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Your letters: The pen is mightier than the keyboard

Before continuing my studies abroad, I was a teaching assistant at a public university in Indonesia

The Jakarta Post
Fri, February 12, 2016

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Your letters: The pen is mightier than the keyboard

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efore continuing my studies abroad, I was a teaching assistant at a public university in Indonesia. While the instructors gave lectures, I sat in the back and noticed that some students were surfing the internet to check social media, shop online and play video games. From the instructor'€™s viewpoint, the students were taking notes with their laptops.

Similar to that experience, during my doctoral work, almost all of my classmates used laptops in the class. They often used laptops to check their email, do other assignments and finish their office work while the professor continued to teach unaware. The professor thought they were taking notes with their laptops.

From these experiences, it can be seen that instead of helping students to take notes, laptops prompt them to undertake activities other than taking notes. In contrast with the students who use laptops, the students who take notes by pen are more likely to focus on the lecture because they are not distracted by laptops.

According to today'€™s standards, in which laptops and gadgets have become a necessary part of study, I might be called old-fashioned. However, I do not see any drawback from using a pen to take notes. Instead, I find that the pen is mightier than the keyboard in the sense of taking notes.

A study published by the Journal of Computing in Higher Education shows that students who take notes with a pen are more likely to better understand the material than those who use a laptop. This is because students who use laptops often write what the professor says without processing it. Differently, students who use a pen often use their own words to take notes from the professor. In other words, students who use a pen are more likely to process the information before putting it down on a piece of paper.

Defta Oktafiga
Indiana University
Bloomington

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