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."
pen and paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing I've yet discovered is as flexible, reliable, and controllable. every digital attempt I've seen/tried has been inferior. You might try recording the lectures as you go in case you need to go back for context at some point, especially if you go back and type them later.
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Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.
Do you want to spend your time swapping between apps, waiting for apps to load, trying to draw with your laptop's touchpad, and otherwise concentrating on the technology rather than concentrating on the discussion?
If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you. But for simple flexibility and reliability, paper is the answer.
Write on it. Draw on it. Re-use it in another class. Archive it. Paper does al
Re:pen and paper (Score:5, Insightful)
I concur. It's worked pretty well so far, why would it need to change...? Is there a specific problem you're trying to solve?
Do bear in mind, from my own painful experience with note taking, you should try to actually pay attention to your class. It's different for everyone, but I found excessive note-taking counter-productive. That's what people did before they had easy access to all the information in the world.
Also, get off my lawn you damn kids.
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Amen and amen. Excessive note taking means, in my experience, missing half the class.
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Is that going to be on the test? Should I write it down? Ok.
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A class is made for you the understand the subject topic.
Only note something once you've understood it.
Some students still haven't grasped this, which is astounding.
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A class is made for you the understand the subject topic.
Only note something once you've understood it.
Some students still haven't grasped this, which is astounding.
Not everyone learns the same; I find that I don't fully understand a topic until I've written my notes, looked at them, and gone "oh, shit, now it makes sense!"
Many educational facilities haven't grasped this.
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How about you skip class altogether and just read notes then?
The reason we hold class is because the interesting thing isn't the notes, it's the class itself.
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How about you skip class altogether and just read notes then?
Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?
The reason we hold class is because the interesting thing isn't the notes, it's the class itself.
That makes no sense. Whatsoever.
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Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.
I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.
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Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.
You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.
I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.
Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.
Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at yo
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Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.
You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.
I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.
Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.
Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at you.
I would mod you up if I had points. I completely agree with you (and I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!).
The purpose of taking notes is to distil what we are reading or listening or observing, and then noting it down on paper in a way that makes sense to us. The act itself has merit as lack of speed (and even laziness) forces us to quickly assimilate what we are hearing or seeing, and write it down as efficiently and quickly as we can so we don't fall behind in a lecture. More imp
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I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!
Because I said something that sounded mildly contradictory, and according to the current edition of the Rules of the Internet, the appropriate response is to immediately get all butthurt and defensive.
Or maybe OP is just having a bad day.
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Pay attention. Yes. Been there, done that.
Tried a number of 'digital' (or analog, mostly) ways of recording lectures - nothing really works. Here's the real kicker: Unless you have a really unusual, high quality lecturer who is invested in teaching medical students, most of the lectures are pretty reflex and humdrum. Nothing that needs to be archived.
The few professors who really are interested in teaching will inevitably have a syllabus. So read the book, go to the lecture. Get some sleep (the hard
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Nothing that needs to be archived.
You miss the point. For some people, notetaking is the most efficient way of absorbing information. I've attended plenty lectures myself (incl. 6 years at university), and I will still take notes. I don't even have to re-read my notes at a later time for the note-taking to have a positive effect.
Anectode on electronic note taking: I once typed up notes from a 45min Quantum Field Theory lecture in LaTeX. It was a bet with a friend, and the lecturer looked at me like I was crazy. So I'd say that electronic
Re:pen and paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.
Do you want to spend your time swapping between apps, waiting for apps to load, trying to draw with your laptop's touchpad, and otherwise concentrating on the technology rather than concentrating on the discussion?
If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you. But for simple flexibility and reliability, paper is the answer.
Write on it. Draw on it. Re-use it in another class. Archive it. Paper does all the things asked for in the article.
OneNote and a tablet with an active digitizer is searchable pencil and paper. It's not any more cumbersome than a notebook but it's far better for finding old notes.
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.
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You can do the same with OneNote on any device with a touchscreen. But the Livescribe is cheaper, if you don't already have a touchscreen laptop, convertible, or tablet.
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I love Livescribe, and I'm not even a student. If I were a student I'd REALLY love it - the thing seems like the perfect tool for note-taking.
I can type FAST. However, I doubt I'd ever want to take notes on a laptop or tablet. Sure, I could regurgitate words faster, but not being able to draw notes/etc at will with trivial effort would be a major shortcoming.
Livescribe lets you take notes and digitize them. The audio recording gives you context during review - I just make a mark if I think I missed some
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Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.
Pencils are for people that make mistakes.
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I'm in total agreement about pen(cil) and paper being the best tool for note-taking. I'm partial to centre-ruled, spiral-bound steno notepads myself. Transposing your handwritten notes to a more appropriate medium for long-term storage is also an essential part of the whole grokking process, imo. And that, I think, is the better question - how best to store, organize and make use of the content of your
Re:pen and paper (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what?
That's why ontologies and inference engines were created. Anyway, if the application doesn't at least offer semi-automated tagging, it's so 20th century (talking of text, of course - pictures will have to wait).
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Re: pen and paper (Score:2)
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Learn shorthand. Get a good pen to avoid writing fatigue, I always preferred a mechanical pencil for mistakes(staedtler http://www.staedtler.com/en/products/pencils-accessories/mechanical-pencils/graphite-925-mechanical-pencil/#id=256&tx_solr%5Bpage%5D=1 [staedtler.com]) ...that one has metal grip and cap w/ plastic tube. It will last for years and years.
Don't go smaller then .5 lead it breaks too much(.5-.7). Use a soft lead(B-HB, don't use F-H)to avoid writing fatigue/tearing paper, and it's easier to erase since
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The best pen for avoiding fatigue is a fountain pen, unless of course you're a left handed devil worshipper. You barely have to touch the page.
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Totally agree with this post, just wanted to offer up a couple resources:
Learn shorthand.
http://www.alysion.org/handy/althandwriting.htm [alysion.org]
I always used graph paper... You can download images and print your own
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/plain/ [incompetech.com]
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If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal.
This is well-meant, and your advice is otherwise excellent, but the name of the game for a second-year med student is merely survival. The M2 and M3 students are expected to sponge up an absolutely unbelievable amount of information.
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I mostly aggree with you. But I have been using a galaxy note 10.1 for more than 6 months, and I am quite happy with its "stylus input". OP might want to try that.
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Why is it always when you find an interesting underrated comment that you're out of mod points?
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Yep. What if the professors, or other students, find your incessant typing to be distracting? Can you mix sketching and writing on a digital document as fast as on paper?
How well will your laptop/tablet/whatever of choice hold up in environments with spurting blood and other contaminants?
I work on some of the TMIP-J software used by DoD for military medical and it' highly ambitious, and heavily unused by medics in the field. They use pencil and paper.
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get a fountain pen, a good notebook, and good ink (Score:3)
I would add: Get a decent (~$100-200) fountain pen, good quality notebooks, and quality ink.
Waterman makes the Expert 2 and is a pretty safe recommendation, but there are a bunch of others out there to try. Note that fountain pens should be held extremely lightly against the writing surface, and are not really ideal for occasional use if you live in a dry climate. For daily or bi-daily use, they'll be fine.
Clairefontaine sells notebooks with superb paper that is very smooth, strong, and thick enough to not
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I also prefer to use a fountain pen, but here in Britain they're not sold only as expensive fashion accessories (though there's certainly a market for that).
So, save $80-$180, and buy a good quality fountain pen from eBay.co.uk or eBay.de. I have a couple of "Online [online-pen.com]" ones, and they're fine -- one was £3 (probably because it's an ugly yellow colour) and the other about £10.
(I still have the one my mum bought me when I started secondary school. Still works fine! I use it at work. It was "Made i
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I took most of my degree notes with a battered Sheaffer Imperial Flighter which is about as old as me but still writes beautifully. Today I'm never without my Pilot Capless.
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For years was taking notes with paper and pen. I used the four color BIC pen; black is for titles, section headings, etc. Blue is for main body notes. Red is for references and underlining, and green is for activities, suggested reading, etc. I would also recommend the Cornell notetaking system. Also get some good notebooks so that you're not going to lose pages.
The problem with paper is searching for information. Using a system like Cornell will help for searching, bu
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How does changing the method of information capture relate to the question that was asked -- you know, the question actually in the summary, where the note taker wanted to facilitate information retrieval? If the note taker converted all of her notes to pen and paper copies, wouldn't the same problem still exist, except now with lots of paper to keep track of?
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LiveScribe
I have one. It's an ink pen with a camera in the tip. The camera reads dots on special paper and digitally records whatever you are writing / scriblling / drawing. It also records audio.
It plays back the audio, too. On each sheet of paper there is a timeline. Touch the timeline with the pen and it plays back from 0% marker to the 100% marker. If you touch the paper to a section that the pen wrote/drew it will start playing the audio from *that* point, too. It's totally awesome.
www.livescrib
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pen and paper
When I first started school, I would have agreed with you. Writing and studying from notes on paper just felt more natural, with fewer distractions. However, by the time I was into the second year, the sheer amount of paper becomes a problem. You end up with shelves of binders that are too heavy to move around, and take a lot of effort to keep organized.
OneNote was pretty good, combined with a convertible laptop-tablet PC. I almost never actually used the PC in tablet mode (too chunky, too awkward), but
One Note? (Score:4, Informative)
See subject.
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Re:One Note? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The files are also pretty readable plain text, vaguely inspired by markdown. So even if org mode somehow disappears, you will still be able to read the damn things, whereas that's less likely to be the case if some day you're stuck with some decades-old janky binary format for a discontinued piece of software.
On the other hand, the learning curve is a bit steep if you've never used Emacs.
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Is there a GUI for this?
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Other than that, usage boils down mostly to the tab key. So beautifully simple.
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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.
Microsoft OneNote (Score:5, Informative)
Since you're needing to record info from Word, Excel and Visio, OneNote would be perfect to consolidate the information in place. You can also include images, video and webpages.
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This, but with an active digitizer. I'm in engineering myself, but I can't imagine medicine requiring much more on this front...
Xmind (Score:3)
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*golf clap* (Score:5, Insightful)
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
I can't hear you. (Score:2)
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
calling the parent post a slashvertisement is a pretty clever way of getting around the problem that OneNote is very good at what it does.
well done.
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If the open source community wants to crow about having a truly great note-taking app, it first needs to ... actually have a truly great note-taking app.
Hate Microsoft if you want, but OneNote is the best at what it does. Kind of like Wolverine.
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Is the transistor terrible because some Americans created it?
And if you like what transistors do, you must be an American shill?
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Spam? Maybe, but OneNote is, well, exactly what our hapless med student seems to want.
Is there an alternative that's as good? Evernote, Remember, and Google Keep are great, sure, but they hardly compare. Hate Microsoft all you want, but OneNote is undoubtedly best-in-class.
Flash cards (Score:2)
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That's pretty interesting. One technique that actually worked well for me was flashcards with a couple of other people. We'd carry them around and pop them out at meals and in boring lectures. A decent program might make sharing the cards pretty easy.
evernote +1 (Score:3)
you can write your own notes and tag them
you can clip websites and news articles as well and tag them
60MB per month for the free account and $45 per year after that. and it works on a computer, phone, tablet
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Content blocked by your organization
Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Personal Network Storage and Backup.
^THIS^ is the problem with any cloud based solution. Your data is only available at the whim of the sysadmins.
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.
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If I had mod points I'd mod you up.
In class, nothing is better than Pencil and Paper Mark One.
Use paper and pen. Scan later to pdf (Score:2)
Paper, Pen, and... (Score:4, Informative)
Past that, I really don't think there is a single application that will filter all your notes automagically into so many different formats.
Re:Paper, Pen, and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.
Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something. ;-)
Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.
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Having been through medical school... (Score:2)
... I suggest you try to ensure you get handouts and then devote 100% of your concentration to listening and interpreting what you're being told.
If you write things down, you won't look at 90% of it. You will need it all in your memory at some point - either for the exams or when you're practising, so better commit it to memory in the first place. And, no, writing it down does not help with that.
My only warning is never to believe 100% anything anyone teaches you - no-one knows everything about everythin
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The trick to note taking is knowing what to write down. Don't do dictation. I disagree that note taking is pointless because I found myself constantly consulting mine for my bachelor's. But, you are right if you just robotically dictate you can't keep up with the professor and will miss information trying to write everything down.
based on my experiences (Score:2)
As a researcher (patient) studying the social practices of doctors (visiting their offices), my tentative conclusions are that the industry-standard note-taking practices are currently: 1) a web browser; 2) open to WebMD.
Surface Pro tablet and OneNote (Score:2)
For this kind of application I can't think of anything better. OneNote is probably the best note taking app out there and the surface pro and a real digitizer and a digital pen so you can take good notes with it.
I picked up a galaxy note 8 for my engineering classes (since it also has a digitizer) and for what I do it works very well. I would have gotten a surface pro except that they are so much more expensive.
For any class where you have drawings it is hard to beat a tablet with a real digitizer. I used t
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.
45 lecture hours plus two all nighters (Score:4, Insightful)
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And, cynically, I will say that trying to do that with the technology is in the long run going to cost you a lot more than that 1 hour.
Instead of thinking purely about the content, you're looking at fonts, layouts, application upgrades, file formats ... and not what you're trying to study.
Technology is cool and useful, but sometimes it also create
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I can't say that any of my university classes were so dense that there was three hours of information packed into a single lecture. I'd say half of them were about 10 minutes of information packed into an hour-long lecture and obfuscated to make it seem like there was more content that there was.
It's not 3 hours of information. It's 3 hours of your life needed to pass an exam on whatever information was in that hour. So if it were 10 minutes of useful information then the second hour is finding and fully understanding that from within the first hour, if it wasn't obvious. Then nearer exam time another hour reminding yourself about it all and doing a few sample questions to get you ready.
As I put earlier it was only in my final year that I realised just how true this piece of first year (probably fi
Take notes with emacs (Score:3)
Most graphs formulas and daigrams are in the book or available online. I take notes with emacs and search with grep.
I've thought about using a corporate wiki like confluence to take school notes, but didn't want to shell out $10 a month.
Google Glass (Score:2)
Or a camera, or better yet, that your class have a camera that takes everything and publish it later in youtube or a students portal for everyone there. You can take the notes later, don't mess your attention fiddling with a touchscreen keyboard, a bulky notebook or switching apps.
Also, getting an antivirus warning in a medical class will be pretty embarrasing.
"The Brain" (Score:2)
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Mind mapping software, anyone? (Score:2)
This sounds like a natural fit for mind mapping software. While normally touted for brainstorming activities or connecting free form thought. It can be used to associate the related but varied sources of information the questioner is asking about. And there are various offerings available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
n-dimensional x-referencing will mess up your head (Score:2)
N-dimensional x-referencing will mess up your head, don't do it and don't try to do it, no matter what hightech gadgets you have access to.
To be honest, for this problem - especially because it's so n-dimensional - I'd deliberately choose *not* to use hightech but to stick with quality notebooks (Leuchtturm [leuchtturm1917.com] are my favourite) and a good pen/fountain pen (Lamy [lamyusa.com] is my favorite) and rely on spacial memory ("Roughly where in notebook was I when we had that lecture?") which relates 1 to 1 to the sequence of your c
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no one can remember that much info on a long term basis
that's why all doctors are in some specialty and most of their problems are the same ones every day so they can remember some frequently used info
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I'm not studying a doctor, but I've never had any trouble cramming information in my head. Despite that I take detailed, copious notes in a very organized and thorough manner. That's part of HOW I cram the information in my head.
I guarantee you, as a patient, you have NO idea how your doctor studied in med school unless you also have a personal relationship with your doctor. Being "scared" about this is just mindless and insulting.
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Doctors Google. Sorry to disappoint you, but really do you want to rely on someone's memory?
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Actually, we UptoDate [uptodate.com], but we don't rely on our increasingly fallible memories except for stuff we use all of the time.
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The doctors that I've known have been able to cram away a lot of information in their heads
Exactly, that's why they never have sizable libraries in their offices.
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Sorry to break your bubble, but those 'libraries' are pretty much for show. These days, one's library is hidden in the smart phone.
Re:Um...as a patient, I'm hoping you MEMORIZE it (Score:4, Informative)
>> I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides
As a former medical student (and now practicing physician), I'm amazed you're going to class in the second year. It may sound like a joke, but at my medical school, the entire second year class could not fit into the auditorium at the same time....people just stopped going, and relied on the note taking service and read their books or the syllabus provided for the class. I guess if you're in a PBL program it may be different....but then your material is already organized that way (see below for PBL)
You're scaring me dude. The doctors that I've known have been able to cram away a lot of information in their heads, and note-taking wasn't one of their problems in year two of med school. As a potential patient, you have me worried already...
Meh....you learn a lot of junk in the first two years of school. Its like learning to rivet and weld so that you can fly a plane....yeah, it's nice to know, but most pilots don't need to know it. The problem is, to be a good doctor you need to know a lot of specialized information, that requires understanding of basic material. Since you don't (can't) know what you're going to specialize in in the future, they fill your head with what we think a doctor should know. As time and training go on, you forget a lot of the information that you don't use (and don't need to know). But a lot of it is still there....I amaze my residents by recalling tidbits I learned 10 years ago and never saw or used since...that's what makes a good physician a great one.
And as far as sitting in class and memorizing it....I will just tell you that you have no idea of the volume of material that is poured into medical students. Which in and of itself is a problem, but you also (as mentioned) need to mentally cross-reference the material to other lectures over several years. Part of this is why they have been doing problem based learning....instead of teaching anatomy, physiology, microbiology, genetics, pharmacology, pathology, neuroscience, and clinical medicine as separate classes, they now teach a cardiology core where you learn heart anatomy, heart physiology, heart microbiology, heart genetics, heart pharmacology, heart pathology, heart neuroscience(lol), and clinical heart medicine, followed by the pulmonary core....etc
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The best doctors are the ones who are experts at looking things up. The ones that think they already know everything because they went to med school are the ones to be worried about.
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Note taking (and dealing the the cram fest that was medical school class instruction) WAS (and I am sure, still is) a big problem for medical students. Too much information, too little time. The whole point of the first two years of med school is to cram the basics of anatomy and physiology down people's throats. It's pretty much out and out memorization.
What most schools don't teach instructors is how to teach a detail oriented, time limited subject in a coherent fashion. Most med school lecturers aren
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My smartpen got me through a couple years of didactic classes at dental school. Highly recommended. Gretaly speeds study time, boosts study efficiency, and minimizes note taking.
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I think you're missing a zero. There's no good fountain pen to be had for $30.
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I think you're missing a zero. There's no good fountain pen to be had for $30.
There are numerous good fountain pens in that price range if your concern is writing ability. After all, it is the nib that does the writing, most expensive pens use the same nibs as much lower quality pens. The extra cost is for the brand name and the materials the barrel is made from. Some of the best writers come from SE Asia, where fountain pens are still very common. While not prestigious as their European brethren, if one is after write-ability, Japan and China have a plethora of pens to choose from
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I use Org all the time. I even wrote my masters in it (exported to LaTeX and PDF).