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Take note: Students free to think When Gregory Abowd walks into a Georgia Tech classroom to lecture these days, the fewer notes his students take, the better. "In a typical classroom, an instructor stands at a whiteboard, speaking to the class and writing furiously," he said. "Students bury their heads in notebooks, trying to record every word of the lecture, afraid they may miss something if they interact with the instructor." That's not the drill in Abowd's classes. And if the Tech method continues to catch on, it may no longer be the routine in many college classrooms across America. Abowd and a team of researchers at Tech have developed Classroom 2000, where technology is used to free students from the laborious task of trying to write down every word of a lecture, so they instead can participate in classroom discussion. "This class is really helpful," said Keesah Green, 21, a graduate student from Ohio. "All of the information is available immediately after class so you can focus more on what is going on in class." A recent Tech survey suggested students' note-taking techniques were like those of a stenographer, aimed at capturing everything the professor writes on the whiteboard, and often copying the exact spoken words. Now, with electronic whiteboards, audio and video equipment, computers and sophisticated software to capture the classroom experience, the exact details of lectures are captured, to be retrieved later in audio, video or written form. As the instructor writes on the whiteboard, the information is projected onto a large screen while simultaneously being input into a computer. Students can access and review the notes later, at home or elsewhere, via the World Wide Web. "The goal of Classroom 2000 is to use existing technology to aid students and instructors in doing their normal routine," said Abowd, 34, an assistant professor in the College of Computing since 1994. "I can (stop) people from hanging their heads down while writing notes. Now they pay attention." In his Human-Computer Interaction class, the blackboard of the past has been replaced by a "whiteboard," a giant computer screen that projects Abowd's slides for the day's lesson. Chalk has gone the way of the felt-tip pen. On Monday, about 30 students sat in class listening to a lecture on computer innovators. Important names and dates were mentioned throughout the lecture, but few of the students jotted them down. After a lecture, all the elements are woven together into a set of Web pages, indexed on the syllabus. A time line provides an index to the audio, video, slides and Web pages. While viewing a slide, students can click on the instructor's annotations to replay the audio and video at the time the note was written. Students also can replay the entire lecture without any interruptions, visit Web sites used in class, and conduct word searches to find specific lecture segments covering a particular topic. "This is far more advanced than any classroom I have ever been in," said Jennifer Sheridan. "This is great." Tech will offer 15 classes this semester using Classroom 2000. All the classes are in the technical sciences --- math, computer technology and electrical engineering. Abowd and senior doctoral student Jason Brotherton have built two Classroom 2000s at Tech, and other institutions are taking notice. Brotherton just returned from Rhode Island, where he installed a similar classroom at Brown University. They have set up two classrooms at Kennesaw State, one at Georgia State and another at McGill University in Toronto. At Kennesaw, where all the students are commuters, calculus professor Meghan Burke said about two-thirds of her students are using the classroom. "The reason that I brought it here is because I wanted a way to record the notations that I write on the board and have my voice associated with them," Burke said. Burke doesn't use slides. Her whiteboard is used more like a traditional blackboard, where she writes out each problem, which is then fed into the computer. "It was called Classroom 2000 because we wanted to look at what is the classroom of the near future going to look like," Burke said. "The idea that as a teacher I can walk in the classroom, start writing and talking, and have that entire experience captured --- and I haven't done anything different --- is incredible." Tech spent about $200,000 to set up its classroom, but the price could be as little as the $15,000 spent at Kennesaw, which already had some of the infrastructure in place. "The cost is going to depend on what you already have," Brotherton said. He said Brown University basically had all the audio and video equipment in place. Tech's classroom was supported by grants from several sources, including the National Science Foundation and Tech's Office of Information Technology. Because the project is so new, Abowd and Brotherton are still gathering data about how effective Classroom 2000 can be. "We are trying to figure out what kind of impact that this is going to have, but there are a lot of possibilities that we haven't explored yet," Abowd said. ON THE WEB: To find out more information about the Classroom 2000 project:
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