June 4, 2014
LEARNING SECRET: Don’t Take Notes With A Laptop. “In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.” I’m not surprised. When you take notes by hand you have to do a fair amount of mental pre-processing. When you type notes, it tends to flow from your ears straight to your fingers with less conscious thought.
Transcribing everything seems to match the mentality of the dweeb in The Paper Chase who said “My outline is better than the casebook — it’s longer than the casebook!”