Take note…
My attention was called via Twitter to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “The benefits of no-tech note taking” whose author, a teacher called Carol E. Holstead, highlights the benefits of taking notes in longhand as opposed to using a laptop or other device. My position is the exact opposite: I believe that paper should be eliminated completely and that we should only use electronic devices to write things down. Allow me to explain.
I don’t doubt that writing things down in a notebook teaches us to remember what we are being told in class. What’s more, if instead of using a pen or pencil, students employed a hammer and chisel on a block of granite, they would surely retain even more of what they were told.
On a more serious note: the problem is that we have decided education is about memorizing things. This is crazy. In the age when knowledge is available within seconds via the internet, what we need to do is forget about taking notes and instead focus on developing the ability to assimilate and understand knowledge through logic, through a combination of analytical and intuitive intelligence. The latter is a process that is pretty much automated in our brains, and can be developed with little effort and doesn’t depend on our ability to remember things. But it needs to be trained to carry out its tasks. Analytical intelligence requires a greater effort and accessing the resources we store in our memory that allow us to resolve a problem or carry out reasoning through a conscious process that takes place sequentially.
Traditionally, analytical intelligence has been associated with memorization, but this is not the case: in reality, the most efficient people are those who understand processes, not those who memorize them. Repetition obviously plays a role: a large part of the learning process consists of carrying out exercises or in explanations designed to set certain information in our brains. But what no longer makes much sense is trying to remember things simply by repeating them. In other words: structure what I have to learn, explain it to me and I will learn it. I may end up memorizing specific things if my brain decides it is worth doing so. If not, I will know where to find them and without doubt, they will be easier to find.
The majority of research that techno-skeptics try to use to justify teaching as we have always done, or so that schools and colleges can remain on the margins of technological progress, becoming teaching islands from the last century, have a serious problem: they assume that the objectives of education don’t change, or that they do so only minimally. For them, education means students being able to recite what they have been taught from memory. This is quite simply absurd. If we recite something it will be because we have repeated it so often that it’s stuck in our memory. But logic, well-managed intuition, and analysis are abilities that the educational process needs to develop.
When I was at university, I was a champion note taker, so much so that in the library of my faculty my notes could be seen, often underlined in different colors on a great many desks. Did that tedious effort help retain knowledge? Perhaps in the short term. It certainly ruined my handwriting, and it made me very popular because I lent my notes out to all and sundry, but that’s about it. It would have made much more sense to get my notes straight from the teacher, or the internet if it had existed then, and instead dedicated my valuable time to learning what the notes actually meant. The flipped classroom approach, increasingly in vogue and the basis for learning in many business schools, instead of spending time in class taking notes, requires students to study something before coming to class, and then spending the lesson discussing it and learning it in greater depth by developing the appropriate mental structures rather than rote learning.
Introducing technology into education makes no sense if we don’t radically modify our methodologies as well as rethinking just what it is we hope to achieve. If we are to continue believing that education is about memorizing things and then regurgitating them a couple of weeks later, only to forget them soon after, then we clearly haven’t learned anything.
(En español, aquí)
