Digital Voice Recorder for Lectures

[TKassis]

Hi all,

I looking for a good voice recorder to start recording my lectures starting in August. I would like to record every lecture and transfer it to my laptop for archiving. Do you have any recommendations?

I've been looking at different companies, and there are so many to choose from!!! (too many). I need something that is good for picking up a lecture even if I had to sit far from the instructor for some reason. I already have an iPod touch 2G, but don't know how reliable it would be to use it and whether I can transfer the audio files to my laptop.

I've considered Livescribe's Pulse pen, but I cannot handle such a big pen while taking notes. It is too thick for my comfort.

[kahlan_amnell]

Hi all,

I looking for a good voice recorder to start recording my lectures starting in August. I would like to record every lecture and transfer it to my laptop for archiving. Do you have any recommendations?

I've been looking at different companies, and there are so many to choose from!!! (too many). I need something that is good for picking up a lecture even if I had to sit far from the instructor for some reason. I already have an iPod touch 2G, but don't know how reliable it would be to use it and whether I can transfer the audio files to my laptop.

I've considered Livescribe's Pulse pen, but I cannot handle such a big pen while taking notes. It is too thick for my comfort.

I can't recommend one, but are you sure you really want to record all your lectures? Why do you want to do so? Will you really have the time and inclination to listen to them again?

If you really do want to record lectures, you will have to get permission to do so from each professor, assuming that by "my lectures" you mean lecture you are attending rather than ones you are giving.

[Minnesotan]

What kind of grad course has lectures?

[TKassis]

Thank you Kahlan, I would like to record all the lectures so that if I need to go back later during revision or self-study. I will not listen to them unless there is something I didn't understand in class from the first place. I can't take notes about something I don't understand (that's when the audio file will come in).

Minnesotan, I am doing a Master's so I have a lot of courses to take in addition to research.

[kahlan_amnell]

What is your area of study? All my courses for my MA were seminars, no lectures.

[belowthree]

What kind of grad course has lectures?

The first year of a lot of the science/engineering ones. There's a few core classes where they go ahead and backfill you on the things the schools can't fit into the four-year undergraduate degrees. So you have a first year of grad school that looks a little bit like undergrad. It's weird, but in CS there's only about 3-5 courses like this and then they quickly decay down to small topic-specific courses of under 20 students. Some of which still actually do have lectures though! Others run in a discussion or seminar style format, depending on the professor's preference.

One of the defining systems courses at UCSD for first year CS students is the operating systems course which actually also serves as your crash course on how to read scientific papers. The entire course uses the socratic method with a professor who attempts his or her best to look mean, a stack of index cards (with each person's name written on them) and a classroom full of scared disoriented first year graduate students.

It's a lot of fun.

TKassis is in EE, so I assume they probably have to deal with the same set of 3-5 core courses that are large lectures. I suppose I should also note that I've only seen this happen at larger grad programs that number hundreds of students. It's harder to do this if you only have 5-10 incoming first years like some of the smaller programs.

[TKassis]

Sorry for any misunderstanding people, but when I talk about lectures I'm referring to any type of classroom instruction. I did my undergrad in England and am not familiar with seminars...

[LingGrad2009]

Sorry for any misunderstanding people, but when I talk about lectures I'm referring to any type of classroom instruction. I did my undergrad in England and am not familiar with seminars...

Seminars are small classes where everyone discusses or takes turns presenting. If you record seminars you'll be expected, and probably required, to clear it with every person present. Even then, they might just disallow it completely, because even with permission, fledgling scholars might be intimidated by the recording and hesitant to participate. Besides, if there's something you don't understand in a seminar, you should just discuss it right then rather than puzzling it out on your own later.

[TKassis]

Thank you Linggrad2009 for the clarification. In such cases I guess where a discussion is involved I do not need a voice recorder.