Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Note-Taking Device For Conferences? 300
First time accepted submitter Duncan J Murray writes "I will be attending a 3-day science conference soon, consisting mainly of lectures, and was wondering what people thought would be the ultimate hardware/software combo note-taking device, taking into account keyboard quality, endurance, portability, discretion & future ease-of-reference. Is a notepad and pen still king? What about an Ipad? N900? Psion 5mx? A small Thinkpad X-series? And if so which OS? Would you have a GUI? Which text-editor?"
Re:Livescribe (Score:5, Interesting)
Any decent conference makes the proceedings available to attendees, so the notes that you need to take will not be the content of the various lectures.
What you will need to do is make contacts, do a bit of social networking and get to know the other people there (who are presumably in the same field that you are). For that, nothing beats a short written note - technology is far too clunky and it doesn't impress anyone, these days.
Re:Livescribe (Score:5, Interesting)
Many people don't understand the value of taking notes during lectures, especially since many of them these days are accompanied by downloadable or hardcopy slide decks which would seem to make the activity superfluous.
The reason physical notetaking works is that it forces the listener to engage the speaker actively rather than passively, and reorganize/rephrase the speaker's material in his/her own mind in real time, with room for possible challenges to the speaker's POV. At least 90 percent of the value of the notes is achieved by the end of the lecture, so if they turned out to be illegible, or the airline loses the bag on the flight home, you still have the overwhelming portion of the value. You've listened well.
Re:OneNote (Score:5, Interesting)
I wasn't happy with OneNote on a standard laptop, but I used it for a while with my convertible tablet and it's almost a dream. Seriously, I complain endelessly about virtually every piece of software I use, I use different OSes at work and home in part so that they piss me off in different ways instead of all the same way... and I had virtually no complaints about how OneNote worked. A couple "this would be awesome" feature wishes, but that's different.
So my standard answer to this question is a convertible tablet + OneNote.
Benefits over paper&pencil is shareability, backup-ability, and (surprisingly good!) searchability. Drawbacks are high cost, heavy weight, and you have to deal with battery life.
Re:it's all between the ears (Score:4, Interesting)
The best hardware/software combo device is between your ears. If you actually listen to and understand what is being said, you will remember it....
This was my method in college, also it didn't hurt to pair up with a dedicated scribe, the kind that wrote everything down, we'd get together after class and I'd explain her notes to her.
Re:Livescribe (Score:5, Interesting)
Two more advantages of a smartpen: 1) it's less distracting for others than a laptop or tablet. Most people just think it's a fountain pen. 2) It's less distracting for me. I can't check my email on it.
iPad plus Notability (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple has been equipping their own employees with Notability.
That simple fact caught my attention so I bought a copy for myself.
This app is on a roll with impressive updates.
It features just about everything you can think of for a note taking app. It includes a recorder with time stamps linked to your notes so tap on part of your note and hear what was being said when you created that part. It has support for drawing, neat handwriting, and typed input.
You can add photos on the fly along with web pages, PDFs and other resources.
Export/Import is to BOX or Dropbox among various cloud storage options.
I use it for one to three day conferences and it works like a champ lasting all day long if you turn down the brightness somewhat.
Often the iPad is all I bother to carry while everyone else is totting regular notebooks or paper solutions.
Notability has new support for retina graphics on the 2012 iPad. The ink used for handwriting is very attractive on the new iPad.
I can also let Notability record while I use four fingers to swipe to other apps to look up private data which I can insert after a screen shot or in most cases via a simple copy and paste.
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I have tried many other iOS apps to see it they were better but I just keep coming back to Notability.
It just works.
Re:Livescribe (Score:2, Interesting)
+1 for the pen and paper. Plus, when you transcribe the notes, you're likely to recall more information and add to the notes in addition to reinforcing the information you've already retained.
Re:No April FOols? (Score:4, Interesting)
My late Dad was a big April Fool fan. Every year he'd tie my shoestrings together and stuff paper in my shoes and that was just the beginning. All day, I'd be barraged with one goofy, unfunny joke after another. I thought it was so lame. He was a serious guy, fought in WWI with Merrill's Marauders, decorated, the whole bit. Worked his ass off. Never complained. But on this one day he'd turn into a total goof.
I don't know what made me think of him just now, but for some reason, April Fools Day is one of the days when I miss him most. He was a Dad in full.
Re:Livescribe (Score:4, Interesting)
I run a *very* good conference, and we don't provide a proper proceedings.
You contradict yourself.
Seriously, every conference I've been to, and every conference I've presented a paper at, has published proceedings with the full articles of the conference. If an article is not delivered to the organizers by the cut-off date for inclusion in the proceedings, it is removed entirely from the conference (some conferences also have a lightweight peer approval to keep out junk). This covers many dozens of conferences over the last 20 years. It used to be that the proceedings were in a book or several, then it was CD+books, nowadays it's often just the CD. The author may choose to put some or all of the presentation as well as the article on the CD. Even those articles relegated to poster sessions are also published in full in the proceedings, not just the articles from the oral sessions.
Of course, there are events which only publish abstracts, but those events do not contain any articles which present a conclusion or a result. Such an event is not referred to as a conference, but as a seminar or colloquium in which people merely indicate what is being worked on, rather than presenting actual results or conclusions. Seminars and colloquia often occur between conferences, and I have attended a few which did publish proceedings, as well as those which merely published abstracts. However, their primary objective is networking among participants, and note taking at such events is minimal.
An event whose purpose is presenting results must publish proceedings. Otherwise everything at the event is nebulous - no better than hot air - and citing any article presented there is worthless. Where can the cited article be found? What - it's only an abstract? Then it's a fraud, from any scientific or engineering viewpoint.
Re:Your memory (Score:4, Interesting)
Note taking for me is rarely for usage later - the act of writing a note forces your brain to comprehend the information you just recieved and put into your own wording, this will greatly help most people better remember the key points of a lecture.
During my studies I wrote a heck of a lot of notes, but I don't think I've used any of them for anything.