It might appear that we are trying to take on too much in this project in our attempts to support such a wide variety of teaching and note-taking styles, but critical architectural decisions made very early on in the project have allowed us to experiment more broadly. The simple division into phases of pre-production, live recording and post-production has been critical to our ability to field several very different prototypes. This has allowed us to support a variety of preparation tools used by teachers (ranging from LaTeX to more WYSIWYG document processing tools), different in-class presentation tools (Web browsers, PostScript previewers, and the ClassPad application) and different post-production tools to automatically or manually generate audio- and video-enhanced notes. Developing tools that served activities in different phases of the project enabled concurrent development and is now allowing us to modify and enhance certain features of the system with minimal impact elsewhere.
This architectural division is not ideal, however. One drawback has been a limited interpretation of what occurs in post-production. Up to now, post-production has simply meant the generation of media-integrated notes based on multiple streams of information captured during the live recording phase. It has not included support for the user in accessing and modifying those notes. Work at Xerox PARC has identified tools to support this separate access phase [9] and we would be wise in the future to focus more effort there as well.
Future Computing Environments