[xenophonf]

Where I went to college, certain math and science classes were taught on NeXT workstations. I'll admit that staying focused on class was a challenge for my 17-year-old self, but having in-class access to tools like Mathematica and being able to manipulate equations and simulations with the teacher really made understanding how the math/physics worked so much easier.

I started taking meeting notes on a succession of Palm and then Compaq handhelds before I bought my first Tablet PC with OneNote in 2005. It was a tremendously valuable tool both professionally and academically. For example, this is a page of notes from a Tandberg certification class I took in 2006:

https://imgur.com/a/1XgNOoi

Sharing my notes was trivial. I could print to PDF and email to the rest of my team in a minute. Organizing my notes was equally simple. It's been nearly two decades, and I was able to locate these notes in seconds. Even though they're handwritten, OneNote can index my notes. It's pretty amazing.

Around the same time, I took an ITIL certification class. The teacher was someone like you, and he demanded we put away our computers for class. I'd love to share with you the detailed notes I took, but they're buried somewhere in a drawer full of paper notebooks. It'd probably take me an hour or two to locate those notes, scan them, and upload them somewhere. My employer spent thousands on that class, but if I have ITIL questions in my various IT operations roles, I have to google reference material instead of using what I created for myself. It's such a ridiculous waste of time and effort that it still frustrates me, ~15 years later.