This Cornell Note-Taking Thing

Last week I poin­ted read­ers to the excel­lent art­icle by Dustin Wax com­par­ing note-taking meth­od­o­lo­gies and weigh­ing the pros and cons of a couple tech­niques. I was not per­son­ally aware of the Cor­nell method. I am how­ever a big fan of Microsoft One­Note for organ­iz­a­tion not just of notes, but of research mater­i­als of all kinds. I use blogs, wikis and One­Note together to man­age my data and happened upon a Cor­nell tem­plate for One Note users this morn­ing. If you are a laptop note taker and you are not aware of One­Note I recom­mend giv­ing the trial ver­sion a test drive. You may find it use­ful. Note tak­ing how­ever is a very per­sonal thing and we all tend to develop a pro­cess that works for us. Here’s a col­lec­tion of MS’ Four Ways to Improve note-taking with One Note.
I don’t mean to be a shill for Microsoft in this and those that know me cer­tainly know that I don’t approach the use of tech­no­logy reli­giously. Its a prag­matic thing. How­ever, if per­chance you have missed the ‘The Ulti­mate Steal” pro­mo­tion that Microsoft is run­ning until the end of the month its worth con­sid­er­ing. Stu­dents are able to acquire Office 2007 Ulti­mate for $US60. Com­pared to the retail cost of any of their products this is a steal.
I will how­ever also offer a little caveat. One­Note 2003 and 2007 do not play well together. I am com­fort­able using 2003, but tried the 2007 ver­sion. Its very con­veni­ently con­ver­ted all my notes to a new (not back­wards com­pat­ible) format. When I went to launch 2003 after the end of the 2007 ima­gine my shock and hor­ror when it told me that the note I wanted to read was in a later and unread­able format. Luck­ily there was a backup folder with 2003 ver­sion notes, but the rather less than intu­it­ive organ­iz­a­tional struc­ture of One­Note left me scram­bling for a time to recon­sti­t­ute my work­ing struc­ture. The authors of One­Note have gone to great lengths to make this soft­ware as seam­less with your work routine that they do away with the manual save process…you don’t even dir­ectly choose where notes are stored. Good for usab­il­ity, but bad for manual backup pro­cesses. My notes were stored in a hid­den folder not read­ily backed up if you rely on your doc­u­ments folder for this routine.