Too long ago that I can up with actual citations I read about studies that said a better way to "retain" information, in the context of college reading material, is recitation. With recitation they meant verbally explaining the content from memory.
One of the problems with most such studies is that they don't compare techniques with each other.
Abstract:
Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning
For starters, it's not just "take notes" and leave it at that. Those notes are reviewed, modified, reorganized, corrected, and studied. It's so much easier to just carry a laptop with several files instead of a variety of notebooks. So much easier to search in files, to rewrite/reorganize... And, for a lot of people like me who have bad handwriting (that gets worse with fatigue), they're also so much easier to read. It's also far easier to take collaborative notes.
In other words, the relation effort-results can be far higher with laptops than with writing.
I can read a book on a subject, and understand it to a degree. If I write down what I learned in my own words, then I must come to grips with the fact that I didn't understand everything; writing it down forces me to come to a better, more organized understanding. Teaching it to someone else means I must be able to explain for someone who does not necessarily have my own background, and who may stop me to ask questions. Programming the knowledge to a computer means that I must account for all questions; the knowledge must be completely and precisely defined.
I reckon very little knowledge has yet been adequately programmed into a computer, but many people stop at the first step, and never write or teach.