Good Notes

Posted Sat Feb 7, 2009 in

A recent thread in the “LaTeX on OS X” mailing list I follow was about the Beamer system for creating presentations. Beamer is something I’m going to have to check out because one of my tasks is developing and making presentations and my preferred format is PDF. An example of a real talk prepared using Beamer is here.

I’m currently using Apple’s Keynote to prepare my talks and then exporting a PDF. I’m not always allowed to use my MacBook Pro for presenting, but Acrobat Reader is ubiquitous. So, I can do things the way I want with Keynote and then present using the full-screen mode of Acrobat Reader.

But, I digress.

During the discussion of Beamer on the list, the topic turned to making presentations. Many list participants are faculty and lecturing is a challenging affair. I never used a Powerpoint presentation in all of my years of teaching. I used a few overhead slides where my personal ability to draw on the board failed. But, my derivations were all done hot (with notes) and my presentation focused on a combined presentation of board (either chalk in the early days or whiteboard in the latter) and voice.

I expected my students to make notes, but never required them to take notes. I expected my students to make notes because my personal belief (and observation) is that the mechanic for internalizing information and creating knowledge is through our sensory systems. Individuals vary in their learning mode. Some learn by listening, some by seeing, some by touching; most learn by some combination of these senses. My particular mode is visual-tactile.

Therefore, my approach to material presentation was constructed such that each learner-type had a fighting chance of getting the material — if they did their part of the job. I spoke what I was doing, I wrote it on the board, and I expected my students to take good notes. A part of that interaction was facing the class, looking at eyeballs, making an assessment of how successful I was at communicating, and asking and taking questions.

Good note-taking skills are learned. The fundamentals are pretty simple. Listen and watch, and get the material down that seems to be important. The more lectures you sit, the easier it is to determine what is important. If you’re fortunate, the lecturer will be good enough to reinforce important points so they are captured in the notes.

It isn’t important to write everything you see or hear. It is important to get enough material so that reconstruction of the information is possible at a later time. Note review is an important part of the learning process. Reinforcement of short-term memory is what creates long-term memory. Good notes, then, comprise those notes that facilitate creation of long-term memory. Good notes, then, are relative, depending on the individual note-taker to define what is needed to catch the information, record enough of it to serve as a memory tool or clue, and then recapture the information later (in review) for processing and creating knowledge in the individual.

Good notes, therefore, are in the eye of the beholder. My “good notes” might not be your “good notes,” and vice versa. That’s interesting, at least to me.

After twenty years of sitting lectures, giving lectures, sitting talks, and making talks, I’ve decided to all but abandon the use of text on slides. Textual slides only serve to encourage the audience to read them. Graphics slides give an opportunity for the presenter to point out the important parts of the slide. I’m going to move my talks to graphics only and talk about the pictures. Wish me luck.