[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...