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Tag: note taking

  • Easy Note Taking – Evernote, OneNote, Pages and SimpleNote

    Easy Note Taking – Evernote, OneNote, Pages and SimpleNote

    He listens well who takes notes. – Dante (Canto XV)

    Note taking can often seem like something of a burden, that gets in the way of learning stuff, or getting things done. However, unless we have a robust eidetic memory, then we are going to need to take notes. Thankfully there are a plethora of note taking options that can make your life easier. Or they can actually make it harder, as we will see. Thankfully they are all easier than using scraps of paper everywhere, and then trying to fit pages into a 3 ring binder with only a 2 hole punch (thanks Tom for the salient example).

    betty.notetaking

    However, what apps and tools should be in your toolkit? Well this is where it gets a bit nasty, as there are so many tools that purport to do everything but make you cups of tea, and wash the dishes. But when you distill it down they may tidy up and take the trash out, but they have a few warts, plus all these bloated bits on the side, and no-one really knows what do do with all the guff that they leave around. So here are my four top tools, and why I only really use two of them.

    Evernote

    2000px-EvernoteEvernote has become something of the big daddy of note taking systems with most people at least having heard of it, if not used it before. It has certainly earned that reputation as well, with most features of the app being easy to use, and the convenience of cloud synced notes is invaluable. Plus it has a relatively good searching system, with notes being indexed and decently easy to access. It is on the bloated side, with it trying to manage your notes, research, life, girlfriend/wife, and it would like to hold your hand on dates if it could. In that regard it essentially duplicates a bunch of other tasks, and several of them not particularly well. Nevertheless, this isn’t the critical flaw that some would like to believe. Think of it as a Swiss Army note pad. You are never going to use that funky skewering thingy, and rarely will you use all three of the bottle openers, but it does the core tasks quite well. You do have to pay for a bunch of features though. Want to use the iOS app offline: Premium, want to collaborate better: Premium, want to upload more: Premium, want to annotate your PDFs: Premium… etc. That just makes me annoyed really, but if you want to live in their ecosystem and use its advantages then it is only fair that they want you to pay for it. After all that lovely condo overlooking Central Park doesn’t come for free.

    However, there is one big caveat with Evernote, and it isn’t that it has such a close naming similarity to Endnote that it makes me shudder. When you are using Evernote you are in their system, and it is a proprietary one. It is a lesson I have learnt the hard way over a couple of other platforms (*cough* Springpad and others), and it involves losing all your notes and information if the system goes down. Evernote here is a bit more friendly, with the userbase being large enough that it shouldn’t go down suddenly, and if it does look like a sinking ship it does allow you to export your notes. Still, this ecosystem deal makes me feel a little queasy.

    OneNote

    microsoft-onenote-2013-06-535x535The next option is OneNote, from the Microsoft behemoth. OneNote does much the same as Evernote, with its own cloud syncing thingy, and given the size of the Micro$oft juggernaut it should be syncing, rather than sinking. Being linked in with the Office environment here makes it a fairly useful little tool, although you give up all of the nice archiving and indexing algorithms from Evernote. But on the flipside, you only have to pay through the nose once for the privilege of using the tool, rather than the pesky subscription model. However, the caveat here is the same as the one for Evernote. Indeed, OneNote is one of the platforms that I have lost data with before. Although in this case I have all my notes still jammed into the little .one files, dutifully backed up. I can do almost nothing with them. The version of OneNote that last opened them didn’t support easy export, and so short of copying and pasting them all it’s a bit of a lost cause. But hey, on the bright side at least I have the files (*hums* Always look on the bright side of life). This consigns OneNote to the same drawer as Evernote.

    Pages/Word/GoogleApps

    mzl.nnnyqswm.175x175-75The fourth option here is Pages, or Word if you are on PC/Android/WinMo, or Google Apps if you swing that way. These aren’t really dedicated note taking systems, although they can be pressed into service in a pinch. They all come with a variety of mobile apps, and you can cloud sync your notes via Dropbox (see the last post) so you can get at your notes anywhere. However, they are quite granular and don’t really support tagging or any other organisational features. So you need to keep your directory structures clean and clear. File format wise they are both proprietary but widespread enough that they can be opened on multiple platforms and by multiple apps.  Plus they can all be exported to PDF for archival. Quite nice really, but seriously bloated for a note taking app. That said, I still use Pages and Word for note taking in conferences (depending if I’m on the iPad or laptop), and then just export to PDF for archival at the end of the conference.

    SimpleNote/nvALT (simplenote.com & brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)

    nvALT2.0ScreenshotNone of the above solutions have really whetted my appetite for a note taking app, until this one: SimpleNote. If Evernote and OneNote are your full featured, slightly bloated and bulging note taking apps, then SimpleNote is the polar opposite. SimpleNote does exactly what it says, and is a basic text based note taking app. It supports one form of organisation: tagging; and that is about it. It is solely text and MultiMarkDown compatible, which means no fancy fonts or formatting, just plain text with some basic italics, bold and other simple formatting features. Where it excels is that it does this without any fuss and mess, and is easily exportable and cross compatible. For a start, given that everything is in text, and several helper apps can reach into the cloud to extract your notes and store them in .txt format on your machine, means that you don’t have to worry about being stuck in a proprietary system. Plus with everything being indexed in text format, apps such as DEVONthink or Spotlight can quickly read them and find your data. You can tag your notes with OpenMeta tags so you can find them easily, and being cloud based you can access your notes anywhere. As they are fairly open with their interface there are other good desktop helper apps to use as well. Personally here I use ResophNotes if I’m on Windows, and a fork from Notational Velocity called nvALT on the Mac. nvALT is my go to for quick note taking and it syncs easily with SimpleNote. That way I can have all the quick notes I need on my phone, and anywhere. From paper ideas, to pithy quotes, it is all here. I quite like this primer on text notes over on the ‘A Better Mess’ blog, he covers the range of uses better than I can in this short form now: Plain Text Primer : nvALT 101.

    Finally I will end this post by highlighting one use of this system. When I find particularly salient quotes from articles and books, I tend to store them in a little file on my SimpleNote, that I nickname my quote bank. Some of it is humorous anecdotes while others are serious treatises. But they are all there for ease of finding and rapid application.

    Well there it is, my note taking post, and why I don’t use Evernote, or OneNote. In this case simple wins out, with SimpleNote just having the ease and sticking power. Tell me why I’m a fool not to use Evernote, or your favourite note taking app, in the comments below.

  • Cognitive Biases: Laptops vs Paper – a useful case study on how to remember things (oh and biases)

    Cognitive Biases: Laptops vs Paper – a useful case study on how to remember things (oh and biases)

    Before we get into the Wednesday series on cognitive biases and fallacies in full swing I thought it would be good to look at a simple case study that not only applies to how we fall into biases unconsciously, but also teaches us a little about how we process information. For a little while now there have been a series of articles floating around the web and popping up from time to time based on the 2014 study by Mueller & Oppenheimer on memory retention with long hand vs laptop note taking. [ref]Mueller, Pam A., and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.” Psychological Science, April 23, 2014, 0956797614524581. doi:10.1177/0956797614524581.[/ref]

    It’s quite a salient topic to look at with the focus on appropriate methods of pedagogy and learning in our modern society, and the sudden and sharp uptake of computers in the last two decades; thanks to Gordon Moore. Now the majority of these articles focus on the study setup by Mueller and Oppenheimer which looks at memory retention from a variety of TED talks when students were asked to take notes in two different modes: handwriting, and laptop note taking. That study found that students performed better at recognition tasks when handwriting rather than laptop note taking. From this the majority of the articles I have read simply conclude that handwriting is superior to laptop note taking, that in the laptops vs paper debate traditional methods come up trumps.

    But is it really? Well before we get into the psychology behind learning and memory, it is worth noting a simple cognitive bias at play here. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a simple bias of taking note of the items or conclusions that fit our existing pattern of beliefs. Simply put the author of most of these articles sub-consciously eliminated the information that disagreed with their presupposition that using laptops in a classroom is detrimental to learning. Notably they ignored the link between laptop use and verbatim transcription, and the corresponding handwriting and synthesis based non-transcription.

    This is just a simple example of the problem with cognitive biases. We simply have a lot of them, and they are excellent at blinding us to alternative data and explanations that challenge our presuppositions. Furthermore there is no malice behind the biases in many cases, which makes it harder to detect in a self-reflective manner. However, being aware of our presuppositions and our predisposition to cognitive biases significantly helps in identifying where our biases are affecting our reasoning and thinking. That is the main reason behind this Wednesday series, if we know more about some of the more common biases it should help us internally defeat them.

    dilbert-confirmation-bias

    Biases aside and back to learning theory, as from the interview in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/ where thankfully the reporter has covered the whole of the study, Mueller reflects:

    “We don’t write longhand as fast as we type these days, but people who were typing just tended to transcribe large parts of lecture content verbatim,… the people who were taking notes on the laptops don’t have to be judicious in what they write down.”

    This reflection shows the underlying cognitive working behind the study design of typing vs handwriting. Indeed the claim of better memory retention from handwritten versus typed comes from the level of cognitive engagement, as in thinking and processing, in the memory task. If you are cognitively engaged, such as you are when synthesising material for a paper, then the mode of recording has little consequence (so long as you record something to be able to find it again several months down the track).

    There have been some studies done with low- and high-cognitive load tasks, along with possible low-cognitive load distraction tasks (flipping coins etc) which show its the load of the task that affects retention. Ultimately if you are cognitively disengaged, such as simply transcribing notes for a lecture, then the ‘harder’ cognitive task of handwriting will generally yield better results. [ref]Cf. Piolat et al, 2012; Makany et al, 2008 for cog load; and Schoen, 2012 for contra Mueller & Oppenheimer[/ref]

    wpid-Photo-20141004215054I generally recommend that people take notes in a ‘cognitively difficult’ fashion. What constitutes cognitively difficult varies per person as well, for some it may involve reading around the subject before and after class, while for others it may be formulating interesting questions even if they are not asked in class. While for students who are learning in a non-native language it may actually mean typing verbatim, as the very act of thinking in a non-native language is a hard cognitive task. Indeed some of the students I had last year did this, and subsequently took photos of the whiteboard after class to supplement their notes. As per this amusing anecdote on James McGrath’s blog here. This probably wouldn’t be a useful task for many people with English as a native language, but for them working across a language barrier it helped with both retention and accuracy.

    Realistically for long term memory retention the cognitive load should be high, and the material should be reviewed regularly. I recommend having a high cognitive engagement, even if it is via typing, but review after 24hours and then 3 days and 7 days. Furthermore if the task is able to be used in a synthesis fashion, by perhaps answering questions or writing a personal paper or synopsis on the lecture at hand, then this will reinforce the cognitive loading of the task as well. As from the Mueller & Oppenheimer study abstract the ultimate difference appears to be the act of ‘processing information and reframing it in their own words’ rather than the physical mechanism. So take notes well, and also take note of your cognitive biases.

    Some tools for note taking will be coming up in future Monday posts, and look forward to more cognitive biases on Wednesdays. Tell me what your preferred note taking method is in the comments.