Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking? 217
First time accepted submitter spencj writes "I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides. One of the problems I've considered is that we learn about the same topic in several arenas. For example, if I consider some disease like coronary artery disease, I will likely learn about this topic in cardiology, radiology, pharmacology, and then in outside study resources such as Kaplan guides, online resources, etc.. Further, it will come up in August, October, March, April, etc.. My dream app is some combination of Excel, Visio, Word, and a blog where I could tag selections of text. If I then 'filtered' by certain parameters, it would collapse all the information I'd collected from different resources. For example, say I create a flowchart in Visio, take some notes in Word, create a table in Excel, and save from text from a web resource. I tag each item with 'coronary artery disease,' then I want to quickly query for all of my items with this tag. Is there any kind of app or resource that can pull this off? Medical students everywhere would be grateful."
Lab books and mind-mapping software maybe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Me, I've used those standard black lab books for my note taking for my daily work for almost 2 decades, and it's tough to do better. At least, for me it is.
You can always write your own mind maps or some kind of wiki later ... but, for the first pass, nothing is more flexible than pen and paper notes since it supports multiple languages, terminologies, and creating diagrams. No upgrades of licenses to worry about. ;-)
And a lab book has the advantage of being hard-covered as well as being pretty obvious if pages have been removed (which is why they use them as lab books in the first place).
Technology has all sorts of failure points and limitations. And most alternatives to pen and paper either have in-built limitations, or in the long run are harder to actually keep your notes with.
I'm not saying you shouldn't look at some technology to see if it helps, but for me, good old fashioned bound paper notebooks are still my preferred way, and look to remain so. I've got a stack of about 40-50 to them that I periodically refer back to.
Remember the one hour equals three hours rule. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was told this when I started at university but it took me until my final year to truly grok it.
Each one hour lecture should take 3 hours of your time. One hour in the lecture itself, one hour within the next day or two (at most, ideally same day so things are fresher in your mind) when you annotate the notes you had taken, redraw bad diagrams, look stuff up etc. Don't hope or expect to get 'perfect' notes from the lecture itself. Then finally one hour before the exam to go over that hour of lecture time.
As others have said, pen and paper is king for that first hour in the lecture itself. Anything you try to do with technology should concentrate on the second hour.
Re:One Note? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll add my two cents for OneNote.
Pen & eraser input on tablets that support it (Surface Pro, for instance), OCR, handwriting recognition, speech recognition... And it's relatively easy to use.
Re:pen and paper (Score:4, Interesting)
It is Pen + Paper, but everything written down is also digitized, searchable, synced to evernote etc. The pen is also a time synced voice recorder. When you go back to your notes (if you recorded the audio), you can tap on any word, and the audio corresponding to that point in time will start playing. You can now even start taking additional notes as the audio is playing. This can simplify your note taking to mostly just marking bookmarks, and noting your own thoughts, instead of transcribing what is being said.
While the paper is proprietary, the cost is quite reasonable, and it is possible (fully supported by Livescribe) to print your own. They are not operating on a Razor/Cartridge business model.
If you do not need wifi sync, you can get the Echo pen for really cheap, Look for the refurbished 4GB or 8GB Echo pens on the Livescribe site.