How to Take Smart Notes (affiliate link) posits that students who handwrite lecture notes gain as many facts and more conceptual understanding than students who type notes to the same lecture, because the slowness of handwriting forces you to compress ideas down to their core, whereas typing lets you transcribe a lecture without reflection. While I agree that translating things in your own words and compressing ideas is better than rote transcription, I have two problems with this.
One, it preemptively gives up on a practical question of which side of a trade-off is better without examining either the conditions or ways to improve the trade off. Given the enormous benefits of electronic storage of notes, maybe we should spend 45 seconds thinking about how to port the benefits of handwritten notes over, or under what circumstances the benefits of quick and high-fidelity transcription outweighs the push to engage more deeply with data.
Two, and this is harder to articulate… there is a reason students are defaulting to transcriptions of lectures, and it’s not because they’re bad or lazy or don’t like thinking. If lecturers actually wanted you to think conceptually about a topic, they would, I don’t know, leave any time at all for that in a lecture (my STEM background may be showing here. Movies tell me English class has more of this). As it is, conceptual understanding and translation requires that you stop listening to the professor- the dreaded multitasking thing that luddites are always going on about.
This is really a college student issue. On the rare occasion I’m trying to learning something from a live lecture, it’s still a non-mandatory event where the speaker cares about either actually teaching something or being entertaining, which solves a lot of these problems. But I’m angry that blame is being placed on students for acquiescing to what the system very strongly pushes them towards.
Aceso Under Glass 