Collaborative Note Taking Using PDAs

Abstract

Collaborative note taking enables students in a class to take notes on their Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and laptops and share them with their “study group” in real-time. Students also receive instructor’s slides in real-time as they are displayed by the instructor. As the individual members of the group take notes pertaining to the slide being presented, their notes are automatically sent to all members of the group. The system has been used in actual practice for a graduate level course on wireless mobile computing. In developing this system, special attention has been paid to the task of entering text on PDAs, efficient use of the screen real estate, dynamics among students, privacy and ease of use issues. We describe our system and report the findings of this user study.