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HOST: Welcome back to the Student Hub Live. OK, you've all been chatting a lot about note-taking. So this is your session, all about note-taking. And joining me is Suzanne Newcombe. Now Suzanne is a lecturer in religious studies. And she's currently writing a chapter on Buddhism, which means that she is having to go back to all her undergraduate notes that she took many moons ago-- probably not that many moons ago, Suzanne.
[LAUGHS]
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Feels like it.
HOST: So I'm hoping these notes are useful to you. Our students have been talking today in our reading session about how they're using notes sometimes to make sense of things. Now we wanted this session to be quite different. Because of course, whilst you might do the two concurrently, we found out from Azumah that there's more to reading than just physically reading. And there's more to note-taking than just physically writing things down. They both have very different purposes.
And what we've been talking about in terms of time management, in terms of reading, and now note-taking, is that there are strategies. There's some stuff that works. And we're going to show students some of the stuff that we find works in the hope that they can pick a few of those bits up and start maybe using it in their own studies as well.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Yeah, absolutely.
HOST: Good. Good. So we'd like you to fill in our widgets, which are, where do you do your best thinking about your OU course? Now if you're a new student, this could be hypothetical. Or it could just be about where you do your best thinking. There's a range of options. So select the one that suits you. Walking the dog doesn't necessarily have to be a four-legged hound. It could be stroking the cat. Because other pets are available, as I've been told.
And also, how do your ideas develop most naturally? So what sorts of things-- we've heard about people taking notebooks to bed, et cetera. But what works well for you? So let us know. And we'll see what's most popular. Of course, when you vote, you'll see what everyone else thinks also. So Suzanne, what's the purpose then of taking notes?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Well, there's lots of different purposes. It really depends on what your purpose is. One of the things is what Azumah talked a lot about, is having a dialogue with what you're reading or having a dialogue if you're at a tutorial to just think about what your tutor is saying as they're lecturing. And then you've got kind of notes to ask questions about when you need to have a dialogue.
But it's also about capturing your thoughts and your insights and intuitions, particularly if you're doing a social science or humanities course because your tutors really want to know what you think, what you've understood, and how you answer the question. If you're doing a more science-based or language-based, your notes might be about, what are the most important things to remember? And they might be really the start of kind of memorisation note cards. So it really depends.
And if you're working on a really big project, a longer essay like an EMA, then you might just want to collect interesting things as you go along. And they may or may not be useful when you actually sit down to write. But it will help your thinking if you're not forgetting all the time.
HOST: Now what were your notes like when you were an undergraduate, so the things you're having to sort of go back and revisit? I found some of my old notes. And some of them, I was very, very-- I was impressed with. Some of them, like when I was doing biological psychology, I got a big brain. And I'd try and relate everything to everything because it was all over the place in terms of the book because we were talking at different levels. And I was trying to use notes to contextualise that.
Some of it is appalling. And I look at that and think, I was just copying from the book. What good was that when I've got the book still?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Yeah, absolutely.
HOST: So have you noticed a shift in your own notes?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Have I noticed a shift? Well, this is one of my introductory notes from when I was an undergraduate for a live lecture. And I used lots of different colours. And Azumah was talking about--
HOST: If you can tilt it forward a bit-- so yeah, there we are.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: --colours for different-- you could be really organised in your colours. I just used different colours, I think, to help me stay awake.
[LAUGHING]
But it was really helpful. And going back, thinking about an introduction to Buddhism, looking at my notes from nearly 20 years ago has helped me realise what I've remembered and what the key points are. And I was never expecting to use it for that when I took the notes. I was just hoping to pass the exam.
[LAUGHING]
But you can be surprised at how they reflect your processing and your understanding and what really was what you took in. I was a bit disappointed because I remember drawing a beautiful bird about insight and compassion being the two sides of an aspect of Buddhist thinking. And I've been scouring my notes to find that beautiful bird. But I still remember the bird. I can't find the bird.
[LAUGHS]
HOST: But it's part of note-taking. I mean, it's about being able to trace back, like we were talking earlier about how you're not expected to remember everything. You will never remember at the end of your qualification-- six years on or whatever it is-- you're not going to remember what you did in week one, day one, et cetera. But you might want to know what sorts of things you did and how you might be able to trace back to it if, indeed, it's something that you might want to link further on. Because often, we're scaffolding ideas.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the notes you take at the beginning of a course, you might-- note-taking can be a way of revising for your exams as well. So one of my colleagues in the religious studies department was talking about these mind maps, which we can talk about more later. But it's kind of a--
HOST: Just-- I'll hold it up here.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Yeah, you hold it. It's a visual way of you can get from just having a linear sense of notes or having to know what to say. You just put words in bubbles and think about how they connect to each other. And my colleague was saying he was ready for the exam when he could get everything he knew about a subject onto one A4 sheet in this method. And then he knew that he could kind of get it in his head no matter what the question might be.
So there's many, many ways of taking notes. And I think we'll go through a few different options. But a lot of it's about capturing what is in your head, what you're thinking about, what's your understanding. So it's very personal. And the way technology is changing so much, I think we all need to reassess what strategies we're using and kind of reflect. Because when I was an undergraduate, there weren't audio recorders. There weren't-- I took lots of notes on little notecards like library catalogues. And I still kind of think in that way.
But now we've got apps that you can just jot something down on your phone. You can walk along and talk in your phone and if you don't have a pen and paper. Or I mean, it's still something really important about using your hands to record. And I think that that helps you remember what you're doing in a different way than typing, so thinking about what works for you and what your purpose is. Yeah.
HOST: Yeah. And I guess it's one of these things. We're going to talk about writing in your own words a bit later. But I remember thinking sometimes, there was this sort of idea that there had to be some sort of parity between what was in the book and what were in my notes. And it was only much later that I realised that sometimes it took someone a lot of words to explain something very, very complex, almost like riding a bike that once I'd got, I sort of-- yeah, that's fine. I get that even that, even though it was a lot of words. And it's this whole sort of, I guess, rehashing and repurposing things and making sense of it that means that they don't always have to happen in parallel.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And how you think is you need to work with how you think. When I was an undergraduate, I had the luxury of having this big, blank wall. And I'm sure some of you do have that luxury and some of you don't. But I used kind of the Post-it notes and just wrote things down and moved them around so that I was kind of visualising my essay in not a written-down structure. But what are the ideas? What do I want to include? And sometimes things would go over there because I thought they were important. But now they're not.
So I think note-taking is really a process of unpacking your thinking, trying to record what you might want to remember, and making your study work for you in whatever your purposes are. And you might not know exactly what you're going to use it for later. It might be very directed towards your nearest assignments, your nearest EMA, your nearest exam. Or it might be just kind of this is interesting. I don't know how I'm going to use it. But I might come back to it later.
HOST: Yeah. A lot of students will use a notebook or a reflective journal or a combination of the two even to take notes. But you're saying that a lot of it is about, I guess, doing the reading and maybe annotating in the way that Azumah was talking about before. But there needs to be maybe some sort of gap. And it's this thinking gap between the internalising of the stuff and then thinking about what might be important.
And so we'd ask people where they did their best thinking about their OU courses and also where their ideas developed most naturally. Now the answers are quite interesting. 68%-- which was the top figure-- said that they do that best thinking about their OU course at their desk at home. The other options were in a library, while cooking dinner, working at the kitchen table, or while walking the dog, which incidentally, came up as the second best option, which I often find a really good space to think.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: You don't have to have a dog to go for a walk, however.
HOST: No, exactly, but it helps. And then we also asked about how they develop ideas most naturally. Now this was very, very interesting. Of the options, which you would have thought that writing lists with pen and paper would come up most highly. That only got 22%. Our most popular way of developing ideas is talking to yourself. So we can see the poll here on the screen. So talking to yourself is way in the lead.
Other people, 24%-- and perhaps this is a way that you can talk to family and friends. In fact, often I'll say to somebody, can I just talk to you about what I'm trying to do? Or can you read what I've written? And they say, but I don't know anything about it. And I say, but that's brilliant. Because you shouldn't. Because if I haven't explained this to you, I'm not doing my job. I want you to spot the gaps. So tell us then about the sort of I guess space then between the learning and the note-taking, and as you say, recording what you may need to remember or the point that you may or may not know what the purpose of it is?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Well, I think that the talking to yourself or talking to someone else is really interesting. And it can be a really good intermediary step between note-taking and actually writing your essay. And some of the modules now have oral assignments, where people are asked to express themselves orally. And some students actually do much better at that than they do in their essay writing.
And with all the modern technology, you can now really harness that as a preliminary note-taking for your written work if you just record your conversation with your friend. Or you can walk along with your phone and pretend you're talking to someone and just record your thoughts. And then when you listen back to them, you can capture them and structure them in an essay much more efficiently than if you just stare at the blank page. I think staring at the blank page is the hardest part of writing an essay, once you've got something to change.
But I think it's about notes. While you're reading, you might just take-- as Azumah was saying-- you might take notes to stay awake. I shouldn't say that. But I certainly did that as an undergraduate. But you might take notes because you don't understand it. You're trying really hard to understand. And that's just an element of active, critical thinking in your study. And then you go back and take notes differently at a different time when you're working for a different purpose.
And so you have different sets of notes. You refer back and forth. And you need to be flexible about how you're doing that and keep thinking of, is this the best way? Because I get stuck in, oh, I did that last time. But actually, I might think better somehow differently for this project.
HOST: No, exactly-- because often when you're rehashing ideas or reconstituting things, sometimes you can miss some of the important things that you might need.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely.
HOST: And so verbalising those things, explaining them to other people can identify some of those gaps. Yeah, I was asking HJ to read something the other day. And I said, actually, this is the argument I've got. And he's like, well, it's not really apparent here. And then I thought, actually, I'm just too close to it. I need to sort of take a step back.
Speaking of HJ, welcome, Kester. I see that HJ has finally got a break. So you're joining us on the Hot Desk. And earlier, everyone was talking about note-taking. We couldn't get a word in for our reading. So is note-taking still the topic of conversation on our Hot Desk, Zach and Kester?
KESTER: Yeah, it is, also with cake as well, as there some people talking about eating cake. But yeah, there's some interesting ideas. Katrina said about making mind maps and writing in learning outcomes to keep on track and going back and rereading the notes after a few hours. Someone else has mentioned about if you're remembering notes, writing the words in the shape of an animal, draw a fish, write the words along the outline. And that's a hopeful way.
ZACH: Yeah.
KESTER: So yeah, interesting ideas.
ZACH: Yeah. And we've got-- apart from cake-- a lot of note-taking, highlighting. And Justin was talking about making study cards to help him remember key words and descriptions. So yeah, a lot of good ideas and a lot of people engaging with the session. It's pretty-- it's good stuff. Thank you.
HOST: I hear Taylor puts Post-it notes all over the house, but why on the ceiling? I mean, I don't even know if I can reach-- certainly can't reach it in here. We'll come back to that, Taylor. It sounds like an interesting idea. I used it when I was revising for exams. I used to go and have a wall for memory, a wall for attention, a wall for this, that, and the other.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Oh, right, yeah.
HOST: And I would physically look at spaces. And I love that idea about writing notes in the shape of things. In fact, one of my notes that I was trying to find that I had thrown away I was so proud of is I had drawn all these diagrams. And I could see it in my mind. Because for me sometimes, I mean, my notes have never been very wordy. Like often, I'll draw things. So I'll draw like an attentional spotlight.
Or I remember the cocktail effect by drawing a cocktail and a cherry on it who was the originator of the theory. And I would sort of make these pictures in my mind as I was taking notes. And I always find that more useful, especially for exams when I had to remember lots of stuff.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely.
HOST: So do notes have to involve words? I mean, people have been talking about mind maps and things. What are your sort of--
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Well, I think if you can draw-- you don't have to be an artist. But often, like I said, I remember that bird I drew as an undergraduate. And that really stuck in my head, or your cocktail thing.
HOST: Yeah.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: And as you were saying before, quite often, the central ideas of what you want to say are actually really concise. But they take a long time to justify, to provide the evidence to show that you can put it in context in your course materials. So your notes probably will involve some words. But they don't have to be many words. Don't feel like if you're not taking many words, you're not doing a good job of taking notes. Because actually, it might be better if you've really got the key points and you can have a very short outline of what you engaged with in a deep way.
HOST: Well, we've heard from Taylor, who says the best ceiling is the bathroom so that one can lie in the bath, which I think is a glorious way of studying. In fact, if I remember when I first got into-- I used to like-- sometimes I didn't get the materials. So I used to go on YouTube. And I used to, like, listen to all these videos and lectures.
I discovered the Institute of Psychiatry lectures, which I was all are brilliant, so I used to go hour-long lecture in the bath, put my laptop on, and do that. So studying in the bath is great.
OK. But sometimes these notes, I mean, especially if you've got an exam-- and not all students will have an exam-- but notes don't always have to be the notes. Often we'll revise them. We'll sort of try and draw things together, in particular maybe when we're planning for assignments. So when you've got the initial notes, how do you then go about revising them?
And what then if they don't sort of make sense? You know how you sometimes, you look at something. And you're like, I don't really understand what I mean by that? How do you go back and forwards using the notes as some sort of linking?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Well, if they don't make sense, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Because part of note-taking is about the process. And it's not about having an outcome. So even if they didn't make sense now, they helped in your process to get where you are now. So I would just start again if it's not making sense. Read your assignments. Read what is your purpose now and start brainstorming. Start thinking about what you read that might be relevant and just skim it. There's lots of different ways of reading. But when you skim it, you might find those few highlighted points or headings if you didn't do highlighting that really jump out as being relevant.
Sometimes the quotes that Azumah was talking about-- she highlights things she might want to quote later-- that's a good way of starting to structure an essay. But then you also need to balance that with writing your own words, which I know you're going to talk about later. So notes can be the potential quotes you're going to use. And then you frame that around your own words. Why is this relevant? Why is this interesting? How does it develop the answer to the question you're doing?
And I think that it's about just a process to keep in the mind of there's not a single answer. You can go back, look at it. If what you have now isn't right, just rework it. Go for a walk. Talk to your partner. Do something different.
HOST: Because of course, unless you come on the Student Hub Live, no one's ever going to see your notes.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: No, absolutely.
HOST: You know, they're yours. And they're part of your thing. And when we were sort of talking about how you were taking notes in your undergraduate, trying to keep awake in lectures, trying to use different things. I bet you use different sorts of strategies and things now, and possibly for different purposes as well. What advice would you give to students, in particular-- we've got conscientious students out there. They're all logging on. They're all getting ready and getting early and excited about their studies.
What advice would you give students about playing with different techniques and not worrying too much if the notes aren't brilliant? Because I used to be so worried that they wouldn't be good enough. I used to want to go to my tutorials with them all nicely written. And I never felt that they were quite suitable for showing. And then I didn't realise actually that no one was interested in them.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: No.
HOST: They were mine.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely. They're just for you. And when I was younger, I had the luxury of studying full-time. And so I had the time to write nice, long notes. But now as an adult, it's more about capturing my thoughts when I've got five minutes to actually think and no one's interrupting me at home, and something I'm writing comes to mind, is how do I make sure that I don't forget that and it gets in my notes for tomorrow when I sit down at the desk?
So I think it's really about just being flexible and not worrying about it being perfect. It just has to be useful and trusting yourself that your insights, your what you remember is important and is interesting. Because at the end of the day, this is about you. It's not about the person who wrote the book.
HOST: Yeah.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: We want to know your understanding and how it's going to change your thinking
HOST: Now increasingly, people are getting hold of technology as a way of facilitating their learning. And no surprise that the Open University, where it's all distance, we've got a lot of people who really like technology. Time management apps and various ways of taking notes-- we were talking about OneNote earlier-- can work for certain people. I mean, last night in the middle of the night, I had an idea. And I just used my phone to record it because I couldn't be bothered getting up and writing something down. And we've heard of people writing things by their beds.
How much of note-taking has to be note-taking? And how much of it is about recording these processes? And do you ever use other technologies, or maybe voice, or other ways of sort of capturing those thoughts so that they're something that you can go back to? Because like you say, sometimes you do get that moment where you think, I can see how it all relates together. I can see the angle that you've got here. And it's those moments when you're walking the dog when you've thought through things that can really just be that nugget in that assignment.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely. And I think we've talked about quite a few ways of doing it. Recording on your phones is so easy now. You could have just a little notebook you're carrying around with you. And you could have the notes by your bed, which definitely helps you sleep if you suddenly have a to-do that comes to mind or a brilliant idea if you can just write it down.
But I think the other challenge is kind of a way of filing, a way of making sure you come back, can find those notes again, so even though I make recordings on my phones, remembering to come back to them. So I think there needs to be a certain amount of discipline to make it useful. So when you do come back to your desk, you come back to your study, if you just spend like two minutes thinking, can I put the notes in a place, in a file for this TMA, in a file for this book, just so that I can come back to them and find them again? And so I've got the folders-- I was able to find my folder for undergraduate. But it doesn't take too much. But you need a bit of filing to be able to come back to it for your assignments and then redo notes.
HOST: And I guess it's knowing. Like sometimes, I'll write a note. And I have piles. So sometimes, I'll chuck it on that pile. And the Post-it note or the note I have taken will be really important to do something. But it's not important to write down and keep, because it's a thing I've done that once it's done. So some notes don't have that sort of timeliness.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
HOST: And it's about recognising, I guess, when you need stuff to go back to and when you don't.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: And you'll get it wrong. And that's OK.
HOST: Yeah. Brilliant.
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: You might have a better idea when you've lost your notes.
HOST: No, absolutely. So there are some online resources, which you can take a look at on the website. There are some skills for study. There's a great critical thinking booklet, which is really good bridging the gap between reading and note-taking, again thinking about the whole purpose of what you're trying to look at. So do take a look at the Resources page. And there are lots of other skills for your study.
Now Zach, you'll be very familiar with this. Because in addition to your student studies, your working at the Student Hub Live, you also work at the Student Support Team. So you'll know a lot about pinpointing students in the right direction. Do you want to give us a quick outline of how students might go and seek further information about these things if they want to?
ZACH: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's lots of things that you can do outside your module website and speaking to your tutor to give you tips in terms of note-taking. And there is a lot of stuff in the help center and student home and also kind of approaching your tutor about specific areas that you might want further kind of assistance on when writing notes.
I know Sophie said, in terms of note-taking, what areas to really kind of focusing in on? Because sometimes you'll be writing notes, and maybe just annotating, and kind of writing and going. And sometimes, it can be hard for students to pinpoint exactly what areas they should be writing notes on. So I'd just say approach your tutor. They can help you focus in on where to go and use the resources on the website, also just to get in touch with your Student Support Team as well if you need it. And we can put some support in place and help out there.
HOST: Brilliant. Lovely. Kester, do students often call about study skills to the Student Support Team, or do they tend to focus on more on problems and things? They come to you a lot for advice?
KESTER: Yeah, a lot of it to do with life getting in the way, and we try and give our advice on how best to help them out, referring to a tutor. Or sometimes they do get problems and we have to give them advice. But sometimes, yeah, we have study skills as well. We sort of refer them to the help centre, which has a lot of useful tips. So, yeah.
HOST: Yeah. There is loads. I mean to be fair, the Open University have amazing resources. But often, it's taking the time to go into them and sort of, I guess, carving that time out. But one of the things that we were talking about very early on in terms of the time management is that these skills are so important early days, aren't they?
You know, if you learn how to take notes and you learn ways that work for you, even if you learn to pick things up and put things down in terms of trying a new idea and maybe it doesn't work, that experimentation can really set you up, can't it, for later life?
SUZANNE NEWCOMBE: Absolutely, and being relaxed about just going with what works for you. Because it's about what works for you. It's not a right way or a wrong way. And it might be different than your best friend's. And I'm still learning. I'm still changing the way I take notes and doing it differently.
HOST: Oh, glad to hear. Well, Suzanne, thank you so much for coming along. And speaking of relaxing and friends, I'm really pleased to see that you've all been helping each other so much in the chat. I hope that you realise, actually, that in helping people, you've got a lot more skills than you may have thought you had. And sharing advice is so important for new students.
I hope you're all feeling a lot better now than you did at the start of the day also and that you've enjoyed meeting each other. There's some great tips in terms of calming down, like yoga, although Jeannette, I hope you're not doing the yoga right now, although you could be. There's no problem with that. You can do whatever you like.
So what we're going to do now is we're going to show you a little bit about what happens in our online rooms. These are our tutorial systems. And our next guest, Isabella, is going to come and talk to us about how you can get involved digitally-- although you are right now-- but in a more formal context, so things like tutorials. And then after her session, she's going to have a workshop in the online room where you can talk to each other and say hello to Isabella and chat in that slightly different environment. So we'll show you a quick video. And then I'll be back to talk about joining in digitally with Isabella.