A Study of Digital Note Sharing in Nomadic Groups

We report on a study of an Anoto® digital pen and paper usage in three student project groups over three months. We have set up a system including a digital pen and paper, handwriting recognition software, and provided the conditions for wireless note sharing over Bluetooth, and thereafter we let the students use the technology as they went about their activities. Our goal was to evaluate the system's potential for student groups as usage naturally occurred and to assess how the participants integrated the technology in their work and whether it bridged the physical-digital gap. We found that even if the technology works well for individual use, collaborative use of digital pen and paper posed important issues, which we discuss in the light of our notion of nomadicity as a work condition, as well as in the light of the increasingly opportunistic nature of handwriting nowadays.