Note to self

Note taking and the control of information

Professor Tara Brabazon

Charles Sturt University

tbrabazon@csu.eduau

What are the causes for the transformation in note taking?

• Laziness

• Underconfidence

• Confusion of testing with learning

Structuring student draftingDraft 1: Correct all spelling and grammatical issues

Draft 2: Check that all references are complete

Draft 3: Verify that all quotations are accurate

Draft 4: Read the introduction. Does it explain the trajectory of the paper?

Draft 5: Read the conclusion. Is there an efficient and evocative ending to the assignment?

Draft 6: Does the topic sentence convey the content of the paragraph that follows it?

Draft 7: Check the last sentence of each paragraph. Does it create a transition to the next paragraph?

Draft 8: Read each word and sentence for meaning and clarity. Is each word required?

Draft 9: Ensure there is no jump between sections of the argument.

Draft 10: Do you answer the question? Return to the question and the marking criteria. What mark would you give the paper?

Screen grab of my digitized notes

Scaffolding note taking• Take notes from readings separately from the books and articles. Do

not write ‘notes’ on photocopies or the books themselves• Stop highlighting text and underlining. Do not colour in photocopies.• Ensure that every subject has a separate file. Insert notes from

readings on separate pages from lecture and seminar notes.• Ensure that accurate references are logged. • Either type or write your notes. Ensure legibility for future use.• Write down the key argument of the writer/s in one sentence.• Look at the bibliography/reference list used by the writer, noting the

quality and dates of the cited scholarship.• Copy important quotations accurately. Carefully differentiate

between your notes, paraphrasing and direct quotations.• Ensure that your notes are sufficiently detailed so that you do not

need to return to the original text when writing assignments.• Ensure that your notes are sufficiently brief that you have not

paraphrased the entire article.

Why note taking stopped

“About five years ago, my students stopped taking notes … I asked, ‘Why are you not taking notes?’ And they said, ‘Why would we take notes on that? … I can go to Wikipedia or go to Google, and I can get all the information I need.’”

Bill Rankin

Note taking is metalearning• improve memory• trigger factual recall • shape the interpretation to data • guide through disciplinary knowledge • increase auditory literacies, • increase real-time interpretations of data • increase concentration in the management of

complex ideas

Dependency culture

• What are the short and long-term consequences of students not taking their own notes?

• What happens if generations of students use teachers’ PowerPoint slides as the notes they use to write assignments and study for exams?

What is happening in our classrooms?

• Teachers confuse planning and writing a teaching session with preparing PowerPoint slides.

• There is a confusion between preparation and presentation.

“Those who brought laptops with them, purportedly for note-taking, seemed to be performing less well than students who did not. And not only were they distracted; so were their nearby classmates … ‘The conspiracy theorist in me assumed they were on Facebook.’ Apparently, some were. Or on Twitter or YouTube or eBay … When he started surreptitiously tracking the performance of the laptop users, Littau found out something else about them: they were getting lower grades.”

Jeremy Littau

“We fall in love with the idea of technology and don’t always think through what students are learning from it. Technology tools are just that: they are tools. Even when they become something that’s just there to waste time, that’s fine. But if it’s my time or your classmates’ time, that’s different … We’ve had enough experience with the internet that it’s now time to sit back and look at what we’re getting from it.”

Jeremy Littau

Education in the distraction factory

“We’ve reached a period where attention is no longer valued. There’s been a cultural change where we’ve forgotten about the idea of paying attention.”

Clifford Nass

Another (bloody) cat picture …

Sent: 09 November 2011 20:26

To: Tara Brabazon

Subject: Assingment 1 

Hi Tara! :)

Hope you are doing well! I just wanted to clear some things up with my confusion towards assignment number one. I have been working on it for a while now and im not quite sure if i am meeting up to your standards. I have been composing an actual scrapbook with photos and some comments of topics from week 1-10 and also i have made a powerpoint with my commentary of the readings (i'm thinking by when you say readings you are talking about the actual readings you have posted that we are required to read? or are you talking about the readings off the powerpoints from class?) along with some songs i have chosen that fit the topics of week 1-10. Please let me know if im on the right track here? Thanks so much!

Student critiques of online ‘learning’

“Since laptops take makes (sic) up a significant portion of our tuition fees, I expect that each and every lecture I go too (sic) utilises this resource, as I am paying over a $1000 every year too use it, because of your lack of enthusiasm to post your lecture notes online, I feel that you have not fully utilized this resource. I believe it should be appropriate in a claimed ‘Laptop Based University’ all course material should be available online.”

“Since we do pay extraordinary amounts for the services of the laptop, we expect that at least the lecture slides be posted on WebCT or the professor make use of silicon chalk for the class discussion.”

Consider

What are the consequences of automating or deskilling

learning?

“Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but – more troubling still – they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”

“If one is to cast aspersions on student cultures that exist on college campuses today, one would do well to focus equal attention on the faculty cultures and orientations.”

Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift

Less is more: Fewer media create more meaning

Platform selection

InformationAudience

Applying multimodality

• Understand the difference between sonic and visual literacy

• Remember that print is a form of visual literacy

• Less text is better text

Less is more?

“Too many pupils arrive at school with mobile phones, iPods and MP3 players when teachers wish they could bring a pen.”

National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers Report, 2011

The inadequate research into PowerPoint

“We investigated whether students liked and learned more from PowerPoint presentations than from overhead transparencies … At the end of the semester, students preferred PowerPoint presentations but this preference was not found on ratings taken immediately after the lectures. Students performed worse on quizzes when PowerPoint presentations included non-text items such as pictures and sound effects. We conclude that PowerPoint can be beneficial, but material that is not pertinent to the presentation can be harmful to students’ learning.”

R. Bartsch and K. Cobern

Bartsch and Cobern’s study

• Students prefer PowerPoint presentations

• There are mixed results with regard to graphics and student memory. Some studies show an improvement. Others do not.

• There is a study that shows a decrease in student performance in the movement from overhead transparencies to PowerPoint.

How does the form of PowerPoint shape the content?

“Helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world … it’s hard to shake off

AutoContent’s spirit: even the most easygoing PowerPoint template insists on a heading followed by bullet points, so that the user to shepherded toward a staccato, summarizing frame of mind.”

Ian Parker

Szabo and Hastings study

“PowerPoint lectures, at least in some circumstances, mainly add to the entertainment rather than to the education of the students … Apart from possible benefits on recall, no significant advantages to PowerPoint lecturing were found … students like PowerPoint as a lecturing method. Their preference for PowerPoint lectures, in contrast to their beliefs, is not accompanied by better academic performance.”

Digital Hemlock

Neil Postman

Questions about the photographing of PowerPoint slides

?1. Why are they using their camera rather than

taking notes onto paper or screen?

2. What happens to that photograph after it is taken?

3. Do they look at the photograph again?

4. Do they think they understand the content on the slide because they have photographed it?

5. What are they missing by photographing the slides? What about the audio content of the teaching and learning experience?

Teach the surprises