Thread: The loss of basic skills in school

Originally Posted by Jimbo

What bothers me as a tertiary educator is the complete lack of anything resembling note-taking skills. Yes, understanding and being able to use technology is important - it always has been and always will be - but just a basic ability to take notes seems to elude 90% of the students I see. And since I lecture maths and stats, there aint no way they can take my notes down on a computer during lectures.

I'm one of those students who LOVES online notes. Not because I can't or don't take my own, I've taken many hundreds of pages of colour-coded notes, don't own and never have owned a laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc. But what I seem to lack is the ability to absorb while I'm writing. I write frantically for 90 minutes and end up with 10-20 pages of stuff I don't remember writing, and I've missed out on all the personal nuances of the lecture that make it easy to understand. Of course, it's lose-lose because if I DON'T write and try to listen instead even my favourite lecturers eventually put me to sleep.

Originally Posted by gugi

Computers are very useful and make the recycling of lectures/lecture notes a breeze. There is almost nothing that gets obsolete on a yearly basis, even in higher education. The differences from year to year are mostly in different problem sets, so that the students don't just copy the previous year's solutions.

I had a professor begin a course by telling us it was exactly what he'd been taught 50 years ago, but the only noticeable (to the students) changes to the science and technical books are a shuffling around of chapter, page and problem numbers so that no one can use a version just a year or two old and be sure of following the appropriate coursework.