So sometime during the last semester, a study came out demonstrating that taking notes by hand (i.e., writing) helps students retain more information than typing notes on their keyboard. I posted that to both my undergrad and graduate class online pages. But it ended up sparking a discussion a few weeks later in my grad class when one of my students shared that she was getting SO MUCH MORE out of the readings of a very difficult course by writing her notes instead of typing them. And later in the semester, she and I had a research meeting in which she had brought in her handwritten notes to an article I had annotated online (through Mendeley) and her insights into the paper were remarkable. This was a paper, I’d read and cited several times, but she was able to get something new out it.
WOWZA.
So I’ve started writing by hand my notes from articles again, my notes in meetings, my to do lists. I’m printing off my students’ papers and reading them and writing on them. Bless their poor little hearts because my writing mimics that of an MD, not a PhD.
I feel like I have gone back to the future. But I also feel like I’m getting a great deal more out of my work. I wrote everything by hand in grad school. (Back in the stone ages) I finally felt like I was getting with the program when I typed my first draft on the computer. I always did my serious editing by writing. But I’ve been trying to even stop that.
No longer though. I’ll Mendeley for storage of the documents I read and also for their in text citing. But I’m going back to note cards for my notes. And I will ride my horse and buggy to campus. I notice a difference. It could be that I’m an old f@rt and so that works for me. Or it may be that all those multiple cues of touch and movement encode these thoughts deeper.
I’d love to hear what you do.