System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 5, 2011 at 06:14 PM

You could be right - but makes me wonder what will be the mechanism which will replace the learning benefit of using longhand - will it be in the act of using dictation hard/software or of scanning? Will it mean taking longer to read notes at a later stage? I recall hearing of studies which have suggested that even keying in - whether on an old Smith Corona portable or the latest laptop - doesn’t provide the equivalent learning/reflection which occurs during longhand note-taking. If that is true, how do we replace such learning? These questions may all be more relevant to the arts and qualitative data, rather than to the sciences, but for the subjects for which it is relevant, it’d be interesting to ponder on what evolution might provide as compensation.

Daly

Dr Andus wrote:
>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>>The second point
>>is that some studies suggest a greater
>degree of learning goes on when note taking is by
>>longhand as opposed to keying in
>material. Scanning probably would lead to least
>>learning at the time because of the
>nature of the process.
> >I used to believe in this theory (that you need to use your
>handwriting to learn well) until for the simple reasons of survival in a digital world
>I had to start using computers to stay competitive and later, when my lack of
>touch-typing skills got in the way, I had to switch to dictation with Dragon. It does
>take an effort to untrain yourself to have to use your hands for everything, but it is
>certainly possible. There are plenty of disabled people who can’t use their hands but
>can still do research and write (Stephen Hawking being a prominent example). If the
>theory of evolution is to be believed, we also used to use our arms for walking at some
>point but then we were able to transfer that function to our legs completely. This is
>now the next moment in evolution where hands will no longer be necessary for writing
>and learning - thanks to voice recognition and OCR.