Distributed Notetaking

I took a wee break from grading and department chair duties today to read over the notes that some students took at our last Cognition class session. It was an interesting read! I also added a few small comments. You can check it out at:

session 9 notetaking

There's many different ways to take notes—and notetaking isn't limited to just classroom situations. That said, one potentially interesting approach is distributed notetaking. When I use that term I'm basically stealing from the terminology of distributed cognition. The essential idea in both cases is that there doesn't need to be one isolated person who does it all. In distributed cognition researchers have looked at computers as cognitive tools, and other learners as cognitive supports, to help "distribute" the load of learning complex material. Why couldn't you do the same with notetaking?

Perhaps some of the live notetakers could comment on their experiences. Was it different/better to be taking intensive notes for 10 minutes, then someone else taking the reigns so you could listen and participate better? Or would it have been better if you were taking notes the whole time? (Our notetakers were Meighen, Margaret, Toby, Rajeev, Diana, Browning, and Karen.)

My guess is distributed notetaking would be of benefit to many of you. There may be several reasons why, but here's two that come to mind for me.

Reason 1: A couple of students came up to me after our last class and asked how some people could possibly create graphic organizer notes based on listening to the MP3 "radio show." These people essentially said they would find that overwhelmingly hard to do—they needed to focus on getting the basic content down. I completely understand. But if you were in a distributed notetaking situation then you wouldn't need to worry about getting all the basics written down (most of the time someone else would be doing that) and you could listen to the lecture/presentation/discussion in a different way. And part of that "differentness" may allow you the "cognitive space" to develop a graphic organizer of the information—focusing on key concepts and relationships—since you know you need not worry about the basic information.

Reason 2: In difficult classes it also might be possible to invite the instructor to review the notes the following week. This could add an interesting layer to the whole process. Let's pretend we were in a statistics course. If we were using distributed notes then I (as the instructor) could also look them over. Why might that be important? Because then I could easily spot any inaccuracies or misconceptions that might be unintentionally spread by incomplete/inaccurate notes. I could post-class chime in with corrections or additional details or new links. The notes would allow other students to add comments, to add clarifying questions, and so on. Put differently, there's some potential for distributed notes become interactive notes.

I may try a pilot study with my Fall 2010 statistics course and test out this whole notion of distributed notetaking during the live class sessions.