info. At least that's my experience.

makeitdouble 5y ago

We are in a field where we get to experience these ideas head first. For instance I remember having to learn how git works, and followed online videos on the base concepts, tutorials with commands to type etc. Most importantly there was no paper nor handwriting involved at any point. I personally don’t feel like it was holding me down and it would have been a royal pain to introduce a non digital media in the middle of it. I’d wagger I’m not the only one, and the majority of us got to terms with digital learning and how to be efficient with it.

physicsguy 5y ago
That's quite different to taking notes in for e.g. a lecture on something though, which was the sort of environment I was talking about.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  It might feel foreign to a lot of us, but looking at primary school kids lessons recently, they don't take any "notes" proper. They get prints, and go through the concepts one by one writing on white boards and rewriting mindmaps node by node to see how much they remember. They still have to write a lot, but outside of the white board stuff it's mostly small essays. Same way as I don't think we're taking full notes when going to seminars, as we get the slides and potentially full recordings of the talks. We'll right down pointers to core concept we might want to get back to again later, but at no point we're writing down as a learning exercice or to persist whole blocks of info. At least that's my experience.