Note Taking

See Hack #14 MindPerformanceHacks/WriteFaster?. How you take notes should also depend on your learning style. See Hack #15, MindPerformanceHacks/SpeakYourBrainsLanguage?.

Classroom Setting

The general instructions I learned in my college research were to

• Read the text before the lecture.
• Take good notes in class.
• After class, while the information is still fresh in your mind, recopy the notes so that they are legible and complete for future review.
• Review and embellish the notes once the next day, and weekly until the test.

However. memorization was not a critical part of most classes by the time I went to college, and usually I didn't want to dump the information from my head right after the exam. (See How to Learn Facts.) I found it much more valuable to

• Read the accompanying text (today I might Google a bunch of the Phrases from the lecture, and see what else I could find).
• Write about the subject (put it on the class wiki?).
• Work with the material (do the homework).
• Prepare a one page "cheat sheet" that most professors allowed us to take to class. (By the time I'd found all the formulas I might need, and figured out how to fit them all onto one page and copied them there, I rarely had to actually look at the page during the test. So, prepare a quick reference guide.
• Write a Python program or Matlab script to assist me in solving the problem.
• Write a wiki page on the subject
• Prepare a presentation slide set on the subject. For the best graduate seminar class I ever took, the professor had each student read a paper and prepare a 20 minute presentation of the material. Each week one student presented, then we discussed the paper for the rest of the hour. I learned much more about chaos theory in that seminar, than I learned in the other three seminar semesters I had attended where we all met once a week to hear an outside person present.

Corporate Meeting

See GettingThingsDone? by David Allen..

• Record Decisions. only when a record of decisions is needed.
• Action Items Identify each action that has to happen, and the owner of the action. Joe: Email customer a summary of bug fix plan. Phil: 1 add gmail.com to the email validation unit test. Jon: Update work area and manually test subscription with gmail.com, yahoo.com, ieee.org, and inbox.com addresses. Joe: when this bug is verified complete, tag the release, remake the executables and export to download site.

Comments

This is pretty interesting stuff. The recent changes in learning style remind me of the speculations about future lifelong learning in Vernor Vinge's recent science fiction novel, Rainbows End. -- Ron Hale-Evans [[DateTime?(2006-09-01T16:05:34Z)]]

I like Vinge for his education focus (wonder why? something to do with being a Prof maybe?) and the way he extrapolates from recent developments to the future. And the How to learn facts Page JonathanDavid?

Ah, a fellow Vinge fan! I might have known. Do you agree that Rainbows End is probably his best novel yet? If not, which do you prefer, and why? -- Ron Hale-Evans [[DateTime?(2006-09-01T23:50:20Z)]]

I have a hard time choosing bests. I like the near future ones because they make me think about how the electronics I work on will affect us. I like the stories in the far future too, because he tends to spend more time on the story.

I tend to prefer Sci Fi that will teach me a little science or make me think about the future, but also that tells a great story. Vinge has been talking about the coming Singularity. Today when hearing about that on PBS, I realized that Frank Herbert talked about it too. I guess that makes him the Other pessimistic Sci Fi author, Larry Niven being the first (or is Jerry Pournelle really the Pessimistic one?) (After all WHY were the Mentats in Dune?) But what I love about Sci Fi, like 1984, is that Naming the dangers helps us to avoid them.

I think if we spend much more time on this, we may want to move this to the Sci Fi wiki ( is there one?) JonathanDavid?

No. There is no one Sci Fi wiki. There are over 30 science fiction wiki. -- DavidCary? [[DateTime?(2006-09-27T00:12:16Z)]]