Using note-taking appliances for student to student collaboration

Student collaboration is important in courses that utilize project-based learning. The authors describe how they tried to enhance this collaboration by testing electronic note-taking appliances along with the NotePals system. NotePals is a note-sharing system that captures and provides access to handwritten notes and documents of interest to a workgroup. Notes can be shared with other group members by synchronizing with a shared note repository that can be viewed using desktop-based web browsers. Students will only be able to take advantage of shared notes when note taking devices are inexpensive and pervasive. Consequently, the authors have developed note-taking applications that run on inexpensive personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other ink-based capture devices. This paper gives an overview of the NotePals system and describes the early usage of the system for note taking by students.