I like to attend conferences. At these conferences, I also find it interesting to observe how people take notes.
No Notes
You of course will find the people that do not take any notes at all. Some of these are those incredibly smart folks that seem to be able to just remember everything. Some are the folks that are not exactly there by choice, and are not paying much attention.
I did a lot of this during my school years. I usually didn’t find it too useful to take notes. Of the two categories above, I like to think I was more in the first category than the second. But at school, you quite often had a text book that you were following anyway. For most of my schooling, the teachers mostly were just reading the text book to us anyway. So not much use to take extra notes.
There were of course the better teachers that actually seemed to know how to teach, and I did take notes during those sessions. The good speakers at the well-known conferences you’ll find will fit this category more. They have a passion for teaching others, and will now certain tricks to engage the audience, without just reading the slides.
Copy Everything
On the other end of the spectrum, you will find the people that will try to copy down everything. At conferences that are recorded, sometimes they end up not taking any notes, because they know they can go back through the recording later. Sometimes they will end up trying to basically transcribe the speech. They take pictures of the slides.
This of course can be useful, but it can also show a lack of comprehension. Perhaps the topic is just new enough that you don’t know which parts are important. In that case, of course you are trying to write it all down, because you don’t know what you will need later. But if you have a sea of notes that you need to try and swim through later, this type of note-taking can end up being a detriment. You may feel overwhelmed with the amount of notes, or just not be able to find the specific thing you are looking for.
Bullet Point Notes
It may be more helpful to take notes on the specifically interesting or bulleted points of the presentation. Of course, these will usually look very similar to the slides that the presenter is using. This type of note-taking can help you focus your memory, and help to narrow your recall later.
Focus on the important bits of the presentation. For an unfamiliar topic, this of course may be difficult. But if you do have some familiarity with the topic at hand, then you will naturally narrow your focus. You will filter out the bits you already know, and hone in on the unfamiliar and new.
This, I think, seems to be the most common form of note-taking. This is probably why the tools like PowerPoint exist in the first place. They help the presenter to formulate their talks in a way that will be familiar and easy to digest for the majority of people.
Your own Narrative
The note taking approach that I find the most useful personally is to reformulate the talk into your own narrative. I actually started to practice this when taking notes on the homilies at church. Take what the presenter is saying, and basically reformulate it and write it down in your own words. It is kind of like imagining that you need to give a talk on this right after the current presenter, and you are laying out what you will say.
This approach can really help you to solidify the topic in your mind. Because you immediately translate what is being said into a form that is most familiar to you, recall becomes very easy. You may not immediately remember everything, of course, but your notes will seem to flow much better. You will be able to find the tidbit of information in your notes much easier.
Slip Box
Somebody recently put me on to the concept of slip box note taking. This is a way to basically codify coherent ideas (full sentences) on notecards, and arrange them into a kind of threaded model. Each idea in a thread connects to another one in a specific way. The slip box approach then really becomes a way to organize the notecards in a way that you can retrieve them later.
I haven’t tried this approach out much, but it does seem interesting. It might work out better if you plan to reformulate your notes into a work of your own (such as writing a book) later. But I think it can also be a very powerful tool for how to read and comprehend code as well.