Discussion Topic: Digital or Paper: Which is "better" and why?

Rather than sharing just your personal, anecdotal, experience or opinion (which is fine, too), you should locate one source that provides evidence or support for a specific claim that you make. At some point in your post you should:

1.) paraphrase or correctly quote this source

2.) include an in-text citation,and then

3.) provide a complete APA style reference at the end

You'll find an example at the end of this post. You'll be graded on the paraphrasing/quoting, citation, and reference, not the source itself, but do try to find high quality sources, since that will be our topic next week!

Tips and Notes:

1.) Don't worry about indentation and minor details for this week. Just make sure you are including all major information in your in-text citation and reference.

2.) You can feel free to use the same source that I did, or try locating something on your own. Try a simple query like [paper vs. digital note taking] using Google or Google Scholar (Links to an external site.).

Hi. For my part, I used to take all my notes using MS Word on my laptop or phone. But in the future, I've decided to take notes on the online videos by hand. One aspect of this debate that I had never previously thought about was how much word-for-word or verbatim content I tended to copy down using my laptop. For example, one research group compared notetaking under different conditions and found that while taking more detailed notes was beneficial for performance on a recall test, so was avoiding "mindless transcription" or having less word-for-word overlap between notes and the original source (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014; see also Association for Psychological Science 2014). When I thought about this, I realized that I am guilty of quite a bit of "mindless transcription" myself. I'm going to force myself to work harder to digest the material by taking notes by hand.

References:

Association for Psychological Science. (2014). "Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension." APS News Releases. Retrieved from:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/take-notes-by-hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html

Mueller, Pam A. and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. (2014, April 23).

"The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard:

Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking." Psychological Science OnlineFIRST. doi:10.1177/0956797614524581.