>> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks.
I agree. I was recently in China lecturing. I took about 100 textbooks on a portable hard drive. It was magic having immediate access to that knowledge. By way of comparison, there was no way I could have taken more than a couple of physical textbooks with me.
BUT I still needed to make my own notes on paper. Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.
When I had a minimally good e-reader, taking notes on it used to beat paper even it having a delay (that could be engineered out of e-readers).
Then it broke, ditto for the company that made it, and there is nothing more on the market nearly as good. Nowadays I go into paper for taking notes too.
>Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.
Re-iterating what I said elsewhere in the thread. It is a false notion that writing on a paper is somehow superior to typing it out on a keyboard. I feel the only reason people feel better when writing paper notes is because they're used to it. Taking notes on electronic devices is fairly new. It is alien to our brain which have known the other way for a long time.
Those studies are usually done on students (because they are readily available as research subjects) and those tend to be "digital natives" who are quite used to keyboards.
From an article[1] about one such study:
The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.
The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”
“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.
I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding.
Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization.
You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement.
But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper.
I agree. I was recently in China lecturing. I took about 100 textbooks on a portable hard drive. It was magic having immediate access to that knowledge. By way of comparison, there was no way I could have taken more than a couple of physical textbooks with me.
BUT I still needed to make my own notes on paper. Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.