Don’t Let Outlining on Your Laptop Interfere With Real Learning

Let me guess, you probably create your outlines for class on your laptop, right? Well, it turns out that this practice might negatively impact your learning of class material. In “Text Is Still a Noun: Preserving Linear Text-Based Literacy in an E-Literate World,” a recent article by Mark Yates in the journal Legal Writing, the author argues that information technology, and laptops in particular, create a “copy and paste culture” that can interfere with learning. Yates discusses the concept of “outsourcing memory,” or how we have started to use the Web as a substitute for personal memory, essentially outsourcing our memory to the Internet, thereby diminishing our own cognitive abilities.

In our copy and paste culture, it’s possible to “outsource” real learning to your laptop-created outlines.  Yates points out that “[n]otes typed into a word processing program can be moved and formatted without reading them, or more importantly, thinking about how the individual notes and topics relate to each other. […] Internet-adapted minds are more likely to use course outlines as repositories of information rather than seeing the creation of outlines as a learning process.”

Savvy laptop outliners can avoid outsourcing memory and turning their outlines into “repositories of information.” Real law school learning (and outlining) involves internalizing, organizing, and synthesizing complex ideas, regardless of the technology used.

See Mark Yates, Text Is Still A Noun: Preserving Linear Text-Based Literacy in an E-Literate World 18 Legal Writing 119 (2012).