In November, I wrote a post detailing my struggle to learn from PowerPoint presentations in my Operating Systems class. I’d like to take a moment to explain what kind of lecture style I do enjoy learning from.

One of my favorite professors teaches philosophy at my college, and I’m taking his Modern Western Philosophy class this semester. I don’t prefer his class because I like philosophy any better than computer science, but rather because I always feel like I’ve learned something from his lectures that I couldn’t have found elsewhere. His style is what I think a real college course should feel like.

The surprising part is not that he lectures without PowerPoint, because many professors also avoid presentation software. The surprising part is that I prefer his chalkboard notes over PowerPoint despite the fact that his handwriting is almost completely illegible, suggesting that there is a quality of “chalk talks” that is useful to my learning style beyond just being able to read the notes. I have some ideas why this might be:

• I focus on the presenter instead of the presentation. With both professor and a projector in the classroom, the presentation becomes a main character in the lecture, and sometimes overpowers the professor. This is especially true if the professor does not write his own slide deck. Taking the projector away can help the professor sound much more knowledgeable and in control of what he says.

• I don’t need to read the board to know what the professor has written. That he makes a note after a talking point is enough to know that it should be written my notes, too.

• Chalkboard notes are concise, while badly-made presentations contain overly wordy slides. No one would sit and take the time to transcribe as much in chalk as they could in PowerPoint. Also, professors write notes on the chalkboard in real time, which removes the temptation to sit and read a lengthy slide that has been prepared beforehand.

There is another aspect of my philosophy professor’s style that is specific to his subject which makes his lectures more effective. His class is about thoughts and events which occurred hundreds of years ago, and the class is situated in a building completed in the 1897. Sitting in an old-fashioned classroom, with an old-fashioned professor, taking old-fashioned notes just puts me in the right mood to learn about historical thoughts and figures.

I concede that the class would probably be more effective if I could read the chalkboard notes, but I still do not think that this class would benefit from PowerPoint. While switching to PowerPoint might help me read the lecture points, it would change the entire style of the class, including the amount of notes presented and the focal point of the lecture. It would also add a flavor of modernity to an otherwise deliciously old-fashioned class. I’ll take my philosophy just the way it is, despite despite the illegible notes.

My spring semester started two weeks ago and already I feel swamped. I’ve entered a semester-long robot competition in addition to having a normal course load, and I have summer internship applications and club responsibilities to juggle. The hardest part is that whenever I have a free moment and I just have to take a break, I can’t relax without thinking to myself that I have a full to-do list, and I don’t have any excuse for not doing those things that have to get done.

I’m doing two things differently this semester to organize the deluge of work, and it has worked well so far.

Google Calendar and Tasks

I discovered this semester that if you turn on Tasks in Google Calendar and assign due dates to them, they show up on the calendar with little checkboxes. When you check an item, it draws a satisfying little line through the title of the task. I use tasks for my things to do outside of class, like club duties and internship deadlines. Those show up in orange. I have a seperate green calendar for homework, so I can see at a glance what has an academic deadline and what might be put off until tomorrow. I also have calendars for class times and general events.

In the past, I’ve kept track of homework assignments in my head. It worked well throughout high school and had worked out all right until now. But without my calendars, I don’t think I could keep up this semester. It’s amazing how many times I’ve thought to myself, “I feel like I have nothing to do; there must be something!” at which point I check the calendar and find that yes, there are at least five or six things I should be doing. Having a ready list keeps me on task. Just having everything on the calendar also helps me realize how little time I actually have and how important it is to schedule well.

Avoiding Reddit

I’m a big fan of Reddit.com. I like the community, and I always find interesting articles to read. I even participated in the first Reddit Secret Santa last year. The problem with it for me is that once I click a link or two, I find myself clicking more, and I can never get away from it.

At some point over winter break, I decided that although I was having a very relaxing vacation spending hours a day on Reddit and never getting out of bed, not being productive was getting on my nerves. I’d think of lots of projects I wanted to work on, and at the end of the day, nothing happened. To break that pattern, I decided that for my new year’s resolution I would remove the Reddit link on my browser toolbar and abstain from the site altogether. I didn’t think I could handle never visiting Reddit again, so I decided to stay away until February and reevaluate my decision at that time. Well, it has been a month, and even though I miss keeping up with news and memes, avoiding Reddit has been wonderful for my productivity. I’m a little sad to say that for the sake of my classes I’m going to have to continue my resolution into the rest of the spring semester.

I noticed today that as I frantically scribbled to keep up with my philosophy professor’s lecture, there was an audible hum of typing in the classroom. It was the first time I noticed that I could count more students using netbooks than notebooks to take notes in class.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to take notes with a pen and paper. As I’ve discussed previously, the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in my mind better than passive listening does, and studies have shown that it’s not just me [pdf]. Still, I know that my old-fashioned ways are quickly going out of style.

I don’t know if typing notes aids memory as well as taking notes on paper does, but I do know that it does not work for me. I decided at the beginning of last year that it would be nice to bring my laptop to class so that my notes would be neatly organized (and actually legible for once), and changed my mind after only one or two classes. I could never type fast enough to keep up with the professor, and every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board. It was a relief to have my Five Stars and Pentel R.S.V.P.s back at the end of that little experiment. Considering my negative experience, I wonder how my classmates can keep up. I know that not everyone learns the same way I do; maybe my peers don’t need notes as copious as mine in order to do well.

If notes are going digital soon anyway, maybe there is a technology that will make up for my ineptitude with typed notes. Tablet computers have been around for years, but I know only one person who uses one in class, and even then she types rather than using the stylus to take written notes. (Maybe Apple’s soon-to-be-announced tablet will bring tablet computers into more common use, the same way the iPhone has with smartphones.) There are also electronic pens which record your written notes for later uploading. I was able to test-write one such pen at MacWorld Expo last year, and it was all right. It would probably mesh well with my way of learning, but I don’t trust myself either to bring one pen to every class or to keep it charged. I’m also not sure if my busy schedule can accommodate the extra step of uploading the notes from the pen to my computer.

Of course, I’m making the assumption that my classmates are actually using their computers to take notes rather than goof off online, which is a huge leap of faith and a different rant entirely. But even though I’m not keeping up with the latest tech trends in note-taking, I’m doing what works best for my learning style, and I’m okay with that.

I subscribe to the Google Student Blog primarily for scholarship announcements, but the majority of posts are ideas on how students can use Google Docs to simplify their lives. Sometimes the suggestions are good, but most of the time the ideas are too mundane to be of much use. The most recent post, however, is just patronizing. Apparently the Google Docs help site has set up a new Docs for Students page, designed to “highlight how various student populations can use Google Docs in their daily life.” Unfortunately, rather than sort tips and tricks by document type or class subject, the content is distributed among five stories of fictional students using Docs to accomplish tasks that might be better accomplished though other means. For example,

Lisa is a French major and very excited about starting her classes. On the first day of class, the French teacher doesn’t speak a word of English. Lisa’s French is good but she realizes she needs some help. To test her ability, she pastes an article about soccer from a French newspaper in a Google Docs document and tries to understand what it says. Then, she uses the Translate document feature to test her knowledge. Turns out, she doesn’t know as many French words as she’d like to, but this helps her improve her vocabulary.

Granted, I appreciate being able to translate chunks of foreign-language text into English. I am just amazed that Google thinks that it isn’t enough to inform me of the feature, and that it would be better to frame a story of a French major around the feature so that I might better relate to her. It sounds as though it is supposed to appeal to a middle school student, rather than a college student. (A college student should at least know that Lisa would learn more effectively if she looked up the unknown words herself, rather than translating the document all in one go.)

Sadly, it gets worse.

Lisa’s life long dream is to study abroad in Paris. She applies for a study abroad program during her Sophomore year. To help her gain an edge on the competition, she decides to use one of the many professional looking resume templates in the Google Docs template gallery and picks one particular template called Blue Rays Resume. Between the styles on the template and her well written essay in French, she impresses the judges and is selected to go to Paris.

I’m no human resources expert, but I shudder at the thought of sending out my resume using that template. Google does have a few nice resume templates, but that isn’t one of them. What is Google trying to tell me here? If I use Google Docs, I could be chosen to go to Paris like Lisa?

Google could have made a well-organized list of reasons why college students should use Docs. There really are some compelling reasons, including no cost, ease of collaboration, and the ability to back up documents and access them from any browser. Instead, they wrote success stories for us to relate to. I’m just not impressed.

When I switched from a pay-as-you-go phone to a contract deal from Verizon a couple years ago, I opted for the cheapest plan the Best Buy employee would offer me: 450 minutes of anytime calls for $45, plus $5 for 250 text messages. This seemed fine at the time, but if I’d known that there were even cheaper plans available through Verizon’s customer service, I could have saved myself a lot of money over the past couple years.

Last week, I called Verizon and threatened to switch carriers because I didn’t feel I was getting a good deal. The rep looked at my usage and offered me this plan:

$29.99 / Month
200 Anytime minutes
500 Night/weekend minutes
Unlimited mobile to mobile calling

I then asked the rep if there were any even cheaper options, and she told me of these plans:

$24.99 / Month
100 Anytime minutes
500 Night/weekend minutes
No free mobile to mobile calling

$19.99 / Month
50 Anytime minutes
250 Night/Weekend minutes
No free mobile to mobile calling

Under each plan, overages are 45¢ per minute and text messages are 20¢ each. I went with the $29.99 plan and added 250 texts for $5, because the majority of my calls are mobile to mobile, and I text enough that I’d spend more than $5 on texts anyway. I’ve been pleased with Verizon’s customer service for the past eight years I’ve been with them, and I’m glad they could accommodate me this time, but I think if they would offer these cheaper plans from the beginning, they would have many more happy customers.

December is a particularly hectic time for college students: in addition to all the normal holiday preparations and festivities, we have an extra hurdle: finals! For this reason, most of us can’t get out in time to get a Christmas tree, even a little one, before it’s time to go home for winter break. So, inspired by Pooh’s tree from Winnie the Pooh and Christmas, Too, I decided to bring a little holiday cheer to my dorm suite by making a wall-mounted paper tree. I think it worked out pretty well, and only took an afternoon to print and assemble. (Click images to enlarge.)

You’ll need:

• Christmas tree template image
• Color printer and white paper
• The Rasterbator
• One string of tree lights
• Painter’s tape
• Scotch tape

The first step is to print out your tree. I used The Rasterbator to transform my tree template into a huge, rasterized image of my tree in easily-printable PDF format. You can adjust the size of the image to fit your wall space; mine came out at 30 pages, measuring about 40″x60″. Make sure to follow the instructions on the website for best printed results.

Once you have printed out the tree, lay out the pages on the floor so you can see how they should be taped together. Trim away the white space from the each pages. Since very few printers can print all the way to the edge of the paper, all the pages will have some white space on the edges. The pages that have interior tree segments should be trimmed with care because the edges need to match up when you tape them together. The edge pages can be trimmed a little less tediously, because a little extra white space on the edge isn’t so noticeable once it’s on the wall.

Once each page is trimmed, the tree is ready to assemble. Piece the tree together upside down on the floor, then tape the edges together. I found that I had to use quite a bit of tape to get the edges to line up nicely and not show the wall through the final picture, but there’s probably a better way that I didn’t think of. Tape was easy to use, and I had it on hand. Either painter’s tape or scotch tape would be fine for this image because the whole thing is dark, but I’ve taped rasterbated images together with painter’s tape before and been sorry later because the blue tape showed through the white parts of the image.

Use painter’s tape to mount the assembled tree on the wall. I had to use painter’s tape because my dorm won’t let me use anything else on the walls, but other means of adhesion probably would have worked just as well. Make sure you mount it near an electrical outlet so you can plug in the lights. Next, using clear scotch tape, starting at the top, tape the Christmas tree lights on the tree, winding your way down until you get to the bottom. I liked the clear tape because it blends in pretty well, but I had to use a lot of it because it doesn’t stick terribly well. Make a paper star to tape on top and stick it up there.

I think the final result looks pretty nifty. We put ours about a foot above the floor and over a little bench so we could put presents underneath. It won’t fool anyone during the day, but at night with the colored lights on the effect is rather striking. It would also look pretty cool with paper ornaments taped on.

I say it’s a dorm-style tree, but it would be great for anyone living in an apartment, condo, or other small space. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than buying a real tree for me, because I have a quota with my college’s printing system that I haven’t maxed out yet. I’m not sure if printing 30 color pages would have been more expensive than a real tree if I had to pay for the ink myself. It’s certainly cheaper once you factor in the cost of ornaments.

If anyone else tries this out, I’d love to hear about it!

One of my favorite classes this semester has been Intro to Cognitive Science. I took the class because more than a few of my friends who think the same way I do are Cognitive Science majors, and this semester the class was taught by one of the rock-star professors in the department. He’s a great lecturer, and I think I’ve learned a lot from the class about cognitive function, as well as the crossover between cognitive science and computer science. I might even get more into studying artificial intelligence before I graduate.

That said, while I think very highly of this professor, he did something I thought to be ridiculous this past week: he assigned a group essay.

I dislike group projects as much as the next person, because I worry that my group members will slack off and leave me with the brunt of the work. But even if they’re all hard workers, it still doesn’t feel fair to me that my grade will be partially determined by the efforts of people I have no control over. So to take control and ensure a good project, I feel pressured to take extra time and help the group members who need extra coaching to produce a decent piece of writing, which still does not seem fair.

Just having a group project is one thing, and I probably would have been okay with a different kind of project. Usually in these sorts of situations the group members can divvy up the work and put it all together close to the due date, spending minimal time consulting with other group members. But this assignment was a group essay. Essays, as I know them, are supposed to have a single point of view throughout to create coherence. How were we supposed to write the paper, I thought, without sitting together the whole time so that the person who wrote the conclusion knew what the person who who wrote the introduction had written? How was one paragraph supposed to follow smoothly to the next when the next paragraph had not been written yet?

The worst part, I felt, was that this was the last assignment in the class before finals season, meaning that during the time everyone was rushing to finish final class projects and study for finals, we also had to find time to meet as a group. It would have been more courteous, I thought, for the professor to have assigned this project much earlier in the semester.

Despite the fact that I spent a significantly larger amount of time worrying about the paper than actually writing it, the method we used to divide the work actually worked fairly well. Everyone did their research and came up with topics for the essay independently, and we went with the best idea among the four of us. The essay prompt came with 8 questions that had to be answered, so we divvied up the questions and answered them each in a paragraph or two. To put the whole thing together, we used Google Docs to compile our sections into one document, then sat around a table for a couple hours, each on our own laptops, reading through the paper, asking each other questions about what we had written, and editing simultaneously (Google Docs is cool with simultaneous editing like that). The end result did not flow as a paper written by one person might have, but it was at least coherent. My fellow group members really liked the simultaneous editing idea, and they had fun watching comments and corrections appear spontaneously in their writing.

I understand why students have to complete group projects: working in groups doesn’t stop in school, and we’ll probably be doing collaborative work the rest of our lives. For this paper specifically, the professor told us outright that the reason he assigned it was that no one researcher writes a scientific paper alone anymore, and that articles are now expected to include descriptions of how each author contributed. However, the difference between group projects in business and in schools is that in business there is usually a designated group leader, whereas in school the group members are expected to agree on everything democratically. This slows down the group’s progress and increases the need for constant consultation, which is the part that bothers me the most.

In retrospect, I guess assigning a group essay was not all that silly. I did learn some cool stuff about how the brain processes vision, and I did introduce my groupmates to the wonders of Google Docs. But the experience was still stressful, and like most students, I wish my professors would refrain from assigning group projects altogether!

I’ve been a Dropbox user for about six months now, and it’s been pretty useful. I use it primarily to transfer files between my own computer and my computer science department lab account. It also comes in handy to share a quick picture online: dragging and dropping the file into my public dropbox folder is easier than opening a browser and uploading the picture to a hosting service. Still, it’s only been useful in a minor way so far, and hasn’t really done anything I couldn’t have done already with a little more effort.

That has changed. Enter the Dropbox iPhone app [iTunes link]. This app solves a problem I’ve been having, namely storing PDFs on my iPod Touch. A few of my professors upload their class readings online as PDFs, and before now I’d had no way of storing several PDFs on my iPod for offline viewing. The Dropbox app lets you not only access files in your Dropbox folder, but lets you download your “favorites” for faster (offline) viewing. This essentially gives my iPod the eReader functionality I’ve been wanting since I got it. I’ve tried other apps, like Stanza, for uploading PDFs, but I had too much trouble syncing. Stanza must be synced over a local wifi network, and my school’s network doesn’t seem to allow it. Syncing to the Dropbox app couldn’t be easier; it’s just click and drag.

The other problem the Dropbox app solves is transferring photos quickly and easily from the iPod Touch to my computer. Syncing my iPod with my Mac is a pain sometimes; half the time the computer refuses to recognize the iPod at all, and the other half of the time, it thinks it’s a camera and doesn’t open iTunes. Now I can upload photos from my iPod to my Dropbox account, and from there I can save them on my computer in less time than it takes iTunes to realize my iPod has been plugged in. Admittedly, this would be a more useful feature if I had an iPhone instead of an iPod Touch, but this feature did allow me to upload the screenshots I took quite speedily.

Unfortunately, the Dropbox app only lets you upload photos. It would be fantastic if it could upload notes as text files. If it had just this one extra feature, I’d probably pay about $5 for the app. However, the best part is that I don’t have to. It’s free!

Click to expand thumbnails of the app in action.

I seem to have developed a muppet addiction this week. The Muppets Studio released a new youtube video on Monday in which the Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s been insanely popular, and even became a trending topic on Twitter today.

If you like that, you should check out the 1981 TV documentary, “Of Muppets and Men,” which can be found in six segments on Youtube. It goes into some detail on how The Muppet Show was produced, and has a lot of classic clips and great backstage footage. Here’s the first part for you:

• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 1
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 2
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 3
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 4
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 5
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 6

In one of my first posts, I talked about how it’s great that textbooks are moving to digital formats, but Kindle-ized textbooks still don’t work for me right now. One of my main gripes was that Kindle ebooks couldn’t be read on a computer. Well, Amazon has started to fix that problem by introducing the Kindle for PC application, letting Kindle ebook owners read their material on their computers.

My reaction is still … really? You’re only just now rolling out this technology? It feels like it should have been an obvious piece of software from the beginning. It’s not as though reading an ebook on a computer is a novel idea. Amazon even used to sell a variety of digital books which could be read using either Adobe or Microsoft reader apps. I remember buying a couple books this way in high school, but the files I purchased no longer appear in my “digital locker” on amazon.com. Now, almost digital books for sale on the website are branded for the Kindle. (You can still find some books for sale as PDF’s, but not on nearly as many as you could have a few years ago.) Maybe Amazon hoped that delaying the ability to read its ebooks without a Kindle would encourage more hardware sales. It is, after all, losing money from the sale of most ebooks. However, the Kindle iPhone App has been freely available since March 2009. Make up your mind, Amazon!

It sounds like Amazon wants to restrict its reading platforms as much as possible, but not to the point where it stops them from being competitive. When Barnes & Noble announced its Nook last month, it advertised that both PC and Mac software will be available to read your Nook-branded ebooks on, and I think Amazon saw a need to match this feature. It’s a smart move; I’ll gladly pick the ereader that will let me read my books (which they insist on putting DRM on) on more devices.

While Kindle for PC is free and available to download now, Amazon.com currently lists Kindle for Mac as “coming soon.” For their sake, I hope they finish it before Christmas, or else there will probably be a few more Mac-users opting for the Nook, instead.