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Re: [Phys-L] [Phys-l] note-taking, or not



On 05/01/2012 08:12 AM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
About a decade ago I decided to type of my complete notes and give them
out at the start of each topic. ..... It has transformed
how I teach and how students learn.

This all takes a very long time to do but is worth it in the end.

That all sounds right.

Here's a time-saving suggestion for anybody who is thinking of
going down this road: Get a tablet PC.

You can write on the tablet just as fast as you could write
on the board. The first year you do this, your notes will
be available at the end of class.

The next year, the notes will be available beforehand.

Each year you can spend a little time polishing the notes.
This takes time, but you don't need to do it all at once.

At some point you might decide to typeset some or all of it
in LaTeX to make it really pretty, but again, this doesn't
need to be done all at once. Don't let the perfect be the
enemy of the good.

There is OCR software that can read your handwriting. Last
time I checked, it wasn't able to produce good-quality human-
readable text, but it is still very useful, because it is good
enough to make the documents /searchable/.

Also ... if you are diametrically not a control freak, you can
put the notes on the web. Sometimes that leads to good things
happening. See below.

On 05/01/2012 11:11 AM, R. W. Tarara wrote:>

I originally worried that making the presentations available before
class might dilute the 'development' of ideas, but silly me, that
would have meant the students had actually read the material before
coming to class. No need to worry!

That's usually true ... but sometimes some of them read, and
sometimes people from the far corners of the globe read what
we've put on the web and benefit from it.

And sometimes the author benefits directly, too: Just last
week somebody sent me two pages of detailed constructive
suggestions on how to improve one of my web documents. I
already knew the document needed fixing, but I didn't know
how to fix it. I was stuck. He got me un-stuck.

On 05/01/2012 07:35 AM, Philip Keller wrote:
Let's just say that I have taught many students who could NOT
produce clear notes but who learned quite well anyway.

That's true ... and conversely I've seen students who took beautiful,
exact, detailed notes yet understood practically nothing. There's
a lot about this I don't understand.

There is a technique to thinking and learning. It can be
taught and needs to be taught. AFAICT it is only very
distantly related to taking notes in class.

=========

On the topic of whiteboards and smartboards, on 04/30/2012 09:56 AM,
Bill Nettles wrote:

Downside to this: I get used to it and it's a lot of work when I give
a talk somewhere that doesn't have the smart board.

For the price of a smartboard you can get a tablet PC.
Advantages include:
-- You can scribble on the tablet while *facing* the
audience.
-- You can take the tablet with you on trips. Plug it
into the host institution's projector.

And by the way ...
-- the tablet PC is also a PC! You can do a lot of things
with it that you can't do with just a smartboard.