I am with the paper and pen crowd when it comes to taking down notes on the fly in a lecture. I am a lawyer in the UK and in my early days I used to earn my crust by doing noting briefs. This would mean taking as near as possible verbaitm note of a case as it proceeded in court. That note is then used to further prepare the case as it progressed.

Lawyers have to be accurate and fullsome and often there's a lot to get down: a witness being aggresively cross examined is a tough note to take.

Many lawyers do this work in the early days of their careers. It's surprising to find many senior judges take very detailed handwritten notes as a matter of course as they listen to the case.

I think you can apply this to lecture notes as follows:

1. First of all fold your note paper in half length ways and draw a dividing line. One half is for the actual note, the other for your own musings, ideas for further reasearch and comments etc. If you find you are not making many comments then adjust the comment strip accordingly

2. Work out some form of shorthand and combine passages of speech where possible. For example "and after that I could not find my way home" becomes "+ aft tt cld nt fnd wy hm". If you write up your notes soon after the lecture the context will be evident so the "me" and "I" are not essential. Dropping vowels is required and some words can be shortened even further as context will make them readily apparent.

3. As you go along highlight any difficult passages of shorthand. That process alone gets the original speech fixed in your mind.

4. Type the note up when you get home. The main benefit of this is the parrot like repetition; it all really soaks into your noggin that way. If you cannot be bothered just read the note aloud to at least firm up your recollection.

5. For retyping I would use something simple like text edit. Also I have a spare gmail account that, when I infrequently take my own court note, I use as a filing cabinet. I just cut and paste them from text edit and put the title in the subject line.

Sorry if that's all a bit longwinded and irrelevant but that's my method.

PS doing it all in reverse - taking long notes and writing them out and reducing them into shorthand is a great method for revising.