Agreed. I take notes for my university classes either by using my tablet to type in a markdown file (the content of which I then transfer to Obsidian) or by writing by hand in a small notebook (and then adding the most important things to Obsidian). In both cases, what comes to my memory when thinking about my note-taking is how it's organized in Obsidian and in what part of my file.
One of the biggest advantages of taking notes digitally (or, at least, transforming hand-written content into digital content), which the article fails to mention, is the fact that you can easily CTRL+F to find the information you are looking for. This has helped me so many times during my studies. This is impossible to do with hand-written notes.
To add to what you said regarding a comparative work between paper writing and digital writing, I'd also like to see other ways of remembering content being taken into account. Writing by hand may "still [be] the best way to retain information", but the article seems to miss that writing is only one way of remembering things.
Let's say person A is taking notes by hand and doing nothing else, and person B is taking notes digitally and then using spaced repetition to remember what they have written. We can easily say that person B will retain much more information than person A. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if they both used spaced repetition. I doubt there would be much difference in the end. What matters is the way information is encoded in one's long-term memory, not the way is it collected.
The interesting part is, should we combine notes and SBS? in my condition, I write note for fetch information in future, redo this part again to add them into my Anki become a repetitive work.
- My notes contain all the knowledge I have accumulated.
- I extract new knowledge that is worth being remembered from my notes into my SR system so as to add it to my long-term memory (there is some knowledge that is good keeping in a file but that doesn't necessarily need to be learnt by heart).
- After a few months, I remove that knowledge from my SR system because I consider it has been imprinted into my memory.
I must say that the last step is necessary in my case, because otherwise I would have too many recalls to deal with each day and that would ruin all the fun.
If, after having removed the knowledge from my SR system, I still remember it, good! Otherwise, I consider that, if I wasn't able to retain it, it means it has no use in my immediate environment and/or in my daily/weekly tasks.
So, to summarize quickly: SR is awesome, but in my workflow, not everything needs to be memorized, hence my using SR + notes.
One of the biggest advantages of taking notes digitally (or, at least, transforming hand-written content into digital content), which the article fails to mention, is the fact that you can easily CTRL+F to find the information you are looking for. This has helped me so many times during my studies. This is impossible to do with hand-written notes.
To add to what you said regarding a comparative work between paper writing and digital writing, I'd also like to see other ways of remembering content being taken into account. Writing by hand may "still [be] the best way to retain information", but the article seems to miss that writing is only one way of remembering things.
Let's say person A is taking notes by hand and doing nothing else, and person B is taking notes digitally and then using spaced repetition to remember what they have written. We can easily say that person B will retain much more information than person A. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if they both used spaced repetition. I doubt there would be much difference in the end. What matters is the way information is encoded in one's long-term memory, not the way is it collected.