The post-course questionnaire also provided an opportunity for the students to provide more detailed reactions. Students provided details on their positive and negative reactions to all aspects of the technology.
Use of the LiveBoard for several in-class usability evaluation exercises and the group presentations at the end of the class were both very popular. Both of these activities involved more than just the teacher interacting with the LiveBoard. But many students did not feel the LiveBoard was any better than an overhead or chalkboard when used exclusively by the teacher in a lecture mode.
The majority of the electronic notebooks used in the class were palmtop PCs (specifically, Dauphin DTR-1s with a 7-inch diagonal screen) and while the students found them good for drawing pictures, in general the screens were too small. In addition, the response time of the units was slow relative to the LiveBoard. This made it difficult for students to navigate between slides as easily as the teacher. Also, a number of the palmtops were unreliable machines that would crash during lectures.
Students found the Web-based review notes interesting in their novelty and useful for examining their own notes and the teacher's notes. Several students found the notes very useful on the occasions when they missed class or did not pay close enough attention to some point during class. Despite the relative ubiquity of Web browsers on campus and in student rooms, several students still desired to have a printed copy of their notes because then they would be easier to carry around and easier to review. The Web notes were not always quickly accessible (especially over telephone lines) and sometimes hard to read.
We were unable to keep logs of use of the audio server, so we cannot give a quantitative indication of its use, but we have determined that audio annotations were not used very much. Only 4 of the students in the class noted in their journals that they had made consistent use of the audio features in more than just full playback mode. There were two reasons for the overall lack of use of the audio. First, students did not have regular access to the correct platform for listening to the audio and we were unable at that time to provide a cross-platform audio player. Second, the set-up of the audio service was too difficult for some students to bear, so they did not bother. Despite this minimal usage of the audio features, several students who did manage to use the audio found it particularly useful to clarify their own notes.
Of particular interest is how electronic notebooks promote different and possibly more effective note-taking strategies. A overview of the electronic notes taken by students reveals that initially most students would write quite a bit on the electronic slide, even if what was written was exactly what the teacher was writing on the LiveBoard. When questioned about this afterwards, several students who used the electronic notebook throughout the class noted that they felt their note-taking became more economical as the course progressed. This is in spite of an apparent lack of use of the audio features. Upon further investigation, these students revealed that even without audio services, merely having the teacher's notes available after class saved them from the sometimes mundane task of copying. One student in the class, however, stated a preference for writing down everything himself, even if what he wrote was identical to the teacher's notes that he could obtain later. This again points out the importance of recognizing different learning styles and supporting as many as possible. We are in the process of completing more significant quantitative analysis of the student notes and will report on those findings later.
All Web pages produced for this class (shown in Figure 2) were publicly viewable, a conscious choice of the students in the class. Students were unaware that they could edit their own Web notes, and we had not provided any easy way to do the editing. Several students commented on the shortcoming of these supposed static review notes, remarking that it was their habit to revise and rewrite their notes. This represents both a technical and social failure of the prototype to support long-term use of class notes. We are now concentrating on providing a better interface to revise notes.
From the instructor's perspective, there were several advantages and disadvantages. The ClassPad application running on the LiveBoard was easy to use and was responsive enough to allow for a natural level of interaction. All of the lecture material for this class was available from a previous section of the course, but as the quarter progressed, it was judged necessary to modify the format of the slides. At the request of several people, the slides were redone to increase the amount of whitespace available for making annotations. The ClassPad logging was effective, even though we had intended to provide per-annotation audio links instead of per-slide links. One drawback of our system, however, was the requirement that the teacher load all slides to be visited during one lecture prior to the beginning of the lecture. This seemingly simple requirement caused a problem twice in the course when the teacher wanted to refer to a slide from a previous lecture but was unable to do so because the capture semantics of ClassPad would not have correctly logged the remainder of the class.
One pleasant surprise came the first time the ClassPad application running on the LiveBoard misbehaved in class and would not load the slides for the lecture. The lecture proceeded more in the private notes style. In time, we began to appreciate ClassPad as being well-suited to the private notes style of teaching and we plan to take advantage of that in the future to attract other teachers into our experiments.
Future Computing Environments