Use Google Docs to Tag-Team Class Note Taking

As college students, we survive by collaborating. We work together on group projects, form study groups, and share advice about the toughest professors. Despite all this, it occurred to me that nobody really works together to take notes. I'm not talking about sharing notes with your buddy who was too hungover to make it to class, I'm talking about actually working simultaneously on the same set of notes during a lecture. Some of us are slow typists, others have moments where we tune out the teacher to daydream (or check Facebook), most of us struggle to keep us with fast-talking professors. So why limit our class notes to what we as individuals are capable of writing down? Aren't two brains better than one?

Google Docs makes it possible to work simultaneously with partners in class to produce a single set of master notes, with more information that any individual could possibly transcribe.  This is made possible through Google Docs' excellent live-updating collaboration feature (detailed in the video above), which lets you watch a letter-for-letter update of your friends' contributions to the document. If you haven't tried it, you really should. Watching the page fill up before your eyes in real time is straight out of Harry Potter. 

I've been trying this out for a few weeks now in a couple of my classes (including one with Laura), so read on for a few tips and tricks I've picked up, then try them out yourself!

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Shocking News: Sleep and Food Good, Alcohol and Smoking Bad

These people are drinking and partying while simultaneously not eating or sleeping. God have mercy on their souls. Photo courtesy of The Next Web. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

According to an article on Psychology Today, the place where we college students are supposed to be doing the most learning in life is actually one of the worst places to learn. Why, you might ask? Well, it’s a place where no one ever sleeps because we’re all cramming to do homework. The food sucks—it’s fast, fatty, and about as nutritious as the cardboard box it comes in. Alcohol and partying is ubiquitous, stunting the development of our brains. And to top it all off, people are smoking cigarettes to take the edge off and focus on writing papers, but really, they’re just getting lung cancer.

The horror! No parents to tell us no, nobody to be responsible for except ourselves, and all of this fun stuff out there for us to try out? How is anyone able to graduate college when we’re living in an environment like this?

Well, here’s the dealio, oh, Psychology Daily. We already know that college can be a pretty rough place sometimes. We get it. We need sleep. We need food. And when not moderated, alcohol can be a very, very bad thing. But the fact is, I think, that the environment that college education happens in is actually not a bad place for us to learn. In fact, I think it’s probably the best. Why? Read on to find out.

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Factotum Supercharges Your Mac's Media Keys, And We Have Promo Codes!

Factotum, out today in the Mac App Store ($3.99), lets you use your Mac's media keys for online music services like Grooveshark, Pandora, Rdio, Last.fm, and more. Pretty cool, considering iTunes has become too bloated to be practical as your computer's primary music player.

We've got five free copies to give away, so the first five people to comment with their favorite online music service will get them. Be sure to leave some way for us to get in touch with you.  

How to Have Hobbies in College

This is Tim. He spends his free time building ships in bottles. Look how happy he is! Image courtesy of Diogo Mendes. Licensed under CC BY NC 2.0

A friend of mine walked into my room the other night, somewhat distraught. "I just realized," she said, "that I literally do not know what to do with myself when I am not doing homework." I would have teased her, but I couldn't--I feel exactly the same way.

Because college has no defined work/not work boundaries, it is incredibly easy to just work all the time and completely lose any ability to do things that are not assigned to you. This isn't healthy. Side projects and hobbies (for example, this site) are the sorts of things that not only get you noticed from a pack of job applicants post-graduation, but which make you a non-boring, fully-functional human being.

So, inspired by this blog post, I've decided to strike back. It's hard, but I've had some successes: for the first time in what feels like months, I read a book purely for pleasure. I have more time to write. Instead of letting college become my life, I've confined it to what it is--my job. I've set myself work hours (10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the week, and the afternoons and evenings on the weekends) and I am doing my hardest to use the time after that to explore things I'm actually interested in.

There are four steps to making this work. They are:

1. Know what you need to do: I have very clear lists each day of what I need to accomplish. I know what assignments I need to finish by the end of my "work" time. I'm able to do this because, every three weeks, I write out all of the homework I need to be doing each day in order to hand my assignments in on time. I don't have to worry about working ahead because I know I will finish everything if I only stick to what's in the planner. This means that absolutely none of my mental processes go towards worrying about what I need to do.

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Guest Post: Surviving School in the Face of Sickness

In college, no time is a good time to get sick. Photo courtesy of Flickr user effekt! and licensed under CC by SA 2.0Today's guest post is by Erin Breedlove, a sophomore at Georgia College and State University. We'll hear from Erin a few more times in the coming weeks, but in the meantime be sure you check out Healthy, Unwealthy, and Becoming Wise, where she blogs frequently about the unique challenges of surviving college with a disability or chronic illness. 

There are days where you wake up and you’ve got a scratchy throat and a stuffy nose. “I’m getting sick, and I want to just lie here and sleep” goes through your head. Truthfully, though, you’ve got four classes that you can’t miss because of strict attendance policies. You feel like death, but you understand that you need to be in class. The picture of the syllabus that says you have a test in two days haunts the back of your mind.

Students with disabilities and chronic health conditions go to class when they’re sick quite often. So, for those of you who aren’t (and who are!) affected in this way, read on for few tips to get you through the sickness during class feeling might do the trick.

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Study Measures Twitter's Effect on Student Engagement

Can Twitter actually help students engage in their classes? A new study attempts to find out. Image courtesy of Fllickr user smannion and licensed under CC by SA 2.0
I've always thought that Twitter gets a free ride in the media. It powers revolutions! It makes us all journalists! It harnesses social currency to build buzz, holy shit!

As the world seemingly melts into Twitter's arms, it's nice to see a few professors using the scientific method to actually examine how Twitter affects our lives; specifically whether it can increase student engagement. If you feel like exercising your collegiate research skills, you can read the whole paper for free at the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, where it was recently published. Basically, Dr. Reynol Junco used a few class sections at Lock Haven University as experimental and control groups, engaging with some students through Twitter, and the control students from a Ning message board. At the end of the semester, the Tweeting students boasted a statistically significant increase in both engagement and grades. 

We've talked about using Twitter in the classroom before, and it seems like a pretty cool idea. I do wonder if this is more a matter of students getting to use a shiny new toy than Twitter actually being so well-suited for learning, and it would be nice to see if the students continued to use it voluntarily after the study ended. In any event, it's nice to see some hard research that treats Twitter with a healthy dose of skepticism, rather than simply assuming that it's the right tool for the job.

The Full Wiki Augments Wikipedia's Usefulness for Students

The Full Wiki aims to make Wikipedia an authoritative source.Since the time we were able to write research papers, we’ve been told by just about everyone to never, ever, ever use Wikipedia. It’s unreliable, anyone can change it, absolutely nothing is true on Wikipedia, etc, etc. However, The Full Wiki is attempting to rectify this.

As explained on Lifehacker, the webapp gives users citable, reliable material from sentences that are highlighted in Wikipedia articles. Check out the examples on their site to get a feel for what The Full Wiki is trying to do. Currently, the webapp is only in beta release and only has a few thousand articles processed. However, the site promises to have the entire site of Wikipedia completed soon. In addition to annotated Wikipedia articles, the site also offers interesting pages and tidbits like the most popular unsolved murder cases in the United States or a biographical map of David Bowie. Click through for what The Full Wiki means for college students.

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Video: How to Choose a College

Laura and Emily answer a reader's question about how to pick the right school for you.