As a special year-end promotion, the Communities team got our hands on some IBM Automation journals. I don’t know about you, but I still write things down by hand. Maybe I’m just a creature of habit, repeating what was drilled into me by Mrs. Lovejoy in 3rd grade, but I don’t think so.
Social psychologist Pam Mueller did an interesting experiment in cognitive processing at Princeton University in 2014. She pointed her students to a series of TED Talks and told half to take notes by hand and half to take notes on a laptop. Take a wild guess which group was better able to explain the concepts expressed in the videos? Mueller concluded that the typists, because they could type faster than the hand writers, tended to write the speaker’s words down verbatim, while hand writers consolidated the concepts into shorter phrases, and therefore engaged on a deeper level.
So here’s the deal:
If you’re new the Automation Community and you join a Topic Group (say, Transforming Your Business or Robotic Process Automation) and post a hello in a Discussion thread, we’ll send you a cloth bound IBM Automation journal. Then you can see for yourself if hand writing notes is better than typing them. Plus, the books are nice. Whatever you write in them will just look better!
Of course, there are some rules (Terms and Conditions). Our funding source stipulates we can only give journals to U.S. residents and we can’t send to employees of a Government Owned Entity (you Public Sector people know about that!), but that still leaves a lot of you eligible. But you better hurry. We only have 100 and then it’s over.
Why not do it right now?
#community