Note Taking

[]

Classroom Setting

The general instructions I learned in my college research were to

• Read the text before the lecture.
• Take good notes in class.
• After class, while the information is still fresh in your mind, recopy the notes so that they are legible and complete for future review.
• Review and embellish the notes once the next day, and weekly until the test.

However. memorization was not a critical part of most classes by the time I went to college, and usually I didn't want to dump the information from my head right after the exam. (See How to Learn Facts.) I found it much more valuable to

• Read the accompanying text (today I might Google a bunch of the Phrases from the lecture, and see what else I could find).
• Write about the subject (put it on the class wiki?).
• Work with the material (do the homework).
• Prepare a one page "cheat sheet" that most professors allowed us to take to class. (By the time I'd found all the formulas I might need, and figured out how to fit them all onto one page and copied them there, I rarely had to actually look at the page during the test. So, prepare a quick reference guide.
• Write a Python program or Matlab script to assist me in solving the problem.
• Write a wiki page on the subject
• Prepare a presentation slide set on the subject. For the best graduate seminar class I ever took, the professor had each student read a paper and prepare a 20 minute presentation of the material. Each week one student presented, then we discussed the paper for the rest of the hour. I learned much more about chaos theory in that seminar, than I learned in the other three seminar semesters I had attended where we all met once a week to hear an outside person present.

Corporate Meeting

See GettingThingsDone by David Allen..

• Record Decisions. only when a record of decisions is needed.
• Action Items Identify each action that has to happen, and the owner of the action. Joe: Email customer a summary of bug fix plan. Phil: 1 add gmail.com to the email validation unit test. Jon: Update work area and manually test subscription with gmail.com, yahoo.com, ieee.org, and inbox.com addresses. Joe: when this bug is verified complete, tag the release, remake the executables and export to download site.