Digitale Pen

In the spring, Cincia Dervishaj was struggling with a take-home math quiz. It was testing her knowledge of exponential notation — translating numbers like “3.87 x 102” into a regular form. Dervishaj is a 13-year-old student at St. John’s Lutheran School in Staten Island, and like many students grappling with exponents, she got confused about where to place the decimal point. “I didn’t get them at all,” Dervishaj told me in June when I visited her math class, which was crowded with four-year-old Dell computers, plastic posters of geometry formulas and a big bowl of Lego bricks.

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Photograph by Benjamin Innes for The New York Times

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To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: she had copied several sample problems but hadn’t written a clear explanation of how exponents work.

She didn’t need to. Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said.

Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream. Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.

LIKE MOST PIECES of classroom technology, the pens cause plenty of digital-age hassles. They can crash. The software for loading students’ notes onto their computers or from there onto the Web can be finicky. And the pens work only with special notepaper that enables the pen to track where it’s writing; regular paper doesn’t work. (Most students buy notepads from Livescribe, though it’s possible to print the paper on a color printer.) There are also some unusual social side-effects. The presence of so many recording devices in the classroom creates a sort of panopticon — or panaudiocon, as it were. Dervishaj has found herself whispering to her seatmate, only to realize the pen was on, “so we’re like, whoa!” — their gossip has been recorded alongside her notes. Although you can pause a recording, there’s currently no way to selectively delete a few seconds of audio from the pen, so she’s forced to make a decision: Delete all the audio for that lesson, or keep it in and hope nobody else ever hears her private chatter. She usually deletes.

Nonetheless, Licata is a convert. As the students started working quietly on review problems, their pens making tiny “boop” noises as the students began or paused their recording, Licata pulled me aside to say the pens had “transformed” his class. Compact and bristling with energy, Licata is a self-professed geek; in his 10 years of teaching, he has seen plenty of classroom gadgets come and go, from Web-based collaboration software to pricey whiteboards that let children play with geometric figures the way they’d manipulate an iPhone screen. Most of these gewgaws don’t impress him. “Two or three times a year teachers whip out some new technology and use it, but it doesn’t do anything better and it’s never seen again,” he said.

But this time, he said, was different. This is because the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. Livescribe first released the pen in 2008; Licata encountered it when a colleague brought his own to work. Intrigued, he persuaded Livescribe to donate 20 pens to the school to outfit his entire class. (The pens sell for around $129.) “I’ve made more gains with this class this year than I’ve made with any class,” he told me. In his evenings, Licata is pursuing a master’s degree in education; separately, he intends to study how the smart pens might affect the way students learn, write and think. “Two years ago I would have told you that note-taking is a lost art, that handwriting was a lost art,” he said. “But now I think handwriting is crucial.”

Yet most students are very bad at taking notes. Kiewra’s research has found that students record about a third of the critical information they hear in class. Why? Because note-taking is a surprisingly complex mental activity. It heavily taxes our “working memory” — the volume of information we can consciously hold in our heads and manipulate. Note-taking requires a student to listen to a teacher, pick out the most important points and summarize and record them, while trying not to lose the overall drift of the lecture. (The very best students do even more mental work: they blend what they’re hearing with material they already know and reframe the concepts in their own words.) Given how jampacked this task is, “transcription fluency” matters: the less you have to think about the way you’re recording notes, the better. When you’re taking notes, you want to be as fast and as automatic as possible.

The Education Issue

See all related articles in The New York Times Magazine.

Related

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A High School Student Reviews a Smartpen, the Livescribe Echo (August 19, 2010)

All note-taking methods have downsides. Handwriting is the most common and easiest, but a lecturer speaks at 150 to 200 words per minute, while even the speediest high-school students write no more than 40 words per minute. The more you struggle to keep up, the more you’re focusing on the act of writing, not the act of paying attention.

Typing can be much faster. A skilled typist can manage 60 words a minute or more. And notes typed into a computer have other advantages: they can be quickly searched (unlike regular handwritten notes) and backed up or shared online with other students. They’re also neater and thus easier to review. But they come with other problems, not least of which is that typing can’t capture the diagrammatic notes that classes in math, engineering or biology often require. What’s more, while personal computers and laptops may be common in college, that isn’t the case in cash-strapped high schools. Laptops in class also bring a host of distractions — from Facebook to Twitter — that teachers loathe. And students today are rarely taught touch typing; some note-taking studies have found that students can be even slower at typing than at handwriting.

One of the most complete ways to document what is said in class is to make an audio record: all 150-plus words a minute can be captured with no mental effort on the part of the student. Kiewra’s research has found that audio can have a powerful effect on learning. In a 1991 experiment, he had four groups of students listen to a lecture. One group was allowed to listen once, another twice, the third three times and the fourth was free to scroll back and forth through the recording at will, listening to whatever snippets the students wanted to review. Those who relistened were increasingly likely to write down crucial “secondary” ideas — concepts in a lecture that add nuance to the main points but that we tend to miss when we’re focused on writing down the core ideas. And the students who were able to move in and out of the audio stream performed as well as those who listened to the lecture three times in a row. (Students who recorded more secondary ideas also scored higher in a later quiz.) But as anyone who has tried to scroll back and forth through an audio file has discovered, reviewing audio is frustrating and clumsy. Audio may be richer in detail, but it is not, like writing and typescript, skimmable.

TAKING NOTES HAS long posed a challenge in education. Decades of research has found a strong correlation between good notes and good grades: the more detailed and accurate your notes, the better you do in school. That’s partly because the act of taking notes forces you to pay closer attention. But what’s more important, according to some researchers, is that good notes provide a record: most of the benefits from notes come not from taking them but from reviewing them, because no matter how closely we pay attention, we forget things soon after we leave class. “We have feeble memories,” says Ken Kiewra, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska and one of the world’s leading researchers into note-taking