Comment by throw8PLTwtFe
21 days ago
Typically, the issue is slides allows the speaker to present stuff much faster than a person can realistically write (unlike writing on a board), so you end up with lossy notes. The coping mechanism for students is therefore by writing notes on the slides. Slides also help you preview the lecture, though few people probably actually do this.
But why wouldn't you just give them the slides? Isn't it the students problem if there is stuff missing?
It's not me who doesn't give the slides. Some people are just precious about their work. I personally don't think this type of attitude is great for a teaching professional.
My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.
> you end up with lossy notes
Notes are definitionally lossy. If they weren't lossy, they'd be a transcript.
The act of compressing a lecture into notes helps students learn. Merely transcribing does not imply understanding.
What I find though when taking notes from a non-academic conference presentation is that I often don’t know what the most salient points or compressed takeaways are in real-time. I don’t end up with a transcript but I do end up with a lot of discard and I’ll take pics of some slides.
Compressing accurately requires understanding what's important.
If you understand it that well already, why are you attending a lecture that covers it?
Truly excellent lecturers can often guide some people to that understanding in a note-friendly amount of time, but oh god, most people are not excellent lecturers. The vast majority that I attended were almost literally just reading from the book in class. Book-structured information isn't at all the same as lecture-structured.