Previous Studies on Note Taking Technology

Studies focused on the tools and applications designed to support note taking using new trends of technologies in education are highlighted. Existing technological note taking approaches proposed by other researchers were reviewed to explore what has been previously done in the literature as follows.

E-notes: these were developed by Wirth [180] to provide students with electronic lecture notes that can be printed as a hand out or annotated during the lectures. The evaluation results showed that e-notes help students to concentrate on the material, as well as engage in other class activities such as discussion. Subjective and objective feedback indicated that students found e-notes to be a valuable application to use for note taking. E-notes aided the students in concentrating on understanding the materials. They also made the lecture notes available electronically before the class.

Collaborative note taking: was developed by Singh et al. [57], enabling students to take notes on their PDAs and share them with their study group. The data collected and the feedback from students indicated that reusing the words from other available resources either slides or fellow note-takers in real time was useful. Students can use text from the slides and from other students to construct their notes. This system improves the speed of entering text and awareness between the members of the study group (see Figure 2-1). Therefore the solution of using short text feature and enabling the learners to generate their own content rather than reusing input already entered might be advantageous. Thus I concluded that further research was needed to investigate the use of short feature of micro-blogging to support learners’ note taking activity.

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Figure 2-1: Collaborative note taking (Singh et al. [57], redrawing)

StuPad was developed by Truong and Abowd [66], and integrates different steams of information such as notes, audio and video. StuPad integrates information generated by individual students and information presented by the teacher in the lecture. It is designed based on two interfaces, one for capturing and the other one for accessing and reviewing. Students are offered two different streams for taking notes: one is private on their notebook, and the other is for annotating their copy of the lectures' notes. StuPad also supports a pen-based interface for note taking. It has a simple interface to use (see Figure 2-2). However, Stupad did not investigate the short text for typing the notes.

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Figure 2-2: StuPad (Truong and Abowd [66])

Note taker was proposed by Ward [111] to take notes in class. It was designed using a number of computer features in order to adapt note taking activity. These features are a pen for drawing, text decoration from the keyboard, text positioning and keyboard for text input. The evaluation of Note taker shows the other features required to support the task of taking notes using the computer such as graphics and text and time (included), as shown in Figure. 2-3. However, this approach did not tackle the feature of short text for note taking like the current research does.

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Figure 2-3: Note taker (Ward [111])

Livenotes was described by Kam et al. [152] as a means to take notes in small groups in lectures, using a whiteboard and Tablets. The first feature is that the system allows students in the classroom to take notes cooperatively. The second feature is the capability to annotate over the lecture slides that were provided to expand students’ note taking. The evaluation results show that the Livenotes system supports cooperative note taking, as well as engagement in discussion in small groups (see Figure2-4). This system focused on cooperative note taking rather than the short and fast form of notes captured during the lecture. This study did not investigate the use of short text feature of micro-blogging for note taking, as in my research.

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Figure 2-4: Livenotes (Kam et al.[152])

DyKnow was designed by Berque [150] to be used by students and teachers for managing interactive classroom activities. Students are able to take notes, annotate, receive the content used in lectures, print their notes and access their notes in the stored server. The teacher can comment on the collected students’ work or mark the quizzes and return it electronically via DyKnow to the students. The evaluation results showed that students felt the system had a positive impact on what they learned in computer science. The results also demonstrated that the faculty members also found value in using DyKnow. This study indicated that there is a rapid change in the nature of text input, according to the students’ need. However, the text input investigated in this study is not the most popular text input, namely the short text feature of microblogging for note taking, which I further investigate.

38 Groupnotes was developed by Reilly and Shan [56] to increase the engagement in the classroom. The small group of students can participate in a real time lecture to take the notes collaboratively on their own smartphones. The aim of this work was to provide students with an interface for note taking that has such features as: synchronisation of multi users’ editable notes and longer smartphone battery life via compression of operation buffers (see Figure 2-5). It focused on how the degree of engagement can be increased across a small group of students while note taking using their own smartphones. This study, however, did not investigate the short text for note taking either, as in my research.

Figure 2-5: Groupnotes (Reilly and Shan [56], redrawing)

Shared text input technique: this was developed by Denoue et al. [55] to facilitate shared text input on small devices for note taking. This system was developed for sharing notes by reusing the words and phrases already entered by users, instead of writing the words on the small screens of these devices. This system allowed the user to reuse the text entered by another user. Other notes produced by others in class are available to access

39 and share after the class. The system provided more options to the users for sharing text extracted from other sources e.g. previous notes, agendas of meetings or abstracts. This study found that shared text input raised awareness among followers in note taking during lectures. Again, this work targeted the speed texting input for note taking on small screen by filtering the words and phrases on small screen, which are entered by others or extracted from different resources. This work did not apply the fast and short text feature of micro-blogging for note taking in class, as in my research.

NotePals was developed by Landay et al. [149] for sharing notes. It aimed to support group work so as to share the ideas and experience captured during a class or conference. It was implemented on a personal digital assistant which involved ink-based capture. The target in this work was to enhance the sharing of notes between the participants in group work after the class, as shown in Figure 2-6. This system focused on supporting collaborative work after class. This application did allow the creation of ink- based notes on the small screen with no specific length, or even by using the soft keyboard of the mobile device, which are further used in my research.

40 ZenPad was developed by Abowd [151] to capture notes as one of the classroom experiences (see Figure 2-7 below). The figure shows an interface for lecture slides and teacher comments. It was concerned with capturing as much as possible of the classroom experience. The author described the classroom as a multimedia classroom session. One of the main objectives of this work was to produce multimedia content that supported students in terms of recall. This work has not addressed what kind of notes the students captured across the multimedia classroom. The students experience with the notes captured has not been investigated in this work.

Figure 2-7: ZenPad (Abowd [151])