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Medicine Education Software

Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking? 217

Posted by timothy from the you-mean-you-don't-like-onenote dept.
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."
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Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking? More

Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking?

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  • pen and paper (Score:4, Insightful)

    by intermodal ( 534361 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:51PM (#44554339) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Frobnicator ( 565869 )

      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)

        by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:06PM (#44554573) Journal

        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.

        • Amen and amen. Excessive note taking means, in my experience, missing half the class.

        • 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.

          • 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.

            • 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!"

              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.

              • 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!"

                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.

                • Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?

                  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.

                  That makes no sense. Whatsoever.

                  I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.

                  • Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?

                    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.

                    That makes no sense. Whatsoever.

                    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

                    • Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?

                      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.

                      That makes no sense. Whatsoever.

                      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

                    • 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.

        • 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

          • 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)

        by Colonel Korn ( 1258968 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:27PM (#44554893)

        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)

        by thebrieze ( 1102809 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @03:09PM (#44556469)
        Livescribe. It's amazing. (http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/)

        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.

        • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rich0 ( 548339 )

          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

      • Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.

        Pencils are for people that make mistakes.

      • If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you.

        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)

      by larwe ( 858929 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:06PM (#44554581)
      This. Not only this, but the OP is seriously underestimating the workload overhead of tagging CONSISTENTLY, and adding all sorts of meta-information to documents. 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? It's extremely hard to maintain consistent tagging rules for a large body of individual notes. As for digital note taking, there is no solution that works as well as paper. In the course of EE studies, I have tried everything under the sun. Tablets, PDAs, laptops, digital ink pens, etc etc. If you're taking lots of text notes, a keyboard is king... but probably no faster than handwriting. If your notes include diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formulae, etc, you can pretty much forget keyboards (though I have seen some Mathcad mavens enter math proofs "live" off a whiteboard since they know all the keyboard shortcuts for everything). Stylus-based screens don't have the resolution nor the responsiveness of paper. The best solution I ever reached was paper notes which I then scanned, so I could carry all my notes on my laptop/tablet. Forget about this frankly OCD-sounding desire for neatly aligned banks of metadata-encrusted Faberge eggs of notecraft. It's far more important to focus on listening to what the hell is going on in the lecture, and comprehending it, which oftentimes means participation back the other way to clarify points being made in the lecture. You won't be able to get that clarification offline studying at home. If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal. Wasting effort on the Quest for Perfect Electronic Notes is a more appropriate activity for someone whose goal is, say, clinical informatics specialist. In summary: Grrrrr.

    • Why is it always when you find an interesting underrated comment that you're out of mod points?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )

      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.

    • I recently finished my degree in Mechanical Engineering. The way I found to be most efficient was to use a pen and paper and subsequently scan the notes. Then, for each of my classes, I had a folder for notes. I would put the scanned copy in all of the classes for which it might be relevant. Not just the one for which they were explicitly for.

    • 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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xaxa ( 988988 )

        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

        • Agreed. I have a $5 Chinese-brand fountain pen and a $45 Lamy-brand fountain pen. It depends on the paper type, but on most paper I actually prefer the Chinese one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rjforster ( 2130 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by camperdave ( 969942 )
      Whatever you do, GET A SYSTEM.

      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

    • 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?

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guppy ( 12314 )

      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)

    by Andrio ( 2580551 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:52PM (#44554349)

    See subject.

    • This would seem to fit. When you search in OneNote it'll give you a list of all the pages that have that search term (including UCRing images, and searching through recorded audio).

    • Re:One Note? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:13PM (#44554681) Homepage Journal
      Emacs. Org mode. Long after One Note goes the way of Bob, Emacs will chug on.
      • I was going to say Org Mode, too, but then I realized that Dynabook Jr. could be an answer to many woes of personal computing - if (when?) it gets "finished" (due to it being an open system, the quotation marks are sort of mandatory).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trepidity ( 597 )

        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.

      • Is there a GUI for this?

        • Emacs is indifferent to whether the user brings a terminal or a graphical desktop to the party. Was that your question?
          Other than that, usage boils down mostly to the tab key. So beautifully simple.
    • It's come a long way in the last few versions - in addition to what the post mentioned, you can even pull in things from Outlook if you're emailed course notes/tasks/homework/etc...

    • Re:One Note? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ericloewe ( 2129490 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:45PM (#44555215)

      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)

    by lw54 ( 73409 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:53PM (#44554361)

    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.

    • 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)

    by Tsiangkun ( 746511 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:55PM (#44554399) Homepage
    Xmind.net [xmind.net]
    • Although I find it useful, I always go back to pen and paper when I need to work at a pace other than my own, such as one being dictated by a speaker.

  • *golf clap* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MagicM ( 85041 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:56PM (#44554407)

    A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by poity ( 465672 )

      Is the transistor terrible because some Americans created it?
      And if you like what transistors do, you must be an American shill?

  • http://mnemosyne-proj.org/ [mnemosyne-proj.org] This is an excellent program flash card program. You rate flash cards by how well you know them and it does automatic scheduling. Cards you know well show up less often than cards you don't know. You can include images and sounds. It has a good tagging system so you can mark a card for multiple areas. You choose which subjects you want the cards to cover. For example, you could look at all your cards on coronary arteries regardless of subject, or you could look specifically at co

    • 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)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:57PM (#44554443)

    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

    • 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)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:00PM (#44554501) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      If I had mod points I'd mod you up.

      In class, nothing is better than Pencil and Paper Mark One.

  • Especially with all the drawings/figures and equations, its best to use paper and pen. Buy a good quality scanner and scan all your notes into pdf at the end of the day. Tablets/laptops jdont work because they actually slow you down. Also, I feel that taking notes with pen/paper help me stay focused during lectures

  • Paper, Pen, and... (Score:4, Informative)

    by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:03PM (#44554539)
    My favorite way to study in a situation like yours is to first take my notes the old fashioned way: with paper and pen in class. I then take those notes, along with applicable textbooks, and manually compose them in whatever software makes sense, typically LibreOffice Writer. The act of first taking notes the old fashioned way, and then cross referencing with the textbook, while in turn creating a highly refined set of notes in an application, strongly re-enforces what I am studying in my brain. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote rehearsal = good). Plus the act of composing more highly refined notes from your originals takes it one step beyond that.

    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)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:27PM (#44554871) Homepage

      . I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote (sic) rehearsal = good).

      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.

  • ... 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

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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)

    by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:31PM (#44554967) Journal

    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)

      by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:42PM (#44555157)
      Seems to have been my actual rule :-)

    • 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.

      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

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rjforster ( 2130 )

        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)

    by WarJolt ( 990309 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:46PM (#44555229)

    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.

  • 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" software is a pretty interesting 3-D mind mapping software and supports tagging and linking. The have a free single user version - http://www.thebrain.com/ [thebrain.com]
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 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, 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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