Do you discourage note-taking in your classes?

[polly_mer]

Just today, I had someone tap me on the shoulder as an all-hands meeting finished to ask about my note-taking technique.  That person had evidently been watching over my shoulder as I used a modified Cornell method (https://medium.goodnotes.com/the-best-note-taking-methods-for-college-students-451f412e264e) that I found works great for the question and answer period of our all-hands meeting to group information and allows enough white space to circle back as questions revisit previous discussion.

[kaysixteen]

I taught notetaking skills at my last k12 job and heartily encourage jr/sr hss to do so, and colleges to offer this through library bibliographic instruction sessions and or tutoring center or intro to college class offerings.  It seems parallel universe behavior to discourage notetaking in virtually any class, and it would almost always translate into a better course grade for the student, unless the kid really has had no training in good notetaking methods.  This should essentially be a no brainer.

[polly_mer]

Inside Higher Ed has an article on how to use technology to eliminate note-taking: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/08/07/end-note-taking

If we're just interacting with a transcript and an electronic medium for discussion, then why would we need to have a synchronous, in-person classroom at all?  Why not put everything on the web and just have a new cohort start together at regular times?

From the employer side, many of the skills we need people to have are not helped by this situation.  I agree with

The analogy is to how you likely watch TV today. Have you ever watched the TV and wondered about a person or a place that you just saw? What do you do? You search the subject matter on the web, and then you likely share your discovery with others watching the TV.

In practice, we pause the television show to discuss what we're learning through the other research if the question is more substantive than "Is that the same actor who was in X?"  We don't write to each other when we're in the same room watching the same show and asking similar questions.  If one person wants to do a lot of research, then we often encourage that person to just watch for now, take notes on questions to address later, and then get back to us later in the week with their research.  We really do this even at home because (1) we have an enthusiastic child who needs encouragement and (2) we have a lot of friends who lack the ability to read social cues so we flat out state expectations.

At work during well-run meetings, we do something similar.  If it's truly vital to the discussion at hand to know now, someone is tasked with going to the computer off to the side and finding out the information to share with the group in a couple minutes.  That person stays at the computer as we ask follow-up questions and wait the thirty seconds for the answer.  We don't have cell phones at most of these meetings (people are allowed old-style one-way pagers to be available for emergencies related to dependents) because the point is to effectively use the time we have together to have real-time give-and-take to make decisions.

Thus for much less urgent questions or more in-depth questions that require significant research, someone is tasked with doing the research before the next meeting and then giving a 5-minute presentation on what they learned.  For cases where we expect to find conflicting information, everyone is tasked with doing some research and being ready to have a productive discussion with references.  We generally have project wikis so that each small group is sharing the information in written form so we can revisit discussions. 

But real-time, unedited transcripts generally aren't nearly as useful for later review as someone doing an outline of the main points (possibly in Q&A form) with a summary paragraph and highlighting the decision made that's much more concise.  Doing those outlines is a true skill, and not one learned by following every possible hyperlink to explore the region. 

One of the most important habits we need people to learn is when to just jot down the question for later research and to remain with the group discussion now.  Encouraging classrooms to let people run down any rabbit hole that occurs to them is the opposite of the job skill we need.  Likewise, a useful habit is knowing when to ask the question right now because if you're confused, then possibly others are as well, and when to follow-up with someone after the meeting because the question is less general audience (e.g., too in-depth, lack of personal background as a new member of the team).

[polly_mer]

After posting about the transcript with an electronic discussion, I ended up as a student in a half-day workshop taught from a canned, open-source set of materials along with an electronic discussion at https://etherpad.net  as well as a lively, in-person discussion since we were all in the same room.

Having the same materials available that the lead teacher did was very useful to revisit points as we did the practice exercises.  So far as I could tell, the student discussion on the electronic live discussion board was the opening "Hello" message, which was deleted, and then the rest of the content was generated by a facilitator hitting the very high points as an outline along with a few targeted answers generated during the live discussion in the classroom. 

I took 7 pages of notes for my own benefit during the workshop; the etherpad.net outline is 3 pages and almost none of it duplicates the notes I have.  The overlap is the few targeted answers generated during the live discussion in the classroom.  The outline is very good for its purpose of helping orient absolute beginners.  However, I was in the workshop because I wanted formal instruction to fill gaps in my acquired-through-catch-as-catch-can during work and thus the outline was much less useful because what I needed was the informal discussion and feedback during the exercises on the details.

I'm still not seeing an AI transcript augmented by student-generated electronic discussion as being hugely valuable in a face-to-face classroom where students know less (and likely much less) than the professor on the topic.

[mamselle]

I've often found the hand-to-eye-to-memory connection to be engaged more fully by physical note-taking, as well.

The act of writing words down i.prints itself somehow on my thinking in a way that just saying the same fact 5 times, fast, does not.

I put my notes in a descending outline order, too, so I'm ordering the hierarchies of information from general to spe ific as I go, so studying them later is easier.

I can still picture where on the page that theological issue about baptism by Augustine is located from the course I audited in 1980, for example.

And I just quoted it, essentially, in a tour discussion on Saturday.

So it's not for nothing...

M.