Lecture techniques

When it comes to lectures some people think that it is boring while others think that it is a valuable opportunity to obtain information on their study and to learn new things and discover their subject area further. However, personally, lectures are different from our ordinary lessons during school days. It is restricted to listening only and that questions can only be asked at the end of the lecture most of the time. So freedom to ask whenever you want is out of the option as lecturer generally holds more authority in terms of power.

Fortunately, we can make lectures more interesting rather than listening and taking notes on whatever the lecturer says. Passive note taking does not require much thinking and that information won’t be reprocessed for our brain to remember them and that would make revision harder. Instead of using passive notes taking we can make our own notes by adding what we think besides what lecturers have said. Things like adding an opinion rephrase sentences to create our own, making comparison tables and try out different notes making/taking techniques can help dramatically.

Apart from taking good notes and get into a good habit to using our own knowledge to explore, attending the lectures is also important because you will miss out important details and explanations given by the lecturer. Although many lecture materials can be found online, they do not explain things by simply looking and reading them won’t help you to learn unless you are a genius.

You may think that reading a friend’s notes will help you but that will make it harder as different people have different notes taking preference and that style might not be suitable for you or you simply just can’t read their hand writing. I for example prefer linear style notes taking because it looks neat on the page. However, to make the notes appeals to me more visually I’ve tried tables as well as spider grams.