Both digital and hand-written notes can be effective with training. I disagree with Dr. Lineweaver’s position on digital note-taking. I agree that it is important to put notes in one’s own words, but falling into the habit of writing word for word can happen in either digital or hand-written notes. It is an important skill to learn regardless of how you take notes. Additionally, digital note-taking opens up possibilities for restructuring and connecting your notes in ways that are more difficult in hand-written notes.
I’m actually disagreeing with this study: Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25, 1159–1168.
Irreducible notes promote development of thought networks While possible to do on paper, techniques like Zettelkasten and atomic notes are easier to do digitally.
This also helps students break their notes out of silos and cross boundaries between courses and programs. When we Capture notes widely and use a discovery process to find notes on specific topics, we give ourselves freedom to combine and recombine our notes in any way that suits us.
One needs to be more thoughtful about what notes we take when there is more friction to storing it in our system Handwritten notes require far more friction than digital notes, both in putting them in the system initially and in re-organizing them.
One alternative viewpoint here is that digital tools provide more distractions than hand-written writing tools. We might say that it’s then preferable to take notes initially on paper but then process them digitally. However it’s also recommended to Avoid keeping notes on multiple platforms, which would include both hand-written and digital notes as well as multiple digital platforms.