Effective Notetaking

Tips for taking notes in class

I think, that for taking notes at class, nothing beats a digital camera attached to a notebook computer. Take a photo of the blackboard and type your own notes.

Of course, you need a pretty damn good battery to last through all your classes... not every university has a power outlet for every chair in every class. Any suggestions?

Spare batteries
- Not cheap, if you're a student _and_ you have a laptop, the latter (if not the former) was probably a gift of some kind.
Charge during breaks
- Works if you have long enough breaks and your battery life is enough to tough out a couple classes in a row.
Use a hand or pedal-powered dynamo in class. Take notes and keep fit!

Here's an idea - tape the class with a tape recorder and recopy by hand what is on the board. Eventually taking a polaroid picture of the board wouldn't hurt although recopying is so easy. But look at it this way, the other students would find it hilarious that someone took a picture of a blackboard.

Use a digital camera; less expensive. Turn off the flash so not to disturb the class/professor. Depending on the prof, you may need several shots per lecture; some profs fill and erase the board several times. If the prof uses an overhead projector, ask for his slides.

I like lectures - depending, of course, but if you're not getting value from the instructors why are you taking classes? Anyways, has anyone ever tried this? It seems to me, far before you ran into problems involving laptop battery life, you would run into problems with resolution and focus. Taking photographs of large regions of text, and having them turn out at all legible, is not trivial.

You can also use an audio tape recorder to record the lecture and questions; doesn't record video aides. Work can be divided up among several students.

If allowed, to carry it one step further, and to cause less disturbance, mount a discCamCorder on tripod focused on the presentation space, whether projection device or blackboard. Zoom in so that the presentation space fills 90% of the the image. Start the camcorder and then go to your seat and take notes in a different way. Merely record a topic or place in a lecture with its realtimeDateStamp, so that upon later review, you are able to go quickly to the important point, or to a point you didn't fully understand at the time, and do further research upon it.

Don't take notes

Notetaking is a personal thing and you must experiment to determine what works for you personally, and what classes you are taking. Thus, the following suggestion is not the end-all, be-all of notetaking and I didn't even apply it myself to all classes. Nevertheless, it is worth a try.

How to take notes: Don't.

Note taking is not free. While you are writing notes, you are indeed reinforcing what you are writing... but that may not be the best use of your time, particularly in the type of classes that might have students that end up on this Wiki. Instead, don't take notes, and pay all of your attention to the professor. Watch the math. Triple check that you understand it now, and ask question if you don't, instead of writing it down and hoping to understand it later. If you don't understand it, most likely neither does anybody else and you may find it difficult to get help later, from students who don't understand it either or from a professor who has lost the context of the discussion. Make sure the stuff on the board is correct and consistent. Make sure you understand the flow, not just the details. Predict where the prof is going next, and validate your predictions.

You should have a text book or a set of class notes that you can consult later for formulas and other important stuff. If not, this advice may have to be modified, depending on your memory. (I did successfully do this in one class, even without those aids, because I found it so very interesting.)

This is probably only applicable to college classes heavy on the math or math-like concepts, and as I said above, will only work for certain people even then. I mention this because it took me over a year to realize that this was my ideal notetaking procedure, and even longer to feel "comfortable" with it, even though it worked out extremely well. Note that I took a lot of those "math or math-like" classes, and that when I took an English History class, I walked out with six or seven pages of notes a day, so like I said, this isn't intended for all situations, just something that you should consider. -- JeremyBowers

I HaveThisPattern. I almost never take notes in classes (occasionally I will for the first couple lectures, until I figure out whether the class is worth taking notes for). I find that classtimes are better spent trying to understand the material instead of learning the material. So ideally, I read the textbook beforehand so the content is already somewhat familiar and then listen carefully to the lecture to try and solidify my understanding, rather than taking down all the details that are in the textbook anyway. -- JonathanTang

Hey, that's odd. I had a similar mostly don't take notes / sometimes take copious notes strategy, but it was applied obversely (and with a wrinkle). I'm doing a PhD in Philosophy of Math and Logic; most of my courses at Uni were Humanities, but mathematical courses happened, too. In the math-type courses, I'd want to get details of the proofs down, so I'd write a fair bit. (I hat math-style classes without course notes or TextBooks?, by the way.) In humanities courses, I'd jot less than 30 words for a 1 hour course, but then spend 5-10 minutes taking notes afterwards. The "take notes afterwards" really worked. I could concentrate on the material during class, and the summary really helped even a week later. Anything that I didn't remember by the end of class likely didn't need noting, anyway. The only important constrain was I had to do it within, say, 20 minutes after class. --BrianvandenBroek?

Not take notes? Risky... that's like doing acrobatics without a net. And what if there's no textbook?

This method worked well for me through most of college. It is especially applicable in technical courses, and less applicable in rote-memorization courses with no good textbook. The only thing better than not taking notes, is to READ THE MATERIAL before you go to class (and then don't take notes, or take notes in the margin of your textbook). This gives your mind hooks to hang the information on (both visual hooks and textual hooks, as well as contextual hooks), and you will remember what is said in class much better than if you hadn't read and took copious notes, probably even if you're the kind that learns best from taking notes (in which case do both). I finished college with a great GPA and used approximately one 1-subject notebook per semester, with notable exceptions. My memory is terrible. I followed this pattern and only wrote down stuff that wasn't in the book or I felt was important enough to warrant writing down (I actually did review my notes occasionally when I felt there was a high signal-to-noise ratio). -- HansFugal?

There's some discussion of note-taking (and not-note taking) on YouArentGonnaReadIt.

For me, notetaking falls more under YouDontNeedToReadIt? or WritingIsItsOwnReward?. I take notes because the process of taking notes - of rewriting the concept in my own words, as I understand it - is one of my best tools for learning. (Another would be Teach it to someone else). I'm long out of classes, but I still write notes when I'm trying to learn new concepts, be it from a tutorial or a book. Anything I think is really important at the end I immediately rewrite - onto a wiki or just a clean sheet. Writing it again clarifies things more. After that, I may never read the notes again. I'm not writing them for reference. I'm writing them to clarify my thought process.

I take takes notes solely to aid my memory. I can't read my notes. If something is important I put it in a box and make sure I write carefully so I can read it. But notes are emotional interpretation and impression of what was said and for the life of me, I usually can't read them or my hand writing. The act of composing the notes seems to aide my memory but I have no empirical evidence to back this up.

Here are some notetaking tips that work for me:

Work out your own system of shorthands. Use arrows and symbols liberally. Not only can you capture more with fewer strokes of the pen, but oftentimes you can understand arguments better if you break long sentences down immediately into components and logical connectors (e.g. using "->" to represent implication).
Have the structure of the lecture in mind when you write. Knowing the structure helps you appreciate where all the pieces fit in, and that will give your notes better flow.
If you are dextrous enough, experiment with multicolored underlining. E.g. underline major headings in red, subheadings in green, important sentences in black etc. This helps impart structure and emphasis to the notes, and also impels you to concentrate on capturing this structure.

-- JasonChan?

This is another way of taking hand-written notes, preserving them and making them UsefulUsableUsed:

Regardless of the subject, if note-taking is called for, it must have been that you envision a future need of them.

The notes taken by hand, with pen, pencil or colored felt-tip pens or colored pencils, are taken using a page size one/half letter size, so they can be slipped into or be taken upon a hard cover book or loose leaf binder. To make the notes indexable, enter the dateTimeStamp in the upper-left, or upper-right hand corner, with the main subject title in the other upper corner. Upon completion, file in the OnePileFilingSystem at the top.

At some time after taking the notes, when you have some reason to recall having taken them, or want to make more permanent use of them before they disappear by being removed from the bottom of the pile:

place then in the multi-page input page feeder of my all-in-one printer/scanner/copier and scan them into the a OnePileFilingFolder? of the PaperPort for future use, using the dateTimeStamp as a subfolder name, rename the scanned document to something significant or suggesting a final destination.
- at that time, throw the scanned originals in the OnePileTrashCan?
- make a short note for remembering or locational use and put it somewhere reserved for such notes (I use a stenographer's notebook, since it is the right size) Each date uses a separate dated page.
At a designated time for doing such things, review the PaperPort OnePileFilingFolder? for stuff you want to place more permanently, perhaps reordering or reorganizing the information via cut/copy/paste.
Decide what is really important and worth saving and what is not, then treat accordingly until having deleted or shifted as much of the Folder as allocated time permits.

Other wiki that have discussions on note-taking: