How are the kids in school taking notes these days?
It depends on your class. When I started taking classes again, I used graphing paper pads (the kind with the really small boxes, because I write really small) because they allow me the vertical and horizontal ruling to quickly take notes, bullet, and diagram effectively. I later transcribed those into Word. I moved up to taking notes on my Palm Tungsten T3 with the Infrared keyboard, which worked fine, but I felt drew too much attention to me in the class (this was at a comm. college where everyone mostly still uses pen’n’paper) so I switched back to pad and pen. Then, some girl started coming in with her iBook weekly and I felt stupid for giving up. I type at about the same speed I write, but I found I spent too much time trying to get Word to indent right (the version on my PDA… don’t know how it would be on an actual computer) to actually save me the effort of copying them from paper later. Your mileage will, of course, vary. So I would suggest you not worry about appearances and
late to the party but… At my school (where I am a grad student) a few people use laptops. Most of them, as far as I can tell, spend their time doing other things on the laptop than paying attention or taking notes. One (in a class I was TAing) would always either be programming (no programming in this class) or playing some MMORPG. Don’t be these people, because no matter how subtle you think you are, it will be noticed. Very few grad students in my dept use laptops in class; in fact, only one or two that I know of. I have the impression that they aren’t using them particularly productively, either. Especially don’t be these people as a grad student – your graduate career is deeply connected to your interpersonal relationships with your professors. I use a personal wiki, but not ever in class. I just like paper better for taking notes on the spot. Don’t forget that taking notes on paper was a skill that you had to learn, and so is taking notes on the computer, except that it’s a diff
I’m an undergrad at a large public university. In really big lecture classes, there’s usually a couple people with laptops. I never found them to be particular dorky, but they do tend to be the sit-in-the-front-row types. I remember one guy (a note-taker for one of our star athletes!) would sit in the front row and record audio of the lectures using the built-in mic on his laptop while typing up outlines in Word. I don’t know how good the audio quality was, but I can imagine audio might be helpful in some lecture classes. Star Athlete certainly needed all the help he could get. Most people just take notes in Word, and when peeking over their shoulders, they seem to spend more time correcting the formatting of their outlines than actually taking notes. I’ve seen notes taken through One Note and it looks like the ability to put sketches directly into your notes is quite useful in classes where diagrams are common (e.g., supply/demand curves in econ). If I were a Windows user and had One
