Computers Bad? Sometimes...

I meant to post on this a while ago, after seeing articles like Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop - Vox. I often post things about how technology can make things better,[update: fixed typo] but technology is all about providing options and sometimes those options aren't good. Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension - Association for Psychological Science

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”

“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.

Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.

I posted a couple of years ago about Cornell Notes, which is probably as good as any among the handwritten note-taking systems. I wonder if it works to do the Cornell Notes "step three" (writing later summaries) on a computer. Or if a "step four" involving flash cards generated from the notes might help. Could be.

Or then again, maybe not.