‘I’m a modern-day luddite’: Meet the students who don’t use laptops

What a pedantic (and incorrect) take. Luddite can absolutely mean a person who purposefully avoids technology.

I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but words can have multiple meanings and take on new meanings over time. Luddite is one of them. This article used it properly.

And anyone who disagrees with me can kiss my linguistics-degree-holding ass.

What does it mean then?

In your defense, the statement specifies "modern-day Luddite" which compares it to the historical Luddite bands and excludes the first meaning of the Oxford dictionary.

Also, avoiding is not the same as opposing.

Got a better word?

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

Yeah, the way he does it is basically how everyone did it even 10 years ago. The tools were mostly the same then as they are now, with the exception of AI and the fact that handwriting wasn't as big a thing anymore when today's undergrads were in school. If you have a fluid and moderately quick handwriting, paper notes will typically be easier to take and more useful for revising the material later on.

Maybe he's lugging a massive typewriter around.

Studies have also shown that taking notes by writing causes better learning outcomes compared to typing.

I used to take my laptop into the lecture hall but I hardly ever actually used it.

Exactly how does he research his essays without internet access?

For me I always wrote as i listened, still do often. I rarely read the notes back.

'Revision' was just writing a whole new set of notes either from memory or from sources. Then, never reading that set of notes.

Massive waste of paper and ink, but it's part of how i pay attention. Most of my lecturers did provide printouts of all the slides, but I'd scribble all over them anyway.

Typing doesn't do the same thing at all for me.

I realized that when i tried to cheat on a test in school, that when i prepared a cheat sheet, i didn't actually need it afterwards - that only applies when writing the sheet by hand.

I always take notes, listening shmistening it's in one ear out the other, reading and writing helps me absorb information much easier, but I never did take notes when we were forced to use pen and paper, once we switched to laptops in high school, I could note down every word because typing is so much easier and faster.

Was gonna bring up the same point about Luddites. They were absolutely pro-automation.

They saw greedy corporations using automation, and getting ready to fuck their society into the dirt, so they started petitioning their local governments, tried to negotiate and drew up the plans for a social security program ~150 years before one was actually implemented, smashed a bunch of expensive corporate equipment when the government wouldn't respond, then the government sided with corporate, used the military to drag all the men, women, and children into public squares and executed every last one of them. Even relatives and companions that weren't in the group and didn't participate. So thoroughly annihilated that it left an informational pinhole in the history books, and the name was co-opted into an insult. Now we're really not sure if John Ludd even existed, maybe the name was just a mythical legend already, and was used as a rally point to boost morale.

And here we are, barely 200 years in the future, about to repeat the fuzzy spots again and rediscover why we brought citrus fruits with us on the ships, with the general population completely oblivious to the brutality the owner class is ready and able to deploy.

What happens if the tech bros are right, and the machine doesn't need 9/10ths of the human population any more?

Luddite is a derogatory term anyway. One might have legit reasons to be against personally using certain technologies

Indeed. The Luddites the high-skilled technology workers of their time! And were the first bloody chapter of the labour movement, nearly erased from that history by their oppressors. "Blood in the machine" by Brian Merchant is a great history of this.

Just remember to back that shit up.

Nothing like forgetting your brain on public transport and getting instant amnesia for the past five years.

eh. i prefer desktops. i see the use of laptops, but i prefer to use as little disposable tech as possible.

As someone who studied without laptop through an entire bachelor's degree - it is a valid option, and I still often make handwritten notes of study materials.

When you write things down by hand, you process information for longer and use more parts of your brain to do so, which genuinely helps to memorize study materials.

It also allows for more focus. Personally, I found that when I moved, eventually, to using laptop in my studies, it has reduced my attention span and added unnecessary distractions. When all you have at your fingertips is paper and a pen, there is nowhere to get astray.

I pretty much treat mine as my second brain.

Withering away your first brain in the process.

Not just what you think. Hand writing is scientifically better for memory retention and more https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/

It does. I vastly prefer writing notes by hand than typing em. But my handwriting sucks when I have to write quickly, and I also don’t like lugging around giant stacks of paper. And so I settled on a digital writing pad, and just do the work to type my notes later. Acts as revision too.

Same for me. Also I sat in front, becouse in the back I would be disturbed by all the not-lecture related stuff people had open on their laptops.

Me too, but that's because my parents bought me a laptop with like a 19 inch screen thinking it would be helpful. That fucker was heavy.

It does, but in my experience, it's way worse for recollection.

Electronic devices are superior when it comes to storing and organizing data, which makes it a better tool if you prefer to use active recall as a memorisation method.

I had literal books worth of notes until switching to a tablet (a stylus keeps the benefits of writing, btw). And going over them when preparing for exams was an absolute nightmare.

When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.

Every English class at my uni has huge, like 10-page essays (can you even call them essays at this point?) where we cover scientific developments in our field we discovered in that month.

Everything is handwritten because "there were students who used LLMs, and they need to be sure at least some effort is put into admission". Like, just to spite on LLM users and all of us just in case.

Engagement. I'm a teacher and using all of your senses to look for information makes you remember that said piece of information more.

It's funny, most studying comes down to that... And motivation, which is also something you have if you prefer books over laptop.

Your book does one single thing, you cannot be distracted by other functions.

I think it's the mental work of "I don't have to do anything, it will find it for me" and "I have to find it myself" and I think it puts you in a state mentally and keeps you there. You don't have to disengage because there's something else doing the work.

The trick is to buy dead tree and also download the same book from the usual online libraries.

Stop eating? As if I would grasp the concept of moderation.

I can kind of see this right now. I'm in a first year course and almost everyone has a laptop in front of them. I'm in a fourth year course and most people use paper notes. It could be survivorship or a result of differences in the desks, or it could be generational.

I graduated college a few years back and can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) how many times I saw someone hand writing notes in class

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

I used to be easily distracted during online lectures yet had little difficulty following live lectures. It's a fundamentally different experience, for whatever reason.

Also, the attention span has to be trained. And training it by working without a distracting computer sounds like a good idea.

Attention span is cultivated, so is discipline. Reading about it is theory. Forcing oneself to do it, in increasingly sizable chunks, is praxis. I'm talking to myself here, too.

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.

I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.

As such, it's completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D'n'D notes, maps for games that I've been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you're meeting someone - they can see you're just making notes and writing to-dos.

Speak for yourself, I've taken typed notes successfully just fine.

Don't complain about my Lenovo Jetpad. The jet engine helped me think by drowning out other sounds.

I'm deaf now, but that was a sacrifice.

First year... In college? No, that's pre-requisite knowledge that they expect students to have from secondary school.

Have you seen people on TikTok bragging about this or are you just coming up with hypotheticals for funsies?

I did something insane: I actually read the article.

The students interviewed used pen and paper because they lack the tempting distractions a laptop/tablet/phone has. One states they feel they "use their brain more" when using a pen and paper. They also mention using a computer to write the final version of an essay for submission, but do most of the work on pen and paper first for the aforementioned reasons.

I’m pretty sure that “not using a laptop is suffering” is actually the privileged take here.