Hi Chris,
The Livescribe seems pretty thick; how natural does it feel while holding it in hand and using it? Is it harder at all to write with it? Is there a learning curve and how long does it take to start using it without noticing a bit awkward thickness near the bottom?
A colleague once told me that you could always tell the graduate students in a meeting because they were constantly taking notes, writing as fast as possible to capture everything that was said verbatim. I’ve long since given up on that strategy as I find that writing everything down means that I miss the big picture of a conversation or meeting. I tend to just listen, taking a quick note or action item as needed. Other people draw or doodle. Some will mind-map. An incredible number of secondary school students don’t bother taking notes at all and then wonder why they fail every summative assessment they encounter.
My point is that we have many different ways of taking notes, whether in the classroom or the boardroom. For many of our students, note taking is ineffective at best and downright harmful at the worst. This is where Livescribe comes in. No, really…their echo smartpen is not like other smartpens out there that just digitize what you write. This is different, and really compelling.
Livescribe released their echo smartpen last month and kindly sent me a review unit. I kindly set it aside and went nuts starting my consulting business. It wasn’t until this past weekend that I finally broke it out for some hands-on time and I was blown away, thoroughly regretting not having this device with me constantly through a month of meetings and conferences.
Let me step back for a minute though and point a few things out. As I said, everyone takes notes differently. My writing is basically illegible, so I tend to type everything and, when I do take notes, it tends to be in Google Docs or OneNote so that I don’t lose the notes and so that I can read them in a week. That being said, I tend to be pretty visual, so as I’m working out a solution with colleagues, I’ll tend to draw relationships, diagrams, maps, and “big pictures.” Google Docs does not lend itself to this particularly well and, while there are plenty of software tools that do, none can substitute for the speed or immediate person-to-person communication of a back-of-the-envelope diagram. I’m just not capable of keeping those diagrams or remembering the context and discussion surrounding them in a week when I need to refer to them. I simply lack the organizational fortitude. That’s why I have my wife, the world’s most organized person.
That being said, the echo pen accommodates my peculiarities quite nicely. However, it requires the grad student model I mentioned above to change completely. It throws it out the window. Good riddance, I say, and welcome to a new approach that will make sense to the vast majority of our students.
