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.

(Virtual) Flash Cards

Flash cards help in the memorization part of almost anything you might want to learn, in school or out of it; virtual flash cards can be organized and presented in ways that physical flash cards can't. (They can also support audio and video components.) Consider Cool Tools – SuperMemo + Anki

In high school, I tried to learn Spanish, and failed. In college, I tried again, and failed again. Then, in my thirties, I discovered SuperMemo, and within a year I had memorized thousands of Spanish words and phrases and was finally on my way to speaking Spanish.

SuperMemo is software premised on the idea that there is an ideal time to practice any item you are trying to remember. You want to practice when you have almost forgotten it. Too soon, and you waste your time, and even interfere with long term memory formation. Too late, and you’ve lost the trace, and have struggle to learn it again....your ideal time to practice can be predicted from your history of attempted recall. ... None of them are perfect from a usability point of view. But any of them will work far, far better than random study of flashcards. These tools will not give you all the pieces of the learning puzzle, obviously. Memorization is only one step. But it is a crucial, difficult, first step, and it is wonderful to get a boost.

So....imagine a school where one part of course preparation is the preparation of flash card sets, building up year by year; better yet, imagine a Khan-style "One World Schoolhouse" where part of the preparation for each five-minute video is a flash card review set (to go along with, and become part of, the list of quiz questions).

Meanwhile, of course, you can use flashcards on computer, tablet, or smartphone (the open-source AnkiDroid Flashcards - Android Apps on Google Play, or the $24.99 AnkiMobile Flashcards on the App Store on iTunes for iPhone/iPad, or the open-source Windows/Mac/Linux Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards for your desktop or laptop) for the memorization part of anything you'd like to learn. Isn't there something you'd like to learn?

Study Strategies

Which study strategies make the grade?

Students everywhere, put down those highlighters and pick up some flashcards! Some of the most popular study strategies -- such as highlighting and even rereading -- don't show much promise for improving student learning, according to a new report published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

If I understand correctly, basically they support flashcards and practice tests (spread over time). Looking at the successes and failures, it seems that the more effective techniques (in their study) are those which directly mimic performance (on a test) rather than those like highlighting and summarizing which try to make sense of the material. My suspicion is that we're not comparing apples and oranges but rather axes and hammers -- different tools which should be used at different times for different tasks by different students; so I'd advocate computerized highlighters (as in the Kindle) and computerized flashcards (all kinds of software available) linked to self-tracking software (based on Google spreadsheet forms, or the equivalent.) Your mileage may vary, so you should keep track of it.

Online Disruption

The Washington Monthly - The Siege of Academe

To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people?