Timeline for Taking lecture notes in lectures
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
27 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 3, 2011 at 0:46 | comment | added | roy smith | The thing that works best for me is to listen to the lecture attentively and not take notes. Then after the lecture to go to a quiet place and write down what I remember from the lecture. However this was so scary, at least as a student, that it was hard to do. I did it only a few times as a young person but it worked really well. I guess the hard part is you must actually listen, while taking notes is an excuse not to pay attention, and hence easier. | |
| Sep 26, 2010 at 2:59 | comment | added | Arend Bayer | About the tap-tap-tapping: I have been in talks where the constant typing by some members in the audience was quite loud and distracting -- e.g. a few times the speaker heard a noise and thought someone wanted to ask a question, when in fact it had just come from someone's keyboard. (I should also say that I am sure I have sat in talks that Anton was live-texing, and I can't remember noticing anything, so maybe he does have a quiet keyboard and keystroke!) | |
| Sep 20, 2010 at 23:56 | comment | added | Anthony Pulido | I've been looking forward to live-TeXing since I read your answer and had the chance to start today. It's just as you said! Thanks! | |
| May 24, 2010 at 22:14 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | Anton, I grant you that I am very skeptical about live-Texing in general, but my real question is, what do you do with pictures? For talks in topology and geometric group theory, I even bring colored pens and they proved indispensable. Once at Cornell Topology Festival I was sitting next to a person who flipped the tablet PC twice a minute in order to switch between text and diagrams. Two students in my differential geometry course took tablet PC notes. One of them Texed the math and drew fairly basic diagrams with a tablet pen, with a so-so overall result. How well have you fared? | |
| Apr 27, 2010 at 21:02 | comment | added | The Mathemagician | You know,I keep putting off learning TeX and getting a laptop to do exactly this.But the more examples I see of this,the more I realize it's not just the wave of the future,but really does represent a technological advance over old fashioned note taking. Not only does it preserve all the old positives of handwritten notes,they look much more professional,polished and above all,faster.So I'm slowly getting sold on this. | |
| Apr 27, 2010 at 8:03 | comment | added | Miguel | Live TeXing is definitely the way to go. | |
| Apr 27, 2010 at 5:10 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | I have live-TeXed all of my math courses since arriving at MIT. It took me awhile to realize that this was not already standard! It just seemed like the obvious thing to do. Some of them might even be worth editing and putting online... | |
| Apr 27, 2010 at 4:49 | vote | accept | Gil Kalai | ||
| Apr 27, 2010 at 4:49 | history | bounty ended | Gil Kalai | ||
| Feb 6, 2010 at 6:48 | comment | added | Anton Geraschenko | I have occasionally worried that somebody would be annoyed by the tippity-tapping, but nobody ever said anything. Maybe my laptop keyboard is actually pretty quiet. Given that I've never gotten any negative feedback about live-TeXing and gotten lots of positive feedback (from people using the notes), I've decided not to worry about it. | |
| Feb 3, 2010 at 9:37 | comment | added | D. Savitt | I started live-TeXing at some point, but stopped because I got paranoid that the tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard would annoy the people sitting around me. (Not that anyone said anything.) I hope that's wrong though; I'd like to get back to it. Do any of the veteran live-TeXers here have a sense what your neighbors thought of it? | |
| Feb 3, 2010 at 8:44 | comment | added | Anton Geraschenko | @Adam: I'm not sure I understand your question. If by "unformatted" you mean with no LaTeX markup, then answer is no. When you're used to typing LaTeX, you can do it fast enough that there's no reason not to do it in real time. Not putting in all the control sequences gives you more work to do later and doesn't save you anything during the lecture. | |
| Feb 3, 2010 at 8:27 | comment | added | Adam Libster | I don't get it, if you're going to type it up, wouldn't it be faster just to write it unformatted in notepad and then tex it? | |
| Jan 26, 2010 at 20:30 | comment | added | Anweshi | @Anton. Thanks for putting up your sources. These headers would help me in my attempts, I suppose. | |
| Jan 26, 2010 at 7:15 | comment | added | Peter Samuelson | I have heard of (but not seen) lecturers live-TEXing their lectures on a projector. (I think it was a physics professor at Caltech in the early 00's.) | |
| Jan 25, 2010 at 19:47 | comment | added | B. Bischof | @Scott Yes I would totally love to see the livewave lecture. Right now wave is NOT up to the task. Between the slow servers and the poor tex recognition, it just would not work. The graduate student seminar at K-state is currently using wave to organize the lecture notes that we are preparing separately, also we use it to organize logistics, but this is the extent of Gwave's usefulness at this point. | |
| Jan 25, 2010 at 19:37 | history | edited | Anton Geraschenko | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
added 497 characters in body
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| Jan 25, 2010 at 19:26 | comment | added | Anton Geraschenko | @Gil: I would say yes, but I haven't tried it any other way. Without looking, I can pretty comfortably type any text, backslashes, dollar signs, carats, and stars. My fingers do sometimes have trouble typing ampersands. | |
| Jan 25, 2010 at 15:38 | comment | added | Gil Kalai | Anton, does live texing requires the ability for blind typing? | |
| Jan 23, 2010 at 4:06 | comment | added | Anton Geraschenko | @Harry: I type up commutative diagrams in xy-pic, even quite complicated ones like spectral sequences and commutative cubes (as a result, I can draw a commutative cube on a chalkboard more easily than most people). I do bring paper with me in case there's some complicated picture I don't have time to type out, but I almost never use it. Even when a lecturer draws a complicated picture, I usually prefer to describe the picture in words and then draw it later if I think it's important enough. | |
| Jan 23, 2010 at 2:50 | comment | added | Chris Schommer-Pries | I do commutative diagrams, and sometimes even spectral sequences. At the top of my game I could even live-tex a TikZ diagram! There are a couple of tricks which help. I copied one of Anton's preambles (you can get it from his many source files). This has lots of predefined commands which are useful to have, like \R for \mathbb{R} or \cC for \mathcal{C}. Have the whole alphabet ready to go. I have a Mac, and use TexShop, which is great since I can make macros. This way I can do commutative diagrams on the fly. I type ctrl-command-C and all the code for a com. square pops. | |
| Jan 23, 2010 at 0:21 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Do you actually type up commutative diagrams and things of that nature, or only really inline text and some easier displays? | |
| Jan 22, 2010 at 22:54 | comment | added | darij grinberg | I remember TeXing a year of lectures. It didn't make the lectures harder to follow, it definitely made them easier to follow. The only negative side-effect was that I had to spam the lecturer with questions of the kind "is this an iso of algebras or an iso of modules", but probably these questions were not totally useless. I would say that taking notes on a GOOD lecture is definitely worth it, and TeXing is even more worth it, unless it is a picturesque course such as topology. | |
| Jan 22, 2010 at 20:00 | comment | added | Kim Morrison | Someday I want to live-wave a lecture. Any takers? Perhaps we need a better wave-->tex workflow first. | |
| Jan 22, 2010 at 19:13 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | I agree with this -- after a little bit of practice, live-Texing is just as fast or faster than conventional note-taking, and so much more useful afterwards. I think I got the idea from Bjorn Poonen in 2006 when I learned that he live-Texes most or all of the talks he attends. In retrospect, this is really funny to me: it must be the only time I have had the thought, "Well, if Bjorn Poonen can do it, then surely I can too!" I guess I have a high opinion of myself as a typist. | |
| Jan 22, 2010 at 18:44 | comment | added | Chris Schommer-Pries | As one of the people Anton converted to live-Texing notes I can attest to its superiority! Before trying it I thought "No way! It's going to be too difficult to Tex it". But amazingly he's right. You end up with EXTRA time when you type it out. In my typed notes I always have lots of comments and jokes that the speaker said that I wouldn't have time for in written notes. For the first 3-4 lectures it was hard. Best to practice with talks/subjects you are familiar with. After that it became easier. If I know there are going to be lots of pics, I combine this with the digital camera approach. | |
| Jan 22, 2010 at 18:21 | history | answered | Anton Geraschenko | CC BY-SA 2.5 |