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Those studies about the wonders of handwriting all suffer from the same set of flaws, namely, a) that they don’t actually work with students who have been taught to use their laptops or devices for taking notes. That is, they all hand students devices and tell them to take notes in the same way they would in written form. In some cases those devices don’t have keyboards; in some cases they don’t provide software tools to use (there are some great ones, but doing it in say, Word, isn’t going to maximize the options digital spaces allow), in some cases the devices are not ones the students use themselves and with which they are comfortable. And b) the studies are almost always focused on learning in large lecture classes or classes in which the assessment of success is performance on a standardized (typically multiple-choice) test, not in the ways that many, many classes operate, and not a measure that many of us use in our own classes. And c) they don’t actually attempt to integrate the devices into the classes in question,

I have plenty of conversations with students about how to take notes already. Most of the time their problem isn’t which device (pencil, laptop, phone, quill) they use to take those notes, but how to take them and how to use them to learn based on their own experiences, learning styles, and discipline

The ideas presented feel like they make sense at the time. But if the ideas do not challenge us in a fundamental way, they might not be being processed deeply enough to lead to any lasting learning.

Such environments may lead us into having a false level of confidence in our understanding of complex concepts. Glossy, high production value resources have been shown to give people an inflated sense of understanding.

So a key way to harness confusion when you are challenged with new concepts or ideas, is to recognise that confusion exists. Be comfortable with this, but seek to resolve it

“Students spend more time doing schoolwork on mobile devices than they would with paper and pencil because it's an affirmation of who they are and it's readily available…In fact, he says he has seen 30 percent improvement when children use mobile devices on the same curriculum they used to cover without them”