This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I hate how the term Luddite has been co-opted as a blanket term for someone who rejects technology for any reason. The original Luddites were a labor movement who were angry that technology was taking people’s livelihoods while society was doing nothing to prevent those people from becoming destitute.
Kinda exactly how AI is going to fuck over a lot of people while primarily benefiting the rich people who own it.
Was gonna bring up the same point about Luddites. They were absolutely pro-automation.
They saw greedy corporations using automation, and getting ready to fuck their society into the dirt, so they started petitioning their local governments, tried to negotiate and drew up the plans for a social security program ~150 years before one was actually implemented, smashed a bunch of expensive corporate equipment when the government wouldn't respond, then the government sided with corporate, used the military to drag all the men, women, and children into public squares and executed every last one of them. Even relatives and companions that weren't in the group and didn't participate. So thoroughly annihilated that it left an informational pinhole in the history books, and the name was co-opted into an insult. Now we're really not sure if John Ludd even existed, maybe the name was just a mythical legend already, and was used as a rally point to boost morale.
And here we are, barely 200 years in the future, about to repeat the fuzzy spots again and rediscover why we brought citrus fruits with us on the ships, with the general population completely oblivious to the brutality the owner class is ready and able to deploy.
What happens if the tech bros are right, and the machine doesn't need 9/10ths of the human population any more?
Indeed. The Luddites the high-skilled technology workers of their time! And were the first bloody chapter of the labour movement, nearly erased from that history by their oppressors. "Blood in the machine" by Brian Merchant is a great history of this.
Luddite is a derogatory term anyway. One might have legit reasons to be against personally using certain technologies
I did that in uni, too. Everyone brought their laptops to the lectures while I took notes on paper. Writing by hand makes your brain absorb the information better I think
Me too, but that's because my parents bought me a laptop with like a 19 inch screen thinking it would be helpful. That fucker was heavy.
Not just what you think. Hand writing is scientifically better for memory retention and more https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/
It does. I vastly prefer writing notes by hand than typing em. But my handwriting sucks when I have to write quickly, and I also don’t like lugging around giant stacks of paper. And so I settled on a digital writing pad, and just do the work to type my notes later. Acts as revision too.
so I settled on a digital writing pad
Which hardware/OS?
Back in university, it was an iPad mini 5, using Notability. Notability has enshittified badly though.
These days (I’m no longer in university so I do write a lot less), I write on a Kobo.
Same for me. Also I sat in front, becouse in the back I would be disturbed by all the not-lecture related stuff people had open on their laptops.
Is taking notes by hand really that exceptional? When I went to college ages ago I only typed essays on a desktop computer, studying was done with textbook + lecture notes, maaybe with a handful of online resources.
I can kind of see this right now. I'm in a first year course and almost everyone has a laptop in front of them. I'm in a fourth year course and most people use paper notes. It could be survivorship or a result of differences in the desks, or it could be generational.
While browsing Insta and Tiktok on a cellphone in class. That word does not mean what you think it means.
I really like being able to Ctrl+F through my book.
But there just seems to be some kind of feel to flipping a page that makes me feel more focussed.
Engagement. I'm a teacher and using all of your senses to look for information makes you remember that said piece of information more.
It's funny, most studying comes down to that... And motivation, which is also something you have if you prefer books over laptop.
Your book does one single thing, you cannot be distracted by other functions.
Went to school before the late '90s: Write everything in paper notebooks & exam books.
Went to school between late '90s-2020s: Tap it all into a computer. Learn nothing.
Went to school late 2020s on: Write in paper notebooks, in between scavenging the ruins for food.
Title is misleading:
Nick, a philosophy student at the University of Cambridge, stopped using his laptop for university work in the last year of his undergraduate degree. He still types his essays, but lecture notes, revision, and essay planning are all done by hand.
The second sentence contradicts the first:
stopped using his laptop for university work
then
He still types his essays
So basically he's not taking a laptop in to the lecture hall to take notes etc but is still using a computer to complete his work. Which makes sense as pen & paper in that environment is way more practical anyway.
All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.
I just have a hard time picturing things being so different from when I left academia only a couple of years ago. Everybody still had pen and paper notebooks
Is now a good time to complain about that one guy who brings a $3000 gaming laptop to the computer science lectures because expensive stuff makes him a good programmer and proceeds to distract people accross the room by the sheer volume of his fan spinning?
Don't complain about my Lenovo Jetpad. The jet engine helped me think by drowning out other sounds.
I'm deaf now, but that was a sacrifice.
Laptops are extremely useful. It really doesn't make sense to avoid them.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.
Withering away your first brain in the process.
As someone who studied without laptop through an entire bachelor's degree - it is a valid option, and I still often make handwritten notes of study materials.
When you write things down by hand, you process information for longer and use more parts of your brain to do so, which genuinely helps to memorize study materials.
It also allows for more focus. Personally, I found that when I moved, eventually, to using laptop in my studies, it has reduced my attention span and added unnecessary distractions. When all you have at your fingertips is paper and a pen, there is nowhere to get astray.
I haven't been to school for a couple decades. Do they no longer teach how to take proper notes in your first year (paper or computer or otherwise)?
First year... In college? No, that's pre-requisite knowledge that they expect students to have from secondary school.
