“The benefits of no-tech note-taking”

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Benefits-of-No-Tech-Note/228089/

I’m strongly tempted to issue a similar decree in my own classes next term.

And not just because I was more than a little irritated, last week, as I noticed a student smiling and laughing at her computer throughout much of my class.

I said noting.  But I noticed.

I’m a preternaturally engaging lecturer, of course.  The soul of wit.  Crammed with deep knowledge and scintillating insights.  Eloquent beyond compare.  So it’s not surprising that my students beam with pleasure and giggle with delight when I’m teaching.  I would expect no less.

But the timing of her laughter was off.  It was out of sync.

There isn’t a whole lot of humor, truth be told, in the derivation of the term Sufism from the Arabic word for “wool.”  Not much that I can see, anyway.  And I doubt that she could see much, either.

I’ve read a couple of items over the past few months about this manual note-taking versus computer note-taking, and I would like to see the psychological study that the author cites.  I very much expect, based upon my own personal experience, that her thesis is true.

And implementing a no-laptop policy would spare me further irritation.

A few years ago, I substituted for a friend, delivering a wonderful illustrated presentation on mosque architecture.  I was impressed by the studiousness of a group of guys toward the back of the class, who were all earnestly typing into their computers as I discoursed learnedly before them.  After the class, my wife, who had decided to drop in and who had been sitting on the back row, told me that they were all competing against one another in some sort of online game.  They hadn’t been paying the slightest attention to my blatherings.  If I’d sat down to read a novel to myself, or had simply settled in for an afternoon nap, they wouldn’t have noticed.

Posted from Monterey, California