I’d be interested to know what universities/courses would be more likely to make you do this.

It’s pretty easy to verify experimentally, too. Test yourself with a few things. Reading stuff on blogs is an excellent example: you read something interesting, then a few weeks later, you absolutely can not bring to mind the specifics anymore. Writing it down by hand makes it much easier to remember. Reading material printed on a physical page also, but it’s a slightly different effect in my experience – doing both helps more than either one alone.

Of course people who say this get dismissed as old fuddy-duddies by the hip young kids. Same ones who get mildly insulted when asked for directions and think everybody should have a smartphone and just type addresses into google. The idea that certain aspects of mental ability need to be trained and benefit from training and benefit other aspects of life is absolutely outside the realm of imagination for them.

The truly hard classes (all two of them) I took no notes for. You had to follow the reasoning closely and try to work out the next step for yourself and if you were writing notes you weren’t giving the understanding full attention.

This Kickstarter project might be of interest to those who believe in the handwritten word.

I still can’t believe people now type faster than they can write under that kind of pressure. I would quickly have so many typos I could not understand the notes.

Now, of course, I mainly wonder which method would cause crippling neuromuscular pain the fastest and think professors should provide notes or topic plans afterward as aide-memoires. I don’t want to reject the lecture model, but it should be an exercising in listening and absorbing, not notetaking.

Also, I am reminded of a joke current circa 1995:

A German professor enters a lecture hall. The students snap to attention and in unison state, “guten morgen, Herr Doktor Professor”.

A French professor enters a lecture hall. The students remain seated but greet the professor with, “Bonjour, M. le Professeur.”

An American professor enters a lecture hall and a couple of students, leaning back in their chairs or over the desks mumble, “’mornin’, prof”.

A Canadian professor enters a lecture hall and all students immediately begin furiously taking notes.

It rings true with this former Canadian student. Although I don’t know if those other stereotypes hold up any more. The Germans and the French would probably declare revolution and the Americans complain that the professor’s entry to the hall was somehow fascist-style and had triggered them all at once.