I think this is a highly personal topic. As a student myself i find a laptop in class is very nice, i can type my notes faster, and organize them better. Most of my professors lectures are scatter brained and i frequently have to go back to previous section and annotate or insert new sections. With a computer i just go back and type, with a pen and paper i have to scribble, or write in the margins. Of course computers can be distractions, but that is the students responsibility, let natural selection take its course and stop hindering my ability to learn how i do best (I am a CS major so computers are >= paper to me). If you cannot do your work with a computer, then don't bring one yourself, dont ban them for everyone.
Some of us also have terrible handwriting, so taking notes by hand is out of the question. Though I will also surmise that they can also be a distraction.
There's a very specific part of the brain responsible for the movement planning and fine motor control required for writing. Some folks have it underdeveloped, and need to spend an inordinate amount of effort and concentration in order to write. And even then, their writing will often degrade over time as they fatigue.
Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).
I can say that in my case my 6th grade teacher started paying close attention and noticed that when I was trying my hardest to be neat I was doing like my peer at their worst. He had the school counselors do some tests which didn't result in anything other that agreement that I have an inability to write neat.
I first head about Dysgraphia 10 right here though - the symptoms a familiar enough for a self-diagnosis, but as all self-diagnosis there might be something else.
My teachers noticed it in the 3rd grade. I was able to write cursive, but it took me far longer. The result of this is me using a device called an Alphasmart (they stopped making them a couple of years go), through the rest of my education.
Another bad handwriting guy here. For me, the answer is "I have better things to do". Learning to cut out distractions on a laptop will serve me better (IMO).
Although in grad school I never used to a digital method of annotating papers and did it by hand anyway.
Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.
True, but Compuguy was not referring to people with medical conditions in my opinion. He is referring to the "many" that don't want make a concentrated effort to improve their handwriting but could if they did.
If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.
I should of mentioned it earlier, but I do have a medical condition, which a previous poster mentioned (Dysgraphia). I also did "navigate" the college bureaucracy and sometimes had to push teachers to allow use of a tablet or laptop, even with an exemption.
Not physically able to use hands != perfectly able to use hands but was failed by their elementary school system and now rationalizes that learning to write legibly is somehow a waste of time ;)
Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.
On the other hand, I had some number of years of handwriting class in grade school (Palmer script) and handwriting was consistently my lowest grade as I recall. It's never been good in spite of considerable practice--and it's slowly deteriorated to almost illegible today.
I'm in the same situation, my handwriting is illegibly bad, even by myself - the main reason I don't want to improve it is that I just don't use it, haven't for years, it'd be an incredible waste of time and effort. There's no motivating reason to do it except for perhaps some very abstract learning benefit - which hasn't to my knowledge even been proven out in the software engineering or computer science field, where it arguably makes the least sense.
In 15 years of studies, I have never ever heard anyone complaining about his own handwriting. Even with a handwriting that can be very bad for others, one can always reread 99.9% of what one has written, because it is one's own handwriting and one knows its quirks.
This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school.
That's bullshit of the same level as "I can take faster and better notes with my laptop". No you can't. You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams, you can't draw small maps quickly and properly as you can by hand. You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
"But it is searchable". Wonderful. As if you used to be lost in a 30 pages long course (which has a logical organisation and/or progression) that anyway you have to learn one way or another, by practice or rote memorisation.
There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Laptop in a classroom are used to play, browse the web and social networks; the rest are made-up justifications to be allowed to bring them.
> This kind of complaint magically appeared after students got Internet-enabled laptops and were allowed to bring them at school.
I had the same kind of problem since elementary school, I was first allowed to use a computer during class in uni.
> That's bullshit
Just because it doesn't occur to you it does not mean that it's not true. Just because you started paying attention to it now it does not mean that it wasn't there before either.
> No you can't
Well, you might not be able to but many people can.
> You can't draw graphs, you can't draw diagrams
Sure you can. There are many tools for this job, both text and graphical ones.
> You can't either type fancy maths, physics and chemistry formulas as fast and as "aligned" as you can do do it by hand.
With Latex + Emacs I can type fancy mathematical formulas much faster and much more aligned than when writing them down.
> There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down
Except that writing down notes for me and for many other people is useless, tiresome and distracting.
It's worth first noting that there are indeed people for whom a laptop would be much, much better, due to some disorders which produce very quick pain or tiredness in the muscles from writing, with handwriting that may be unreadable even the next day. Such people obviously greatly benefit from laptops.
>There is zero benefit in typing notes vs writing them down. At best, in an unlikely optimistic case, it could be equal.
Have you used org-mode? I really like the ability to organise many notes, link them together (like a small personal wiki) and others. Typing is also significantly less fatiguing, at least for my hands, and I suspect at equal or even faster speed, though I have nothing to back that up, I can type at around 110wpm comfortably.
Typing notes also comes in quite handy if the course comes with digital material. You can copy that graph in, you don't have to draw it out. Tablet-laptops (if there's a word for them, I don't know it) let you draw diagrams with ease. It may also benefit to record what the lecturer is saying with the laptop's microphone, though you can do that with a separate device, it's more useful and convenient to have that as embedded media in your notes.
It also means you can do things other than note-taking. If the course requires some amount of memorisation of facts with definite answers, you can use spaced repetition flashcard programs such as Anki, and fill them in during the lecture, or better, copy-and-paste from your typed up lecture notes. This is especially useful for definitions of things.
Whether laptops are used as they could be used is a different matter, and my own lecturers have told me anecdotes of their misusage, though I think it's unwise to stop people who would otherwise use them well from using them. The people who misuse their laptops will find that not paying attention has consequences.
>Laptop in a classroom are used to play, browse the web and social networks; the rest are made-up justifications to be allowed to bring them.
As a side note, if you actually need/want to take notes on an electronic device such a laptop, it doesn't mean that the device MUST have a browser AND be connected to the internet.
If there was a word processor ONLY laptop with no browser nor games on it, air-gaped from the internet, THEN it would be just a matter of preferences.
And I would go a bit further on the handwriting (excluded medical conditions) having a decently readable handwriting only costs some time in exercising wanting to better it, and it is a form of respect towards yourself (when you have to re-read your notes) and towards others that may need to read what you write.
Maybe you will manage to live your whole life only writing "electronically" but why risking to be unable to communicate in handwriting?
Once upon a time you couldn't get past first few years of elementary schools unless you had a decent handwriting, no need for it to be "beautiful" or "calligraphic", only readable.
The fact that it may be slower than typing ( and this BTW happens only for exceptionally fast and accurate typists) it's not in itself a bad thing, while you write by hand you somehow need more concentration to avoid mis-spelling as you haven't the equivalent of a backspace (or in some cases a spelling corrector) and this usually helps for memorizing what you are writing while you write it.
I guess, you haven't read up about Dysgraphia then. When I was made aware/diagnosed (mid 1990's), we didn't have Internet-enabled lightweight laptops, but Alphasmarts (which are no longer made).
