Hellllooooooo Badgers!!
I hope it was a lovely weekend for you all and that you had a Happy Tuesday this week!
Today, I’ll be talking about something that is important to you (whether you know it or not yet), all Badgers, and university students across the board: Note-Taking! It’s a long-standing debate among education, psychological, cognitive and many other scholars across the world right now, and one that may effect you as you move your way on up to Brock: are handwritten or computer notes the way to go?
Each do, of course, have their pros and cons.
Courtesy of giphy.com
Newspapers across the continent like the Toronto Star or The Globe and Mail will tell you that taking notes on your laptop prevents you from sorting what’s important and what’s not. You’ll just take down everything that your professor is lecturing about, simply because they are saying it. Whereas when taking written notes, you’re forced to sort through what you want to write down and what you probably don’t need to, because we all want to avoid that hand cramp!
Of course, these articles advocate heavily for the use of pen-to-paper notes in class, which would avoid students getting distracted by outside influences (such as Facebook) however when you have students who have grown up on a laptop, how can professors reasonably expect us to be able to take “proper” notes complete with shorthand and just the important enough information to carry us through exam season.
My argument for laptop notes then rests in the face that these types of notes have the ability to be a multimedia front through which we can learn. When you consider the different types of learning out there, we can see that not everyone learns in the same way (listening to the professor-comprehending the important information-translating it into shorthand-getting a better grasp on the learned material-allowing for recall when it comes to the exam season). There are some people out there who would rather watch a YouTube video with cartoons and an voiceover to better understand the material, because that’s just how they get it. Laptop notes, especially with available apps such as Evernote and even the updated Apple Notes allow for students to cut and paste audiovisual extras into their notes that paper notes simply can’t do. This way, students can grab the extras that will help them better understand the material being taught and better study in the long-run.
Well, there you have it Badgers! The eNote vs. Ye Olde Note debate. Which side do you stand on?
Brock On, Badgers!
