Call me old-fashioned, but I use pen and paper in class. I’m an East Asian Studies major.

When I get home, I type my notes in Markdown format, usually the same day. I touch-type, so this doesn’t take much time. (Say, 30-45 minutes for a 3-hour class). It gives me a chance to review and structure the material better, and this transcribing step helps me remember stuff and identify things I don’t understand. I’m sure it ends up saving me hours of studying.

I’m finishing up my BS in MechE this semseter, so I’ve struggled with this topic a lot. Mechanical engineering isn’t as well documented online as other fields, so it makes collecting and organizing notes more difficult (additionally, a large number of the proprietary tools we use also only run on windows which keeps me tied to that platform to some extent).

My dream setup would be a flexible display tablet that you could fold to make larger or smaller. Say as small as a nexus 7 and as large as an open textbook (17″x11″). You can important lecture notes, digital textbooks, audio recordings, videos, pictures/scans into a single application. Web pages could be quickly clipped and imported. All audio samples would have speech-to-text analysis performed on them and all text notes could be written on. This entire database would sync to the cloud quickly and in the background. I’d prefer if items could be labeled using a tagging scheme rather than a folder/notebook structure for easier sorting. The tablet could be paired with external displays wirelessly whenever you needed some extra screen real-estate. A small camera/microphone unit could be detached from the tablet and placed in a more useful location for capturing (alternatively, a smartphone could also take this roll).

I know you can get part of the way to this setup with applications like OneNote and Evernote, but they aren’t nearly as fast, flexible, and feature-rich enough in their current states. I also have a difficult time deciding what media I need to keep locally, and what media i can have living in the cloud.

Call me old fashioned, but I totally disagree using a tablet for class.

I take my laptop (Thinkpad T530) to my lectures and take notes on that. Considering its size and power, it’s surprisingly light – I can carry it comfortably in a backpack to and from uni, and apart from one lecture theatre where everyone has troubles with laptops, it sits comfortably on almost anything. It can also last through my longest day (about four-five hours) on a single charge.

I type notes in OneNote, as that way there’s a chance that a) I won’t lose them and b) I will be able to read them as my handwriting is horrible, which are synced to Skydrive (and thus my phone and my tablet) as I go along.

As for assignment work, I do that in Word on the laptop, save it to Skydrive and it’s there and available on the phone and tablet for viewing and editing. Skydrive also has the added benefit of not totally mangling a Word document so that it only vaguely resembles what you fed to it and offers more storage (25GB in my case because I have an old account).

As for my tablet and phone, I tend to use the former when I’m wasting time between classes and just want to muck about on the internet and the latter for phone-y things like messaging and things between classes – I rarely actually use either for educational purposes at uni.

I still use a real laptop myself (T61), I dont find the weight to be an issue and I can use my normal dev tools when I want, could I go the route of sshing to a remote VPS and doing the dev work there, most of the time, but a decent enough chunk of the time I have no net access. I also dont like being dependent on some company who’c commercial interests may (or probably) run contary to mine, especially for data, regardless of what it actually is.

I also take notes on paper, then at the end of the week type em up, doesnt take long, and it helps it sink in

Samsung has done a much better job with taking written notes. From the crappy little S-Notes app to some really nice ones on Play, their interaction between pen and tablet are much smoother on the Note than any Apple, Android, or even other Samsung devices.

I would disagree with some of what you said. Dropbox is great. However, I don’t take notes in a WYSIWYG environment. I always use LaTeX. Granted, I am in high school, so it might be different in college. I have always had troubles with diagrams, and flowcharts. I use a rather large laptop that gets about 9 hours of battery life. For my uses, it is enough, so an iPad isn’t necessary. Also, I feel like I would be less productive with an iPad because it is smaller, and doesn’t have a proper keyboard. I don’t have one, so I don’t know, but I think that alt+tab doesn’t work. In addition, I don’t think that you can have to apps open side by side. Thus, I am sticking with my laptop, and think that that is the best choice for me at the moment (though I do want to switch to linux). Also, in regards to the iPhone, I type all of my notes, so I don’t find it necessary to have a camera.

Great post, and yes, you can do everything on Droid too :)

A few comments:
Although I’m a heavy Dropbox user, most of the online storage can also be achieved on Google Drive in this case. You even have the choice of storing files as-is or convert them to Google documents when applicable. Furthermore, you can edit or annotate your stuff directly once stored in Drive. The build-in Drive-widget (on the Galaxy at least) lets you upload pictures (“scans”) of your notes directly.

For plain text, the official Dropbox app for Android has a build-in text editor which makes yet another app redundant.

@ FX:

Yeah, paper is the most convenient for a lot of math and science courses. Hence my recommendation of JotNot. :)

@ Jason *StDoodle* Wood:

Yes, it would. I just happen to own an iPhone and an iPad and no Android devices so I’m writing about what I know. Unfortunately the software ecosystems for Apple and Android are a bit disjoint and there isn’t much overlap between them.

I don’t know if I’m super pro-Apple though. A lot of their policies annoy me, their Maps app sucks (breaking up with Google was the worst thing they could have ever done) and I’m getting tired of some of the the excessive sekumorphism (that leather stitching thing is kinda ugly). But yeah, I’m sure there are equivalent apps on the droid platform – I just haven’t used them so I can’t comment on their quality.

@ Mart:

Yes, it can fail but when when it does, it is usually a local failure. For example, if you lose internet connection in your dorm, you pick up your crap and leg it to the next building over. If it fails at your entire university, you get in the car and drive to the nearest Starbucks. If there is no connectivity in a convenient driving distance, whip out the phone and create hotspot over 3G or LTE. If the cellular network is down in addition to internet connectivity in the area… Well, that probably means some serious shit is going down over there and the classes will probably be cancelled anyway. :P

Oh, and Apple love is here because in the last few years acquired some Apple products. Might as well write about them. :)

I feel like the necessity of these items changes based on campus. For instance, all of my professors are deeply offended if anyone takes out any kind of electronic device. They recognize that they can be good note taking tools, but also know that students are more than likely going to be browsing Facebook most of the time.

Professors, especially after the implementation of BlackBoard at our school (an online course management system that allows electronic assignment submission), require files to be submitted as Word docs. Although Google will allow you to export files as word documents, a well formatted lab report will never look quite right once it has been converted. The end result is that it is much simpler to use Dropbox and MS Word rather than Google Drive — even if you have to first download the file to any lab machines you use before you can edit it.

The technologies that I use the most are remote sessions. Instead of using an iPad, I carry around my CR-48 (with a minimal Linux desktop replacing Chrome OS). It gets just about the same battery life as a tablet and is only marginally heavier while allowing me the comfort of a larger screen and real keyboard. However, the computer lacks the power for me to ever consider using it to run Octave. In this case, I ssh to my Macbook Pro and run my scripts that way. With Dropbox I don’t even have to figure out how to transfer my locally created .m files to the MBP. Likewise, for the instances where I know LibreOffice will make files that look different in MS Office, our school has several VNC servers where I can then write in Word.

We live in a world with ubiquitous internet access and powerful mobile devices whose computing power is better with laptops 7 years ago, so sometimes we forget that connectivity can fail. And fail fast. Once it does, that polished essay you just saved on a cloud-based service, isn’t worth anything if you are not able to access it.

While we bask in the awesomeness, we must also be aware of the shortcomings. We should always be mindful of the need to find balance when using the Force.

And what’s with all the Apple love lately? :D