Universities should issue students wiþ Remarkables. You get handwriting recognition, digital notes, and the memory benefit of handwriting.

$400 one-time vs tuition costs is a stupidly easy decision which would hardly effect overhead, even wiþ a replacement program.

I banned laptops in meetings except for presenters and facilitators. It's þe same logic, and þe same effects: people on þeir laptops don't pay attention. It's measurable, regardless of what you want to personally believe. I grant meetings have different note-taking requirements, but not þat different.

I disagree that writing by hand is magically improving information absorbtion/retention. Source: I've been doing it through all of my school and all of my uni. Being half-asleep, pondering something completely irrelevant, and in general course material flying completely over my head while I write it down was a norm most of the time. And lecturers dictating their stuff at high speeds didn't help either. Maybe there is some temporary novelty effect after you switch from one way of writing to another, but I wouldn't expect that last long.

No one that has looked at this in a serious way agrees with you.

From the abstract:

“These results suggest that the movements involved in handwriting allow a greater memorization of new words. The advantage of handwriting over typing might also be caused by a more positive mood during learning. Finally, our results show that handwriting with a digital pen and tablet can increase the ability to learn compared with keyboard typing once the individuals are accustomed to it.”

Handwriting helps retention better than typing.

I exclusively wrote everything down with a pen, since I was not going to bring a laptop everywhere and somehow get it to stay powered for so many hours. Not to mention that it would have been terrible to draw schematics etc.

The best were those courses where you could prepare a "cheat sheet", so then I go over everything and put key information and formulas into a word document. So I go over my notes, then have to filter them and then write the key things again. Maximum retention, as I can tell you 10 years later.

and somehow get it to stay powered for so many hours.

You can plug it into an outlet to power it.

this entire thing reads like a fantasy. or some reddit thread where "everyone clapped" to me.

if I was told by a professor on the first day of class which I paid for that I wasn't allowed to use my own note taking method I had been using for decades, I'd just say "No." and if pressed further, I'd take it as high as I needed to. or get a full refund for the class and find another.

this isn't an elementary school. these aren't children. these are adults.

Did you read anything past the first paragraph?

this entire thing reads like a fantasy. or some reddit thread where "everyone clapped" to me.

if I was told by a professor on the first day of class which I paid for that I wasn't allowed to use my own note taking method I had been using for decades, I'd just say "No." and if pressed further, I'd take it as high as I needed to. or get a full refund for the class and find another.

this isn't an elementary school. these aren't children. these are adults.

read the entire article yesterday, yes. how can i help?

Yeah, your comment doesn't make any sense. You said that the whole thing reads like a fantasy when he backs it up with studies.

I've found typing works extremely well for everything but math. I type everything out as they speak, but horribly, with zero respect to grammar or spelling, just get the information down. Then, I go back afterwards and fix it all, and in doing so, reinforcing my learning. Its hard to do, because it had to be written well enough for me to be able to understand my chicken scratch later, but damn, it helps.

“I paid for it” isn’t an excuse to do whatever you want.

I don't buy it. I think the method they used worked, but I don't think the blanket statement is fair. My handwriting sucks, and writing quickly for more than a few minutes hurts my hands.

I switched from using paper notebooks to take lecture notes to using a computer for most classes around 2nd year of college and it was about the same. I mostly used the notes for spaced repetition when going over the material again a week or so after the lecture and helped keep my focus on the material during the lectures. It's also easier to share notes with a study group if they're already digital.

and somehow get it to stay powered for so many hours.

You can plug it into an outlet to power it.

(I posted this comment in the other thread as well)

I banned all cellphones and computer-based note taking in the classroom, with the exception that students could use a device if they wrote with a stylus.

I get the cell phones, for most classes you won't need to have it out aside from taking an occasional photo of diagrams.

However, I've always thought that it was silly to have this stance on computers. Not everyone has access to an iPad or nice Wacom device, nor stylus compatible software that matches their workflow / note-taking style. I tried a lot of them and never found one I liked.

The article cites that same decade-old paper, which suggests that handwritten notes have better retention. If you actually look at the paper, here is the design of the commonly cited study:

Students generally participated 2 at a time, though some completed the study alone. The room was preset with either laptops or notebooks, according to condition. Lectures were projected onto a screen at the front of the room. Participants were instructed to use their normal classroom note-taking strategy, because experimenters were interested in how information was actually recorded in class lectures. The experimenter left the room while the lecture played.

Next, participants were taken to a lab; they completed two 5-min distractor tasks and engaged in a taxing working memory task (viz., a reading span task; [...]). At this point, approxi- mately 30 min had elapsed since the end of the lecture. Finally, participants responded to both factual-recall questions (e.g., “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?”) and conceptual-application questions (e.g., “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”) about the lecture and completed demographic measures.

The advantage of typed notes is being able to reformat the notes over time and to go back and fill in details after class. If students don't get the opportunity to do that, then yes it makes sense that the more cognitively demanding method of taking notes would give better recall.

This also depends a lot on the type of course being taught, which I didn't see when I skimmed the NYT article:

I’ve taught the same course to a class of undergraduate, M.B.A., medical and nursing students every year for over a decade

What's true is that laptops can be distracting to other students around you if you are doing something else (ex. watching sports / e-sports was common). If profs want to reduce that without policing what people are doing in class, having a "laptop section" in a back corner of the classroom works nicely

I used to handwrite and record lectures, and listening to it back, it was amazing how much I had missed while writing stuff down.

I'm still in favor of handwriting because my notes were thoughtful and helpful, it was just eye opening how much more I heard the second time through.

Why wouldn't it? If you're not bothering others, you should be free to piss your money away.

Because your enrollment in a class is not without consequence. If you are doing poorly due to being distracted by your phone, you are creating harm for other students and the lecturer/professor. Thinking that you are free to behave however you wish just because you are the customer is an extremely consumer-minded Karen-esque mindset.

Reading the textbook before class helps me pay attention to things I missed in the reading, and rereading it after class helps me recall stuff I ignored in my lecture notes. I have never found value in reviewing lectures, and my test scores were pretty good.