A few months ago I "took" a class in ordinary differential equations by enrolling MIT's open courseware class on the subject. I've already written about the testing strategies I picked up from that experience. I want to share a subset of the notes I took so everyone can clearly see what I did. Plus, when I review the notes, some new behavior of OneNote shows. Get the section here: http://johnguin.com/Documents/ode.zip

For instance, this is a snippet of my notes from lecture 1. Notice how the graph field is in a separate container than the rest of the notes above and below it. That seems odd to me: if I am not careful, when I start dragging and dropping outlines around, I could wind up leaving this one at its old location. Then, when I am done, the outlines won't be lined up and the text written around them will not have any meaning.

Being a tester, I had to go ahead and drag the outline off to the right. This is what I wound up with:

Hmm: only the slope points were in that outline. This is explainable, but somehow not intuitive. I have a workaround for these "move outline" behaviors: select everything on the page with CTRL+A, then move the elements. I'll also try to move elements around until I "break" something, but that's just the tester in me.

Going on to my class 2 notes, you can see where I decided a thicker pen was easier to read than the thin pen I had been using. I also changed to black ink from blue. This is just personal preference and I set my default pen to be the thicker, black pen after this.

Going down the page I remember this:

I started switching pen colors to better match the chalk the teacher was using. I paused the video while I set my pens toolbar to the bottom of my screen, and already commented that this is the type of thing students should do before class. I see this as the modern equivalent to making sure your pencils are sharpened before the lecture begins.

I also printed the lecture notes, recitations and homework files to OneNote so I would have them handy in the class section. I did not annotate them, but left room to the right to do so (maybe during a study group or the like). I'm only including the first four sessions here - the rest was more of the same. I used Nani's Table of Contents powertoy to create the table of contents.

My server has a 10MB file size limit (which is why I'm only including the first four lecture notes). If I had the room, I would have embedded the video files on the page - then my notes would have been synced to the timing of the video.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John