The days of traditional note-taking, where students use only pen and paper to record notes, are quickly coming to an end. With the ascendance of digital technologies, students in higher education are now expected to gather and assimilate information from a wide variety of electronic sources, most prominently the Internet, to accomplish many of their academic tasks. Students commonly need to gather, edit, annotate, organize, and save information from multiple, disparate web pages, a process the PI refers to as information assimilation. Because information assimilation activities often extend beyond a single continuous, uninterrupted session, students require support for tracking their ongoing work processes so that they can easily recall and rejoin previous work. Although similar in some ways to the concept of traditional note-taking on paper, information assimilation represents an emerging note-taking paradigm that involves the retrieval, integration and archiving of digital, often web-based information which, unfortunately, is not well supported by existing software applications, so that users are often forced to rely on ad hoc and ineffective methods to get the job done. Not only do students have a difficult time creating and integrating a set of personalized notes from the web and other sources (both digital and manual), they also lack a centralized repository from which they can store and retrieve their notes from a variety of different Internet access points. In this project, the PI will explore solutions to these problems. She will seek to extend the theory of note-taking in the digital age by designing, implementing, and evaluating a centralized web-based electronic notebook (e-notebook) to help students manage their rapidly evolving academic information assimilation tasks. She will conduct ethnographic studies in the first phase of this research to analyze how notes are recorded, maintained, used, re-accessed, interpreted, and integrated, in order to learn more about how the digital age affects a student's ability to learn from and internalize his/her notes, and if the basic components of notes are different than what they used to be prior to our extensive reliance on electronic media. The PI will then follow a user-centered design methodology, with heavy emphasis on participatory design, to develop an e-notebook application that supports the most crucial functions for student note takers, that works seamlessly in conjunction with other electronic sources, and that is accessible from a wide variety of locations and computer platforms. The PI will evaluate the e-notebook using a series of longitudinal studies that tie back many of the theoretical questions originally posed.
Broader Impacts: This work will lead to development of a new tool to help students synthesize information and make better use of knowledge across disciplines. While the final prototype has the immediate potential to affect the student population at the PI's institution, the potential long-term benefit of this research to society as a whole is far reaching and significant, in that the e-notebook might be readily adopted by other institutions and by general web users who engage in the process of information assimilation, and ultimately alleviate the ever-increasing rate at which our society consumes paper.
