[dexwiz]

Thank goodness I learned this freshmen year in college, also the first time I was allowed a laptop in class. I starting taking notes with pen and paper as soon as I could write fast enough. I was successful in school, and I really think a large part of it was recording so many notes. I noticed that many classmates that stayed on laptops often were bad students. And the times I did take my laptop to class I was worse for it.

This article aligns with most of why I thought note taking was good. It definitely has a mechanical nature that typing just doesn't match. Also you don't want notes that are just transcription, you want your own thoughts recorded on the page. Something I think they missed though was diagrams. Typing may result in a perfect transcription, but most lectures contain a visual component. Being able to quickly copy a graph or diagram is extremely useful. When taking notes via typing, there is no good way to do that without a touch screen and some skill. I'm much more likely to remember a diagram I drew than one I looked at.

I love how they gloss over the internet connectivity portion, but I also find that to be a huge component in reality. Sometimes I need to "space off" for a few seconds to digest an idea. When taking paper notes, I end up doodling boxes or lines. When typing, I inevitably get distracted by some shiny thing designed to steal my attention.

I do note in the workplace who brings paper and who brings a laptop to a meeting. Sometimes you need a laptop to present or look up information. But if you are solely there to listen, people who bring paper pay the most attention.

[seanmcdirmid]

Why can’t you just take a picture of the diagram?

I actually never learned or benefited from note taking, so I’m pretty clueless. I still got through university and grad school with good grades, but I wonder if I was missing something. Professionally I draw a blank whenever someone at a meeting asks me to take notes, kind of embarrassing.

[veddox]

> Why can’t you just take a picture of the diagram?

Because the learning effect is zero. (Also, not every professor allows it, and you don't always sit in a location from which you can take a decent picture. But that's beside the point.)

The best teacher I ever had in school never got tired of reminding us that we learn in four different ways: hearing, writing, speaking, drawing. Taken individually, hearing is the worst, drawing the best. The more you combine, the better your rate of recall will be.

Drawing is fantastic because it engages your kinesthetic learning, your spatial learning, and your analytical learning (because you really have to look at a picture in detail before you can copy it).

[Maskawanian]

I dislike the reductive reasoning here.

I personally learn the best from listening intently to what the lecturer is saying. That is why in college I would always sit at the front with an audio recorder, and then listen to that until I memorized most of the content.

[psychomugs]

Taking a picture has always seemed like the laziest way to say that you're participating in class. I've found that people that take pictures of every lecture slide and say they'll look at them later are usually freeters who show up to lectures once in a blue moon.

To me, written note-taking was useful because it forced me to internalize the information in some way, even if it's only verbatim copying. My hand has to move to the shape of the letters, and I'd usually mouth out what I was writing; this forced me to experience the information in more ways than just listening to it. I can make my own annotations to a hand-drawn graph. Taking a photo doesn't challenge my senses in the same ways.

[1] showed that taking a photo improves visual recall at the expense of auditory recall, but I'd argue that lecture information more often emphasizes the latter.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976176948...

[sersi]

I was going to say this, I used to take notes the first couple of years of university and eventually stopped when I noticed that I learned better when not taking notes. It was preventing me from concentrating on the content... (plus I don't write well enough that my notes were nice to reread)