With many professors using Blackboard and Powerpoint presentations during their lectures, it becomes difficult to take notes in a notebook, look at visual aids and listen to the professor lecture, some students said. “You constantly have to take notes while looking at other stuff. So it’s easier to take notes on a laptop,” said Katie Curren, a senior journalism student.
Blackboard, Powerpoint… maybe you’re also texting back and forth on your phone. Not a pretty picture…
I mean, nothing but a picture, really. You’re jumping from screen to screen to screen, capturing a blur of an image here, a rush of language there.
You gotta figure the first thing to go is the actual meaning of anything the professor’s saying. That’s why you’re passively transcribing all of her words on your laptop.
January 21st, 2010 at 5:16PM
You know, it can be difficult sometimes to juggle taking notes, referring to textual material and looking at slides in an art history course (speaking from experience). When I lecture, I sometimes ask or invite students to look at the reading for the week, and I expect that when we’re having a discussion. The student in the article makes no mention of texting, watching porn, etc.: the comment is squarely focused on being asked at a variety of relevant material simultaneously, something which happened in classrooms before laptops.
I don’t know that a laptop makes that movement between reference material any easier, but don’t get such tunnel vision on the technology that you overlook that there are issues here on note-taking technique and attention which predate digital media. Unless you believe that note-taking itself in any medium intrinsically detracts from full attentiveness, and that laptops are merely the most exaggerated form of that distraction.
Just in mnemonic terms, I find that notes I’ve taken on my laptop at conferences are more memorable, as well as more accessible and useful later on. They’re not transcriptions, since my techniques for note-taking predate digital media. With my best students who take notes on laptops, I don’t think they’re transcribing my words literally either. Students who “passively transcribe” as note-takers tend to have that problem whether they’re using laptops or not. I had one student who was struggling with pen-and-paper note-taking some years ago who showed me her notes, and those had exactly this literal quality.