• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Taking Notes Together: Augmenting Note Taking
Laurian C. Vega, Margaret Dickey-Kurdziolek, Lauren Shupp, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, John Booker,Ben CongletonCenter for Human Computer Interaction and Department of Computer ScienceVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech){lhobby, mdickey, lshupp, perez, jobooker, bc}@cs.vt.edu
ABSTRACT
Sufficient tools for students with Learning Disabilitiesand Attention Deficit Disorder have not yet beenestablished. We believe that the current tools thesestudents can use call for a drastic change in traditionallearning paradigms by either the instructor or the pupil.To fill this gap, we propose our tool, Taking NotesTogether (TNT), as a collaborative note taking tool that will help in equalizing the classroom for students withdisabilities. This tool allows students to collaborativelytag classroom lecture/discussion in real time throughsynchronized transcription and audio recording. TNT  provides a visualization that highlights the important classroom points and we argue facilitates better recalland a deeper understanding of the classroom material.Through our evaluation we were able to prove that allstudents can benefit from this tool. We also present acase study of one student with ADD and how theybenefited. The tool makes the learning experience, particularly for students with special needs like LD and  ADD, less stressful while still being active in the note-taking.
KEYWORDS:
Collaborative Learning, CollaborativeNote Taking, Attention Deficit Disorder, LearningDisorders, Tagging
1.
 
INTRODUCTION
Supporting students with Learning Disabilities (LD) andwith Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity(ADD/ADHD) can be difficult. Proper teachingtechniques should be used to support these specializedneeds in order to minimize the time spent in theclassroom and for later recall. In this paper, we discussthe need for a tool that facilitates the collaborativetagging of transcribed audio – one that will promoteequity in the classroom. We argue that our proposedmulti-media tool, Taking Notes Together (TNT),overcomes the shortcomings of traditional paper-basednotes, stand-alone audio recordings, and transcriptions.We make the case that TNT supports a natural learningmethod that LD/ADD students will be able to usecoherently with their lectures and class-based education.Also, by allowing students to take advantage of thegrowing use of technology within the classroom TNT cansupport students in a collaborative, faster, and moreautomated process.Current research has explored many technologies toenhance traditional paper-based note-taking either bytranscription or digital ink [8, 16, 19]. Yet, much of theresearch community is reluctant to step outside of thepaper-based paradigm of taking notes. Paper or ink notesalone are insufficient because users often miss importantinformation and participate less in discussion [10]. Someresearch has examined audio as data, either alone or inconjunction with digital ink notes [8, 16, 18, 19].Nevertheless, the focus is usually on a single note-taker.Davis et. al. recognized the need for collaborative note-taking, where different notes can be merged [8]. TheirNotePals tool seemed to do it all by integrating ink noteswith audio across multiple users. However, theirobservations revealed the desire to tag importantinformation: "There was also unanticipated usage. Severalresearchers independently used the device as an audioeditor to isolate key verbatim quotes" [10]. This is whereTNT combines the advantages of audio as data,collaborative efforts, and transcription. TNT hopes toalleviate users of the need to manually record audio datavia transcription and audio recording. The tool alsopromises quick access to the chronologically orderedinformation by collaborative tagging.In the rest of this paper we address a significant amountof background work done with LD/ADD students and ingeneral on note taking collaboration. We then talk abouta tool we propose will help all students, in particularLD/ADD student, and discuss our experiment withresults.
2.
 
RELATED WORK
2.1
 
Background on LD/ADD
ADD/ADHD and LD have been and are still a growingconcern for educational institutions. This is becausebetween three to five percent of the student populationhas ADD. Of these students, ADD is linked to anadditional learning disorder by thirty-three percent [1, 2].
 
Thus, tailoring an educational program to the specialneeds of this significant minority while still maintaining astructured educational method for the rest of the studentpopulation is important [15].For memory we look at the Encoding Specificity principleto help with the in class recall: “specific encodingoperations performed on what is perceived determinewhat is stored and what is stored determines whatretrieval cues are effective in providing access to what isstored“ [7]. This means that a student is going to developvarious cues when learning to be able to recall thisinformation at a later time. Thus, technology could helpby having a way for students to work with thesepredefined cues.However, technology should not be simply thrown at theproblem [17]. Instead, careful consideration of what theclassroom needs are and how to support them should beevaluated. Specifically, Bramer found after evaluatingseven college students that self perception of his or herdisorder had a large effect on the overall success of thestudent [6]. Also, in a lecture based classroom ADD/LDstudents find that they cannot keep up with the incominginformation – due to a range of possible disabilities – andthus miss the mental and physical encoding of the classmaterial. Later, when the student goes back to review thelecture notes, the student is unable to comprehend thedisorganized annotations due to recall problems [9].An article by Joseph Boyle and Mary Weishaar showedthat LD students were able to effectively recall andcomprehend lecture information by having students takenotes with a structured note taking system [5]. As aresult, the students’ test grades increased. The authorswent on to argue that the two current ways for LDstudents to take notes in the classroom (using note takersand having the teacher change methodology) wereineffective. However, the structured note taking systemhas had limited results. While disappointing, this result isencouraging for trying a new method for teachingstudents with special needs.In summary, during a traditional lecture-based classLD/ADD students can have serious educationaldifficulties. Past methods have had limited success andcan cause passive learning. Using a tool that engages thestudents and allows the student to learn in a more naturalway will be successful for helping LD/ADD students.
2.2
 
Note Taking
We looked at memory-aids tools [4, 12, 13], tools forpeople with disabilities [20], memory tools [4, 12, 13,20], and transcription tools [11], to help design TNT. Inone article by Wu, Baecker, et al., they describe the co-development of a tool to help those suffering with chronicamnesia called “OrientingTool”. The developers chosethe participatory design paradigm because they felt, “itcan be extremely difficult for designers to imagine theexperience of coping with a cognitive impairment,resulting in a gulf of understanding.” When evaluated, theOrientingTool proved to be very useful for amnesiacs andtheir caretakers. For TNT, we collaborated with theAssistive Technologies Lab to facilitate a betterunderstanding of how to design for LD/ADD.In other related work, tools have been designed tofacilitate audio recording and indexing. As one example,Kubala, Colbath, et al. designed “Rough and Ready”, atool to record, transcribe, and catalog CNN newscasts[11]. The authors felt that, “speech is not valued today asan archival information’s source because it is impossibleto efficiently locate information in large audio archives.”Their tool, called “Rough ‘N’ Ready,” used currenttranscription tools to produce text from newscasts andthen pick out names, places, and other key words. Theyfound that their participants could “understand thecontents of a news broadcast from a small set of highlydescriptive labels.” Building on this work, we alsowanted to include a transcription and index. Currenttranscription technologies, however, do not producetranscriptions with enough reliability. We hope astranscription technologies improve, that they could beused with assistive tools like TNT.In a similar effort [3], the Classroom 2000 projectexplored the use of different classroom technologies tostudy whether ubiquitous tools enhanced teaching andlearning. The project broke the experience into threephases: pre-production (e.g. teacher preparation), liverecording (e.g. taking notes, group exercises), and post-production (accessing notes). In the pre-production phase,teaching styles were categorized into presentation, publicnotes, private notes, and discussion; learning styles werecategorized into verbatim recording, highlighting, andnone. The project then evaluated three courses withdifferent teaching styles. In the evaluation they observeda strong liking for their tool and the Web access torecorded class materials.In an article by Leggett, he said, “the design of a systemwill need to accommodate the needs of the ‘memoryworker’, whether as an individual or part of a closed oropen working group.” [12] Students certainly fit thedefinition of “memory workers”, and class lectures arerich with information that could be lost to students that donot have effective note-taking abilities. This is why wehave chosen the classroom setting to be the launchingpoint for our tool design. Dr. Bell, in his paper describingthe CyberAll tool, predicted, “in ten years, systemsshould be able to recall every personal lifetimeconversation.” [4] The development of tools for class
 
lecture recording and indexing seems like a good firststep to designing systems to record and index informationin any audio form leveraging collaboration.
3.
 
Taking Notes Together (TNT)
3.1
 
Motivation
Our goal is to create a multi-media tool that supports amore active and natural education for all students. Weplan on doing this by creating a system that is non-interruptive to the lecture session. To do this we havecreated our tool, TNT. We found that people withLD/ADD can feel stressed because of differing abilities todo combined activities such as write and listen. Therefore,we incorporated collaborative tagging, so that studentscan actively listen and participate without manuallytranscribing information. It is very easy to imagine how astudent could take ineffective notes: missing information,recording less important information, not recording moreimportant information. By supporting a way for studentsto collaboratively determine what lecture parts areimportant, a student will not only be able to compare andcontrast what others found important, but train themselvesto pick up verbal weight themselves. TNT enables studentto record information in such a way that students feelcapable and not rushed.
3.2
 
Usage
TNT starts by taking an audio recording of a classroomlecture with palm pilots. At the start of each lecture thestudents will use their palm pilots to log into our onlinetagging system. TNT then shows buttons that correspondto the categories of class lecture material (e.g. see Figure1). As the lecture progresses, students tag material that isimportant by selecting one of these buttons. These time-stamped tags are then uploaded to a server where they canbe collected.During the class, students could also take notes; however,normal cognitive stress that is caused by taking notes isreduced because the student will be able to use TNT as analternative. When the student needs to review the lecture,the audio file, the transcription, and tags are integratedtogether for easy review. At this point, students can seean aggregation of all class tags. In the future, studentsmay benefit from seeing which tags were their own.
 
TNT was developed using Flash with tagged XML. Thetranscript is tagged by discussion breaks, which arevisually shown as paragraphs. These are about a minuteor two in length. You can see a working version of TNTin Figure 2. When the audio is playing you can see thecurrent position of the transcription highlighted in blueand indicated on the timeline with the gray horizontal bar.This facilitates easy use of TNT. Students are able to seethe collaborative tagging along the top of the recording.
Figure 1. The Online Tagging System
Hypothetically, the higher the bar the more studentstagged at that time, indicating importance. We arecurrently considering aggregation formulas for studentswho are misbehaving in class and are tagging to causeconfusion with the visualization. Also, supported in TNTis a searching tool. Here students can enter a word orphrase that they remember from class, and the audio andtranscription will skip to that point. Lastly, the audio andtranscription are tightly coupled. The student can click onany section of text in the transcription and the audio jumps to that portion of the recording. Likewise, thestudent can either click on the visualization or drag-and-drop the audio marker to the desired section and thetranscription jumps to that part as well. This supportsstudents jumping around in TNT to the tagged sections.Eventually, the interface will be developed to support anote taking schemas such as the Cornel Note-takingsystem [14]. This is where the left hand, one-third of theinterface is open for notes that the student might want totake, while the transcription is placed on the right two-thirds of the page. This way the students can takesubsequent notes using TNT, and this information wouldbe logged for later viewing.
 
4.
 
EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY
This study was designed to generate both qualitative andquantitative results about the usefulness and usability of this multi-media tool. In designing our study we realizedthat it would be very difficult to find and recruit asignificant number of students with LD/ADD that wereall within one class. Because of this, our study consistedof two phases: a controlled study using an in-classroom
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...