Join us on Bluesky on Wednesday 24th September 2025 at 20:00 BST

At the University of Glasgow we are in our first teaching week, the topic of note making, and its related systems seems appropriate, to set ourselves and our learners up for the new academic year.

Notemaking

I am not going deeply into the differentiation between note-taking versus note-making, but I will leave some references in the footnote¹ for your further perusal. To summarise the main differences:

Note-taking, is in situation, mainly focusing on taking down information, key points, questions, they are often a raw record, and if we don’t have well developed note taking skills, we might not remember what our notes mean a week later. This is where note-making comes in.

Note-making, is usually notes prepared after note-taking, or during research, reading, studying. This is a more deliberate process and helps us to understand, organise, think through the topics we are engaging in.

You probably noticed the issue with the strict differentiation here. If you are someone who takes sketch notes or doodle notes you are likely already in the note-making process while taking notes. If you are using other systems such as Cornell² you are likely in the cross-over between note-taking and note-making. So it is not a very clear cut issue in my opinion.

However, for the purpose of this #LTHEchat we are predominantly exploring systems, and methods for note-making. That might help you or your learners this academic year.

Handwritten versus typed notes

There is a body of evidence on the benefits of taking notes by hand (if you are able to), which I have briefly written about before, versus typing notes on a device. Some authors state that handwriting encrypts embodied cognition³, and a meta-analysis in 2024⁴ has identified that:

“handwritten notes are more useful for studying and committing to memory than typed notes, ultimately contributing to higher achievement for college students.” (Flanigan, et al., 2024, p.77).

If you want to find out more about this particular topic, maybe the references below will give you a good starting point.

Notemaking systems

From scribbling in the margins of an article to highlighting 70 percent of a textbook page. What note-making is actually effective?

Here I appreciate Pat Thomson’s point⁵ that you are writing for two people, both of which are yourself. Your current self and how you understand the notes at the moment, and your future self who might have forgotten some of the context of the notes when you revisit these.

Example: Years ago a group of students had shared with me, there is this one lecturer, who is so good in explaining, that it makes all total sense in the moment, and they then don’t take notes, because everything was so clear during the lecture. But once they wanted to revise, they noticed that they had forgotten how this sense making happened, and didn’t have the notes to fall back on.

We might be able to help our learners by emphasising the points that are important. Clearly telling them, this connection, or logical consequence is important to remember for understanding that process. So the learners know that this might be important information to take a note off.

Handwritten notemaking

The actual process of making notes, is what helps us process information, and remember. It is useful here to categorise and sort information, to highlight connections, processes, and note questions.

How you or your learners do this. I think is very much a matter of preference. However, there is science behind it, if you want to dig deeper without having to read neuro-science papers, you might want to explore the blogs and resources at the learning scientist⁶.

This is a list of note-taking and note-making techniques that can be effective. Some of which may have more limited advantages such as mind-mapping.

• Sketchnotes⁷
• Doodle⁸
• Mindmaps⁹
• Atomic notes¹⁰
• Bullet Journalling¹¹
• Cornel Technique
• Outline method¹²
• Boxing method¹³

Digital Notes

While I have piles of journals dotted about the place, I also make notes digitally. Despite the strong evidence of the benefits of handwritten notes, digital notes have important use as well, such as speed, legibility, searchability, and foremost accessiblity¹⁴ . You can add meta-data, take multimedia notes, use a screen reader, change background colours, fonts and font sizes, it is easier to organise in a Zettelkasten system, and you can share notes easier.

There are fantastic digital note-making systems: Notion, Notesnook, Obsidian, Research Rabbit all of these have varying degrees of privacy, and clarity about data handling. If you are strongly concerned about this than Notesnook might be your choice over Notion. If you are more concerned about functionality and aesthics then Notion on the other hand allows you to install plugins such as Notero which automatically imports your Zotero bookmarks into a table in which you then can add notes, and keywords.

Enter AI

My main issue with digital note-making is that I loose track of what resources have I saved, where are certain notes (despite meta data), and keeping an overall idea of learning and research over the last years. The way my brain functions the physical representation of my journals helps me to remember things much better. So here AI is useful to help sort through a significant amount of data and pick out and categorise the learning from across a long timespan. I shared my learning from this exercise in a blog post¹⁵ .

If you or your learners, like me, are information hogs, who constantly need to create, write, produce, collect, and need to manage large amounts of information. AI can help you get on top of the mess, and digitally declutter, sort, and organise.

Where we need to be careful is if we solely rely on AI to produce notes, there are not only issues in terms of environmental impact, veracity, and fake resources, but fundamentally we shortcut and deprive ourselves of the actual learning. Of the engaging with the material and thinking through ideas, research, concepts. We would Reader’s Digest our whole learning experience.

I have found that AI helps me manage my ADHD brain when it comes to notes. For instance, last weekend I went into hyperfocus and read 13 papers in an afternoon, I was so engrossed I had forgotten to take notes. I asked AI to help me backtrack which bit of information came from which paper. As my brain had made all of this into one big story.

I am looking forward to our chat on Wednesday the 23rd of September! And hope you will enjoy at least some of the questions and provocations.

Note:

We must not use AI uncritically and be aware of the resource implications, even if they are at the moment, far away from our selves.

Guest Biography

Dr Nathalie Tasler is an award winning Principal Academic and Digital Development Adviser (senior lecturer) at the University of Glasgow. She is internationally recognised and drives innovation in learning, teaching, and scholarship, championing inclusive and creative pedagogies. Recognised for extensive collaborations and impactful digital scholarship, Nathalie leads significant academic development initiatives. She also fosters ethical research environments and actively mentors and coaches colleagues.

Links

1. https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-11-28-note-taking-vs-note-making/
   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9940558/
   https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/77/1/42/6628705?lo.gin=false
   https://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/UsefulDownloads_Download/21870759DB904943811008DAD6C91051/Notetaking%20and%20notemaking%202014%20%20.pdf
2. https://www.goodnotes.com/blog/cornell-notes
3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20200910-the-benefits-of-note-taking-by-hand
   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.156
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w
5. https://patthomson.net/2022/10/24/one-key-thing-about-making-notes/
6. https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2025/8/28-1
7. https://yourvisualjournal.com/how-to-sketchnote/
8. https://www.mathgiraffe.com/blog/sketch-notes-vs-doodle-notes
   9.https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/note-taking/mind-map
9. https://medium.com/@jeffreywebber_/atomic-notes-are-we-obsessed-e9e0937dcf51
10. https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq/what-is-the-bullet-journal-method?srsltid=AfmBOopb2F9pUkIjxSk5D2XmKDyihzbtMpkvuhu1qPVlVcl3wms-Fo5W
11. https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/note-taking/outline
12. https://methods.remarkable.com/resources/boxing-method-template
13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4812780/
14. https://nathalietasler.blog/2025/09/14/one-and-a-half-decades-on-google-keep/

Questions and chat

Q1 – Warm-up question: what are your personal note-making conventions? For instance (but not exclusive to) systems you might use, quirks, structures, processes, abbreviations?

Q2 – How could multi-media notes, digital and analogue, be useful for both educators and learners as we enter the new academic year?

Q3 – What are your top tips for making or taking notes?

Q4 – Let’s talk about aesthetics and note-making/note-taking. What role does the aesthetic of your tools play?

Q5 – Imagine we had ethical AI; how would it help educators or learners with their note-taking or note-making?

Q6 – Pick any of these to answer, or add your own: notes as reflection, notes as art, notes as therapy–how do you think this manifests?