Notes on notes

The beginning of a new academic year (a week later than usual at JMU this year) is a good opportunity to take a look at some useful note-taking and scheduling tools. I do enjoy the occasional new geeky toy; playing with it adds some extra motivation to doing the work I need to do.

Obviously, before deciding on a tool to use, we should first consider what we use it for.

I find that many students do not know how to take notes and why. OK, you take them for exams, but the filtering step between information intake and exam use seems to be pretty blurry. For class notes, for example, many students simply copy whatever comes up on powerpoint slides or black/white boards, and nothing else. Others try to copy every thing an instructor says.

I find it useful to think of class notes using business meeting minutes as a model, in part because this connects class-room work with skills that are needed in the "real world," and because I think that the mindset of "others are going to use my work" helps improve the clarity of one's notes. For good minutes, we have to listen carefully and critically and identify the points that everybody involved should remember. Obviously, this includes the action items (what do we have to do by which deadline?), but not only. Since meeting minutes are typically one or two typed pages long, it's really important to focus on the main points and main arguments of the (class) meeting. Add enough detail to understand the main arguments, but not more.

The good thing about thinking about class notes as meeting minutes is that a meeting is not usually like a lecture (although you get too many boring PowerPoint presentations out there). You typically have several people speaking up, asking questions, discussing questions, and the minutes have to include the main points and conclusions of these more free-wheeling exchanges as well. Just as in a class meeting: Often, I find that the most important points come out of conversations between class participants, not from my lecture notes. (And I also find that students stop taking notes in non-lecture classes...)

But how to use such meeting-minutes-as-class-notes to study for exams? After all, they include the main points, leaving out a lot of detail that may show up on the exam. The solution to this problem is to use the notes to identify what questions are important, and then use the readings and one's own (and one's fellow students') memory to identify all the details that "belong" to the main questions. Great way to memorize stuff, by the way!

You can find a good summary of how to write business meeting minutes from effectivemeetings.com (a website run by SMART Technologies, a company that specializes in presentation technology). The Dartmouth Academic Skills Center has a great page on Taking Lecture and Class Notes, which includes detailed handouts not only on note-taking but also on how to listen (and how not to listen). If you are in a hurry, you can check out this Lifehacker post on the Cornell note-taking method.

So what about the promised tools to take notes? Stay tuned.