Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide School Laptop Program

Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by majewsky on Saturday August 26, 2017 @03:54PM (#15107054)

Are students allowed to appeal? When I moved from hand-written notes to LaTeX notes entirely, I anecdotally found that it improved my immediate understanding of the material. For example, when the professor is doing a sketch on the board and you make hand-written notes, you quickly copy the sketch and forget about it. When you do it in LaTeX, you have to think about how to translate the sketch into TikZ commands as fast as possible because the board could be wiped any minute. It requires me to distill the core ideas out of these sketches much more quickly than the average student, and that helped me quite a lot.

(It should be noted that I don't say that any student will benefit from writing their notes in LaTeX. 90-99% will be absolutely lost when the first big formula appears, and that's before you get to figures describing tree algorithms.)

EDIT: Just saw the link in the article to another article about a study where hand-written notes resulted in better recall. Must be just me then.

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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by TomMarius on Saturday August 26, 2017 @04:22PM (#15107231)

These studies compare to standard Word writing, you wrote your notes in LaTeX, which is vastly different IMO.

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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by castle-bravo on Saturday August 26, 2017 @10:17PM (#15108727)

Not many people know TikZ well enough to spin circuit diagrams or integration contours from a class on analysis as fast as a professor can draw them on a board. While I'm skeptical that you managed this, if you did, you're a rare talent.

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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by majewsky on Sunday August 27, 2017 @03:33AM (#15109602)

Probably. I spent 11 years at university (six for a full-time physics degree, five for a part-time CS bachelor), and started writing notes in LaTeX after a few weeks. Initially, we were a team of three: two took turns in LaTeX, and one took notes by hand to find and fix errors afterwards (e.g. when unknown symbols were used; this was before DeTeXify existed iirc).

After a year or so, we ditched the handwritten notes, and moved to a rotation between writing and proofreading. Images were still copied on paper only, tagged with an ID on paper and where it should appear in LaTeX, and drawn in Inkscape after the lecture.

I only really learned TikZ during my final physics thesis. When I started the CS degree, I was comfortable enough with it to stop bringing paper to class. (Also, I was now working alone, since my two collaborators moved on to other things.)

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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by ranger207 on Saturday August 26, 2017 @07:12PM (#15107987)

If I recall correctly, one theory as to why hand written notes are better is because they're slower, forcing you to get to the core of the professor's lecture. So in other words, exactly the same reason LaTeX notes worked for you.

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Re:Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look at the Only Statewide Sc... by valuearb on Saturday August 26, 2017 @04:34PM (#15107287)

If you pay attention, anything will help you recall. But if the medium you choose also contains it's own distractions (chat apps, email, hacker news) it will hurt the recall of those who fall under their sway.

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