Learning styles

Just as teachers have different styles for teaching, so too students have different styles for learning. Rather than address these different general learning styles, we focused on one of the primary student activities -- recording information. We identified several different recording, or note-taking, styles that a student could employ, each distinguished by the amount of recording that goes on.

Verbatim

The student acts like a court stenographer, busily writing down as much of what they experience from the class as possible.

Highlighting

The student writes down only key parts of what is said in class.

None

The student writes nothing, relying on memory or provided materials as the only written record of the classroom experience.

Different teaching styles provide more or less support for the various recording styles. For example, the highlighting student probably receives good support in a presentation style lecture in which they can annotate their own copy of the slides during the lecture.

 

 

	HCI Human-Computer Interaction	AI Artificial Intelligence	FCE Future Computing Environments
teaching style	presentation	public notes	discussion
enrollment	25 grad students	60 undergrad CS majors	15 grad students
live recording (teacher)	ClassPad on LiveBoard captured navigation and annotation (Fig. 1)	LCD projector to display Web notes; no capture	LCD projector to display outline and Web pages; no caputre
live recording (students)	ClassPad on pen-based PC captured navigation and annotation (Fig. 1)	paper notes; no capture	outline annotator on MessagePad to capture outline entry notes (right side of Fig. 1)
live recording (classroom)	single digital audio stream recording	single analog audio-video stream recording	single analog audio-video stream recording
post-production	log file, annotated slides and keyword text used by PERL script to create audio-enhanced, searchable Web notes (Fig. 2)	audio and video links added to HTML notes manually (Fig. 3); video digitized to QuickTime packets	PERL script transforms Newton data into audio-enhanced outline with notes (Fig. 3)

Table 1: Summary of technology used by phase (pre-production, live recording and post-production) in three Classroom 2000 prototypes. In all cases, the products of post-production were a collection of Web pages with various external helper applications to hear audio and play video.

Future Computing Environments
College of Computing at Georgia Tech University