Comment Pencil & Paper Still the Best (Score 1) 364
Slashdot - Taking Notes in the Modern Classroom
TL;DR - I found pencil and paper to still be the best way to take notes in class, but Notability and an iPad stylus work pretty well.
This past spring I sat in on an undergrad philosophy class that a friend of mine was teaching. I hadn't been in a college classroom for at least 10 years, and I decided to experiment with different ways of note taking. No risk if I messed up since I was just sitting in and not taking the class for credit. Here are the methods I tried:
- Good old pencil and paper, Ecosystem notebook and mechanical pencil.
- Macbook Pro - OmniOutliner, Pages
- iPad with on screen keyboard and bluetooth keyboard - OmniOutliner, [Pages]5]
- iPad, handwriting with stylus with Notability
The clear winner: pencil and paper. I thought carefully after trying each system about what did and didn't work, and why what didn't work didn't. Here's why I think pencil and paper wins out: there's no extra cognitive load when using pencil and paper. It's straight out of my brain and on to the page. All the computer and tablet based systems I tried required my brain to do extra work to get my thought recorded. With pencil and paper, I can put things where I want on the page without thinking about it. I can indent, underline, arrange text, and draw diagrams with no extra mental effort. With all of the computer/table based ways I tried, I had to not only thing about what I was putting down but also how I was going to do it. That effort distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning.
That being said, taking notes by hand using a stylus and Notability on the iPad came a close second to pencil and paper. Taking notes that way added less excess cognitive load than any other way I tried save pencil and paper. Handwriting on the iPad had a couple of advantages over pencil and paper.
- I could use different pen colors and line weights to emphasize important ideas
- If I wanted to re-arrange my notes on the page, I could just select the handwritten text and move it around the virtual page.
- Digital versions of my notes without having to scan them.
On the other hand, because of the size of the iPad screen, writing directly on the page doesn't work very well, so I had to use Notability's zoom feature to write legible text. That means I couldn't see the whole page at a glance, so it was hard to tell exactly where on the page I was writing. I often wound up scrunching letters at the right edge of the page, or writing over the page divider at the bottom of the page. The extra cognitive load of keeping track of those kinds of things was more trouble than the advantages were worth, for me at least.
