Digital Voice Recorders?

[proletariat]

I'm thinking of getting one of these to record meetings at work as well as classes at law school.  It would be handy to have all lectures on MP3 on my computer.  Does anyone do this?  Any recommendations on products?  Will I be an uber geek if I bust out my recorder in class?

[desmo]

I haven't noticed anyone recording yet.  I had one prof who would not allow it because she felt it was too easy to take something she said out of context and use it improperly.  Whatever you do, ask the prof first. 

The only problem I've heard about recording is that the student questions are not always heard so you may get the reply, but you won't hear the question.

[John Galt]

No offense intended, but I wouldn't be able to take anybody with a digital voice recorder seriously. 

[tenth8sphere]

I was considering this as well, with professor permission, of course. But only if my built in laptop mic was powerful enough to pick up. Otherwise the social trauma of whipping out a microphone every class probably wouldn't be worth the gain.

[jason1114]

I thought about getting a recorder but I just don't see how I would have time to listen to old classes when preparing for new ones... Also, the classes aren't lecture based, it's socratic, so the flow of the class would seem to be too disjointed to lend itself to record-and-playback.

[dandlewood]

I put some thought into this as well, there are some decent and fairly inconspicuous omni directional microphones that you can buy and plug into your laptop. I figured I would wait and see what the classroom environment/acoustics were like before making the investment though.  Also, if you go the laptop route, make sure you have appropriate software to compress wav's to MP3's if you don't want to fill your HD fast.

On a side note, I think that recordings are generally only appropriate for the day that class happened.  If you're going over your notes and come to something you remember discussing but can't put your finger on it, bam, load it up, cue to that section of class and you're in.  As soon as you have a couple days saved up, it becomes inefficient to go back and listen in.