.jpg)
Home
Forums
Wiki/Library
Beginner Guide
Gallery
Glossary
About Us
RSS Feed
Microsocft MVP: Tablet PC
Nigel Ward on OneNote and My Response
16 February 2005Posted By: TracyPosted in: OneNote, Tablet Concepts
Associate Professor of Computer Science (University of Texas - El Paso) Nigel Ward posted a comment about a review of OneNote he wrote on whether OneNote really is the next big thing for students. He asked for my comments on his article and I thought this discussion would be beneficial to all you out there in computer world as it covered a lot of issues many have problems with. Somethings I agree with, a lot of things I don’t, but I hope some of this helps. (me in black type, Nigel in italic gray)
"OneNote is being marketed to college students as a tool for taking notes in class. Is it up to the task?
"The short answer is, probably not. The longer answer is, of course, it depends . . . "
"Possible Pluses
There are several ways in which in-class note-taking with the computer could be good for you.
"First, you could end up with better notes. The OneNote ads feature beautiful, colorful, well-laid out notes, notes that are a joy to look at. The night before the test of course you’d prefer to have notes like that instead of in dull black ink on paper. But there’s no free lunch. To create more beautiful notes requires more work, and using a computer doesn’t much change that."
While, yes, to create "pretty" notes, it does require the effort of actually creating, but the thing not put into consideration is the convenience of having so many utensils at your beck and call while taking notes. I was sitting in lecture today watching the guy in front of me make crafty notes on paper. While I never had to pick up a new pen the entire lecture, I almost felt bad for him when I saw him with four pens in different colors balanced on the tiny fold up desk as he dug in his pencil bag looking for another color. Yes, you do have to already have the desire to create better notes within you, just the same as you have to have the want to do read your books to have digital textbooks do you any good. Tablets won’t make you a neat person, but they will make it easier to be a neat person.
"Second, you could share notes easier. Of course it’s nicer to exchange notes with friends by e-mail, rather than running to the copy shop. Unfortunately there’s a moral hazard here; if note sharing becomes trivially easy, it will become that much easier to skip classes; not always a good thing."
I actually take a different stand on this one, even if I do agree it could happen with those not inclined to come to class in the first place (which is a lot of people, but just like the pretty notes scenario, if you weren’t inclined to do it before, you probably won’t be inclined to do it after). Any person who has tried to decipher someone else’s notes knows how close to impossible it is to really gain an understanding of what’s actually going on. It’s just someones personal memory triggers that they write down, not a word for word lecture summary (it’s almost as hard as deciphering someones excel file…). If you DO gain a full understanding from the notes, then you probably spent more time on the subject than you would have anyway just going to class. The benefit to easy sharing is when, for instance, my friend is missing DiffEQ tomorrow morning because of a test so I told him I’d take good notes (as in, "understandable to other") and e-mail it to him, or print out a copy. When it really comes down to it, printing your notes and making a copy of paper notes take about the same amount of time so there’s not really a big gain in that aspect. The real benefit of digital notes shows up is when it’s 2AM and this scenario happens: "Oh no! I can’t find my notes and the test is tomorrow!! Can you e-mail me yours to look at?!?" .
"Third, you could get better organized. This is something that really appeals to businesspeople, reporters, authors, etc., who are the primary market for OneNote and the Tablet PC itself. However, unless your professor is really bad, your class notes can simply follow the lectures and automatically be reasonably well structured into topics. And if you’re like most people, reviewing for the test is mostly a question of going though the notes in order, with no need for fancy reorganization or indexing."
Yes, if you have a decent lecturer and you are an organized person, your notes will be just as organized on a tablet pc as on paper. What happens to me though is I like to take notes on loose-leaf paper (I don’t like carrying around 5 spirals with me each day just to use one sheet out of each page. I try to be organized, I get the little tabs and the binder out, I date each lecture and I *try* to get it put away when I get home. But there would always be a set of notes or homework or whatever that would get stuck in a book while being lazy, or tossed in the backpack while rushing to beat the lunch crowd, which never would make it to the binder, or where ever it was meant to go. With digital notes, sure it may be in the same notes in the same order as paper notes, but the worst you could probably do is save the page in the wrong folder, or name it wrong and misplace it for a little. Unless you go and delete it or your hard drive crashes (which I compare to dropping your binder in a puddle, or cleaning out old papers and throwing away something you actually needed…), nothing will go very far. When I’m bored on the bus and can’t get internet (or when I’m wasting time putting off homework ^_^), it’s easy to go through and move files around and rename, etc..
"Fourth, your notes could be more legible. Maybe having a shiny new computer will motivate you to take more care with your writing, but it will simultaneously make it harder. The Tablet PC, although a huge advance on PDA touch-screens, still is not as writeable as paper. Technically, the screen has less friction, lower resolution, less contrast, parallax problems, and a delay from the moment you write to the moment the ink appears. Today paper is still the best technology for capturing handwriting. (It’s also the best technology for viewing handwriting.)"
Hmm, not sure if the author has tried a tablet or not. I know many who say these claims who are go off a trial of one of the early tablets two or so years ago. Yes, there is less friction, yes, there is a glare here and there, but lower resolution and less contrast? A delay from the moment you write to the moment the ink appears? No, no, no…I’m sitting here on a 14" screen (the largest tablets get) and I can only barely see the pixels when I write. The resolution of the screen may technically be less but not visibly. And while the contrast at times can be worse while in the sun or really bright lights, think about all the dark lecture rooms you have to take notes in, or the times at night where you have a shadow blocking the light and the paper gets hard to read. The back light on a computer makes any low lighting situation not a problem, which is a trade off for loosing the bright light readability. You win some, you lose some, but since I study at night and sit in dark lecture rooms, I personally benefit. As for the delay, I REALLY WISH I could let everyone who doubts this come over and try a real, normal, modern tablet (they’ve improved greatly even from 2 years ago). There’s NO lag between the stroke and the ink appearance at all, and the lack of a lot of friction is a joy once you normalize yourself to it. I can write EXACTLY the same on the tablet as I do on paper. People pay good money for pens with little friction. Yes, when you first grab a tablet and start writing, it will feel weird and your writing will feel sloppy, but that goes away in less than a week, some people only a day. It just takes adjusting your pressure down (which is nice for those of us who have a lump on the middle finger from a tight grip on a pencil ^_^). If you have this idea in your head as you read this thinking, "Yeah, right, she’s just saying that…," then go to your local Fry’s or any place that has a tablet you know of and ask to use the pen (hopefully they’ll know what you mean 
). After six months on a tablet, writing on paper feels so rough and hard. It’s like going from a stick shift pinto, to a luxury car, then back. Transitions are always weird.
"But what about the handwriting recognition? Again, no free lunch. If you write beautifully, then perhaps it will work for you, but otherwise you’ll be spending more time correcting the recognition mistakes than listening to the lecture."
I don’t use handwriting recognition while taking lecture notes…I don’t know any reason you would….When I do use HW, it’s for things like surfing the web or writing short e-mails. Like I said in my Ink as Ink article, things like lecture notes are better left as ink. The ink is search-able anyway, so there’s not any real reason to convert it unless you’re wanting to cut and paste into a report or something. Is there a reason to convert while taking notes that I’m not thinking of?
"But why not just type the notes? In principle that’s the answer, especially if you type faster than you write, but OneNote appears not to be designed with that in mind. It does improve on Journal, in that you can type after just clicking the screen where you want the text to go (the "anywhere canvas" feature). This is a welcome break with the Office tradition of being unable to enter text without painfully creating a textbox. But it doesn’t go far enough. Since most notes are mostly text, the overhead for text entry should be minimized. For students, this means the ability to create little chunks of text all over the page, so that the notes reflect the way the professor lays out the keywords and keyphrases on the the board to in meaningful patterns showing their logical relationships. In OneNote, however, you still have to click before you can start typing, which forces you to pick up the pen, click, and put it down again, for no real reason. (Of course if you buy a TabletPC with a trackball (recommended!) you’re a little better off, but there’s still the unnecessary click.) (Oct 29, 2003: A OneNote product manager at Microsoft sent me mail kindly pointing out that description above is technically incorrect. The unnecessary click actually seems to be required for the purpose of exiting the previous text box. Of course that doesn’t make the usability problem less significant.)"
I don’t really use OneNote, but for fun I’ve been trying to play around with typing my notes (for variety and because I get bored in class ^_^ Only in government, though. My other classes require thinking and diagrams ^_^). If I were really into typing my notes, I don’t think I’d use one of the notes programs out *yet*. I know GoBinder is coming out new (version 2006) within the next year (how’s that for being vague, lol) and they’re really going to try to make it more keyboard friendly, but right now it’s just downright weird. Typing is one of those things that you’re use to having certain rules, such as pressing tab creates and indent, etc., and you can do formatting up the wazoo. These programs geared towards the tablet pc just don’t seem to be up to par with programs like Word and such. This is one factor I agree with the author. Typing notes in OneNote and similar is…interesting. Doable, and many do, but it takes learning a new way to type,…sorta…hard to explain….
"…
"Fifth, you could create notes with less effort. If using OneNote is more intuitive than paper for you, then great. But most people will probably find it a distraction to have to navigate through menus, recall shortcuts, and fight with the pen-mode problems (more on that below). Now if you’re a businessman in a boring meeting, that distraction is probably welcome, but if you’re in lecture and your brain is already running at capacity just trying to understand what the professor is saying, then the extra cognitive load will be a real drag."
Lol, most programs do have a learning curve, which is why I suggest pick a program, learning it before classes start, then sticking to it, but what student hasn’t looked at the clock a couple (tens…thousands…) of times during a lecture? Not saying it takes extra effort to take normal notes, but if you’re getting bored, it’s nice to have the option to highlight up a little, change the color of a block of text, or rewrite something real quick which turned out wrong the first time around. When you have a hard class you can easily keep up, such a your lecturer talks fast or it’s just a lot of material. But maybe it’s just since I’m down South and, while amusing, Southern drawls can get quite lengthy and boring as it means the professor talks a LOT slower than you can write. In those cases, I pull out the big guns; internet explorer ^_^. I know, I know, but it keeps me awake.
"Sixth, you could restructure your notes more easily. This is not something that most students do a lot, but it might be useful sometimes.
…
Actually it’s even worse, since there is some evil logic in OneNote which appears to dislike overlapped objects. For example: I input some text and highlight it. Then I decide it should be somewhere else, so I select the text and the highlighting and drag them down. Oops, the highlighting did not come with the text. Okay, I’ll click on the highlighting and drag it down on top of the text… but now the text jumps away. After chasing the text around a bit I give up. Apparently the proper thing to do is delete the old highlighting, and create a new highlight. Why make things easy?"
First, the overlapping/jumping text is just a problem with OneNote and not an issue with other notes programs. In Journal you can grab individual strokes, and GoBinder will even let you grab parts of strokes to move around (in OneNote it grabs a group of ink/text to move at once). As for "grouping," yeah, that would be nice to just say "make this all one thing," like in many Office programs, but the select tool does a pretty good job of making up for it. What I use the select and moving tools for is mostly for my special way of doing homework. I like to take all my notes for each lecture, shrink them down to half the size, and fit them all on one or two pages. This makes it super easy to follow the notes when looking for something visually when doing homework. That and it looks really cool ^_^. And yes, the ink shrinks perfectly and is still plenty readable at half the size. Even the highlighting shrinks fine.
"Seventh, you could find stuff in your notes more easily by searching in them. Once in a while you may really want to find something in your notes from last semester. I guess. I never have. But if you did, then you could search for it. That is, you could if OneNote’s supposed ability to search handwritten text actually worked once in a while."
Lol, I actually don’t use the search tool that much either. I know people that use it all the time though, so maybe it’s just me, but yeah, I don’t really use it.
"Eighth, you could recycle snippets from your notes into reports without having to retype them. Business people of course do this all the time, but students? I guess it’s useful in those rare cases where you get a professor who gives regurgitation-type assignments."
Again, another feature I don’t use much. I don’t write reports much either, though, so each to his own ^_^.
Read the whole original article here: OneNote and Classroom Note Taking
If there are any comments on my comments, or comments on Nigel’s comments, PLEASE post them!!! I love hearing different attitudes and viewpoints (as long as they’re reasonable!) so don’t lurk if you have something to say!
top
February 17th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
In my opinion, how OneNote handles containers is without a doubt its biggest weakness as a note-taking tool. It drove me so far up the wall I dropped it in favor of GoBinder.
The ability to type notes comes in handy in classes in which the professor covers a lot of information very quickly. I don’t know how it would work in OneNote, but I print the power point slides to GoBinder and take typewritten notes below them. My notes are far more complete than my classmates’.
My handwriting is now better on the tablet than it is on paper! It hasn’t been a problem. And the ability to use different colors quickly (and correct mistakes with no residue) is invaluable to me. I can mark a couple of things to show steps or order, write areas or forumlas for later memorization in a different color, or mark a correction if it’s something you’ve previously learned wrong.
Sharing notes is difficult. People have to download a viewer if I send them electronically, and printing is a problem because I use the Cornell method of notetaking and often add width to the page.
I wouldn’t go back to paper notes for the world. When I lost my pen and had to take a few days’ worth in a notebook, I could hardly decipher them later. Between the eraser ghost marks and monotone color I lost a lot of information.
February 19th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
Jeepers, Professor Ward doesn’t like OneNote. Fair enough, but . . .
Some omissions: he should personally inspect the bookbags and trapperkeepers of his students. He should hand out an information sheet the last five minutes of class one week and collect it the next. My point: paper sucks, and students are usually disorganized in handling them. OneNote is one way for students not lose paper. OneNote is a way for students to organize their own papers. At least they won’t be shreds by week 2.
In fact, I do reorganize my pages, not because I have good lecturers or bad, but because a lecture (of which I have very few) and class discussions range and vary, and because the process of learning in these situations is itself chaotic. I don’t necessarily know what to write down. The professor may or may not know what she thinks I need to write down, but what I need to write down I may discover too late, and what I didn’t need to write down is different. Professor Ward is thinking in terms of the free flow of ink on paper, and not what my chaotic brain is doing to figure out what I should be recording. Sometimes a program screws up while I’m working and makes another dimension of difficulty, but that’s not usually where the frustration is in learning. It’s in figuring out what it is I’m supposed to BE learning, and learning it so that I can write notes about it that anyone would agree is what I should have learned.
OneNote may have its limitations and frustrations, but so does paper, including reshaping the images on it, storing and accessing, and modifying them. I have NO qualms with someone finding paper and pen to their taste, but the categoric statements of Professor Ward ignore some realities that have led some of us to move as much as possible to digitize as much of our work as possible.
I also remember professors roundly criticizing the advent of the wordprocessor in the academy as making dumb ideas look good, making a generation of students unable to spell, creating a false impression of completeness, etc. Does anybody really use a typewriter today other than a few troglodytes and luddites? Does anybody recommend to their students that you have to click too many times, so just stick with paper?
Obviously I’m a tablet PC user, or I wouldn’t have come to this website, and obviously I’m concerned with academic use thereof. Unfortunately, tablet PCs don’t improve my handwriting, but neither do they make anything worse, and many of the included tools are better. If I can get materials in advance, I can put them in OneNote or GoBinder and write on them, and that is better than writing on a piece of paper. The software writers haven’t created a perfect format for everybody for every situation, but OneNote is a certain kind of improvement.
Professor Ward didn’t mention one of the biggest pleasures of paper notebooks: leafing through them, which hasn’t been duplicated or improved on in digital form. I’m a longtime journal writer, and my old journals are more of a pleasure to leaf through than my current, digital ones–but I’m sticking with this newfangled technology because it is more of a pleasure to write on, because backlit pages are easier, not harder to read, because I can search and copy easily, because I can link in some ways, because I can change colors and thicknesses with a tap or two, because gadgets are fun, and because I can carry it all with me in the size of one notebook, albeit in the weight of five, along with two encyclopediae, six hundred Gutenberg Project books, all my correspondence in the form of email, all the music I own, and the aggragation of twenty-five or so blogs, access (depending on where I am) to all the newspapers I read, etc. Trying to separate OneNote from its integration with Outlook isn’t fair; maybe it isn’t for everybody, but it’s not as bad Professor Ward says it is.
February 27th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
First of all, I was using a laptop for several years, but no tablet PC so far. Thus my experience is a litte different, concerning possibilities (no ink) and programs (no journal).
Sharing notes is easy, fast and useful if you use Acrobat (NOT the reader). Simply export and then import them. Useful as well if the prof is updating the slides often, but with minor changes only (typos in formulae etc), as you just take the old notes to the new content. BTW Acrobat 5 costs around 50€ / 75$, so it’s affordable.
My notes are also much more complete and comprehensible as my classmates ones. Why more comprehensible? Because changing, correcting, completing them later is very easy compared to paper notes. You certainly know this feeling of “a, this page explains some of the stuff that was so hard 5 pages ago”.
What I missed: What’s about “hyper”links? It’s much more easy to add and follow pointers in the digital scripts than in paper based ones. Want some examples? OK. One of my majors is given in app. 1200 pages. Page 50 relates to page 170, 290, 680 and 1100. In computer world, it’s one click, in paper world, you have to get another file, open, search, move all that paper. And now the overkill: Cross term and cross subject references. 2nd term law is needed in 8th term economics….
It might be very easy to copy some lines of text to flash cards, a summary, question lists and the like. If there are no security options like “disallow copy of text” set…
And I do use search, e.g. to directly jump to the desired page or to look for Peters comments. I even build indices using acrobat. That’s pretty useful, as orinary search does not find “color” when the sheet contains “colour”, but searching in indices offers “soundex”, “thesaurus” and “edit distance”. It’s a pity that not all of those advanced options are available for German as well
Last of all: I’ve always my complete collection of scripts and notes and compentia (wikipedia offline version, encarta,…) with me, but need not to carry along a whole shelve… - Friends learn with their paper notes, and afterwards want my digital ones, which are easy to store and to take along during studies abroad. - Very useful when you exactly know that something were part of a certain lecture - you just go there, information at your finger tips, even when you’re not at home!
Well, after all, I’m now preparing to give courses in “digital university” for students. It’s going to be a service of the student union and we wish to animate all those notebook-owing folks to REALLY USE their machines…
Happy hacking, Georg
April 19th, 2005 at 9:21 am
re: handwriting. I’ve been playing with my tablet for a week plus and a month prior with OneNote. What I found was that it did a really great job recognizing my handwriting and that is a realy job LOL. I need to let my middle son try it. That would be the test for any hw recognition.
Alan
April 27th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
Prof. Ward starts his opinion saying OneNote is probably not up to the task of being a useful place for college students’ notes, but then goes on to never prove that OneNote can’t do the job. All he does is refute evidence that OneNote is better than paper. So maybe I’m missing the point. The way I see it, if OneNote is as good as paper, and a digital copy is at all useful to you, then OneNote does the job. It might not do a $99 or $49 job, but it still works.
I think his real objection is to the ability to share notes. He’s probably a professor who is shocked and angered when someone has the gall to miss one of his brilliant lectures. If you were gonna skip class, you would whether you would be rewriting or photocopying someone’s paper notes, or receiving an e-mail. If you were motiviated to attend, being able to get a copy of someone’s notes isn’t going to change your mind.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:01 am
For a OneNote extension which works in Firefox 1.5+, it can be downloaded here: http://www.onenotepowertoys.com/2006/02/10/firefoxflock-clip-to-onenote-extension-updated-on-adminidcom/