07-19-2004, 02:27 AM
Quote:Still have trouble envisioning a gaggle of students typing their notes during a lecture. Feels too much like stenography school.
That would be because typing notes is a pain. Unless you want to only have text in fixed lines, or have to try and draw pretty circles to draw diagrams.
The future, is tablet PC's and a desktop machine to do all the hard processing/storage/writing things like coursework. I don't work for Microsoft (thought I'd get that out of the way) but OneNote, in OfficeXP looks pretty nifty (from reviews & screenshots & whatknot).
A quick explanation for those of you with eyes already boggling. OneNote is a bit like a souped up notepad. You use it on a tablet PC (or potentially a PDA),where you write on the screen. You then have nearly limitless pages of book to write/draw/doodle on and the programme just stors the images of the page for you to flip through, saving as you write so that you're unlikely to lose more that a letter. But, whilst it's doing this, it's also turning your handwriting into text, to be bumped into word to write your notes up good and proper afterwards.
It also has machine understandable marks for important stuff and lots of other nice features.
But, the crowning glory (for now), Is the audio recording. The programme records the whole audio of the lecture, and indexes it against when you wrote something, so you can listen to the entire lecture again, and see your notes come up at the relevant point, or you can look at a note and have it play back what was being said when you wrote it.
It also has the ability to interface with other bits of software, so you can put snippets of websites up, PowerPoint slides and (although not here yet, but and certainly right around the corner) the 'page' from an interactive whiteboard. All time indexed again to when notes were made.
A far more efficient way of taking notes, and each lecture worth can be exported as one file to be archived away for later reference.
So, what's the disadvantage? it requires a tablet PC, which for now cost an absolute fortune (£2,000+ starting prices).
So, there's a lovely gap in the market for some ingenious entrapeneur (yeah, I know I didn't spell that right, OneNote's probably got a spellchecker in it too, although I don't know. It could easily have been overlooked since they're taken for granted these days) to start selling cut down tablet PC's, just a 10" or 12" (maybe even 8") LCD screen, a battery, some RAM, a ROM or solid state memory, wireless networking & a low-power processor (a 1GHz-y crusoe chip would be nice). With this, comes a pretty powerdul, but otherwise basic desktop PC (the kind of stuff that PCWorld sells - good for work & a few limited applications, worthless for anything else). With high-bandwidth wireless networking and some proper security protocols, and entire campus could have a tablet PC with them as a digital notepad & a decent desktop PC actually doing everything - and it means that everyone actually has a computer for doing computer things, rather than a fiddly laptop & a tablet PC for taking notes on, which is easier than typing, because writing is more 'free'.
A desktop PC with the same specifications as a laptop will cost several £100 less than the laptop - such a basic tablet type thing would probably only cost that much to produce - the most of the additional cost of the things is the minaturisation of most of a computer into such a small space - if it isn't actually most of a computer a) there's less b ) it doesn't have to be as minaturised.
This also means that the actually computer bit is more accessable (i.e. you can repair/upgrade it yourself), and the bit which is more likely to get dropped
1) doesn't contain as much so would be less expensive to repair
2) isn't the vital bit, if you do end up smashing the tablet, you can still write on real paper & scan it in (if you want) and you're not totally with a computer.
The main things needed for this all to happen are:
1)Broadband WI-FI (and potentially better internet links, as the same principle would apply using wireless hotspots all around the globe)
2)Someone to start making 'just-the-marrow' bare-bones tablet PC's
3)Someone else to srite all the integration stuff
4)Another smart person to sell this with a cheap-but-decent desktop PC
5)The nice people at Microsoft to start allowing 'dumb terminal licenses' for free with a copy of XP, an extra £100 for a second copy of windows is the one thing that could really screw this plan up.
The other advantage is that the dumb terminals won't beceom obsolete very fast, so universities can invest in the tablets & rent (ot just require a deposit) on them, and the students need just bring a cheaper & better desktop PC with them.
Simple, Effective, Efficient, Potentially cheaper.
You can see that I'm excitied by the prospesct of tablet PC's, can't you?
-Bob