Practice Taking Notes

Select a lecture or presentation in one of your classes, or attend a talk that is presented on campus or in the community. If you can, go with a friend or involve a classmate in this activity. Apply your active note taking skills to this event and afterwards, use your notes to do the following activities.

• List the main points.
• Prioritize the main points according to how important they were to the topic.
• Relate the main points together. Draw the connections among your main points and next to the lines you draw, write a word or phrase describing the relationship. (Don’t be surprised if this begins to look a lot like a mind or concept map.)
• From these main points, list and describe the overall concepts that make up the main points. This exercise will help you identify the more abstract elements of the lecture or presentation. You will identify things such as assumptions, themes, interpretations, theories, concepts, hypotheses, views, and ideas by creating your own meta-analysis of the lecture or presentation.
• Using these overall themes, theories, etc., review other sources that relate to the topic; these might include articles, textbooks, and class discussions.
• From these sources, write a short interpretation of the lecture. This interpretation might look like the introduction or summary that you often see in book chapters. It may also be similar to the introductory or concluding overheads used in a presentation. What you will have created is a way of organizing the topic that is meaningful to you and to your further studies.

If you were able to work with a partner on this exercise, exchange the lists of main points, priorities, relationships, themes, and your own short explanation. Compare what each of you developed. How are they similar and how are they different? Explore the differences by explaining to each other how and why you interpreted the topic as you did. If you were to collaborate on introducing this topic to others, how would you reorganize and combine the two interpretations?