Lecture Technique - Yasin Gonen

Going to lectures is vital, that attending them allows you to gather knowledge and the fact that when you participate in that event, you can learn a lot more by listening to the professor which definitely has some knowledge to their subject area. The fact at the matter is that when you attend a lecture, you would have to take relevant notes when listening but the most important part of a lecture is when you listen and understand the lecturer rather than taking every note down and going back to it and not understanding.

Even if you don’t take in all the notes, Essex University has a unique way to go back to lectures. This is called ‘Listen Again’ and it is used in a way that when a student misses a vital information during the lecture, they would go back onto Moodle and listen again on the lecture that they have attended or not. It is widely available to the student who is doing that course.

There are many different styles of writing when taking in notes and using it in revision but personally writing it down and re-citing it works with me because of the fact that you can summarise a lot of topic areas by taking key information and shrinking it down and then using flash cards to make questions up.

Reading revision notes are dependent on each student because each student has a unique way of learning information as some are kinaesthetic learners or practical learners. It is really up to the student who writes notes down but understand them, there is no point in revising in someone else’s technique because it wouldn’t necessarily work for them.

lectures by Daniel Bull

Lectures are very vital to how I learn in university they give me a understanding of the topic and can help me while I'm revising for tests such as the maths I taken today and also it helps me my assignments. I attend nearly all of my lectures and I use moodle to have a copy of lectures on my computer for future reference so I could all ways refer back to it when I need them, I don’t normally take notes because the handouts are giving to me but in the future when the handouts will no longer be available I will be taking as much notes as possible because I believe that it is needed to help me remind myself of the lecture and also help me with studies, it is also helpful to take my classmates notes and see what they writes about the ppt so that has helped me a lot. So yes I think lectures are very important in helping us learn in university and they are always good in helping me improve my studies. 

Lecture Technique - Jason Jones

With lectures i do think it is vital to attend them. There are other ways of getting the notes from lectures for example i know they can be found on Moodle, or you could use the listen again or even get a friends notes. I think that it's best to try and go to every lecture because no ones notes are as good as your own. My note taking style mainly consists of bullet points and short phrases that i think will be useful. I will also draw lines on my notes to connect different points if i think they are linked. Also i will underline or circle certain things, this way i will know that they are especially important when i come back to them later. From my experience of lectures so far, i would say that i would not need to re-write my notes because i think that my note taking has been organised and i can understand it when looking over it again. I think it would be wise to go over my lecture notes after each lecture and add any points and perhaps do some further reading around the topic.

Blog Post 3 - William Davis

With lectures, it is imperative that you attend as many as you can with a high level of promptness. This ensures that you can get the most from it as well as having an opportunity to ask questions from the lecturer when the body of the lecture is complete.  While having access to a friend's notes can be good for enhancing your own, it does not work as a replacement for your own attendance. At the University of Essex, the system "Listen Again" will allow you to watch lectures that have already been given. While this is a useful tool for enhancing your notes after the lecture, it is not as effective as attending the lecture yourself. This is due to many factors, the largest being how easy it is to become distracted when using a computer.

There are many different styles of note taking and different types work for different people. There is no wrong method as long as you can get the information you need and can use it at a later date easily.  For myself, mind maps often work when I need to outline my notes quickly. It is often important to re-write some parts of your notes, or summarize them as this helps you learn the information and make it more concise for later use.

For revision, simply reading information will not help as much as re-writing the information along with practicing where possible. Reading is useful and needed but is not effective on its own.

The subject of this our third (and last) blog is Lecture Technique. What we would like you to think and write about is how one can best approach lectures. Is it vital to attend or do you think you can use friend's notes, get Powerpoint slides or use Listen Again? Also, how best to take notes? Do other styles rather than linear note taking work for you? What are your observations of the lectures you have attended so far? Should one summarise or re-write notes or is this a waste of time? Does just revising your notes through reading them again suffice?

As always please refrain from insulting or offensive language. I will have to remove it and it may constitute an academic offence.