The Livescribe Smartpen Is Mightier Than Your Brain
A few weeks back, I ran into a gadget I'd never heard of before that--the Livescribe Echo smartpen--and wondered, "Who on earth is ever going to buy this thing?" Essentially, it's a bulky pen that's combined with a voice recorder (that saves audio files to an internal flash memory) that enables you to record class lectures, meetings, etc. and match up your written notes to specific moments of audio (thanks to an infrared camera built into the pen's tip and special dotted paper). "What's the matter with a simple Bic or typing into a netbook?" I wondered in full grumpy-old-luddite mode.
But after finally catching up on some weeks' old Sunday New York Times, it seems that this kind of device could be the way of the future for high school and college classroom learning. The NY Times Sunday Magazine's education-themed issue from back on September 19 ran a feature story on how Livescribe pens are being used by students to improve studying. And it's not just because they can pinpoint a moment of class lecture/discussion that's matched to their notes:
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 (teacher Brian) 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.
How exactly does the Livescribe work? Chris Holt of Macworld explains thusly when previewing the previous version of the pen--the Livescribe Pulse:
To take advantage of the text and audio features, you must use the Smartpen with Livescribe's dot paper; the tiny dots on the paper are used by the pen as points of reference for the audio. The dot paper notepad that comes with the pen has pre-printed controls on the bottom of each page that resemble something you'd see in GarageBand. These controls allow users to fast-forward, rewind, jump, pause, speed up, or slow down the audio.
Once you get home from class or your day's meetings, you can then transfer recordings to your PC or Mac for playback--or even upload the notes as a PDF or notes with accompanying audio as an interactive Flash movie called a pencast (as mentioned above in the NY Times excerpt). Livescribe provides you with 500 MB of online storage for uploads.
The new Livescribe Echo smartpen bumps up the memory capacity to 4 GB and 8 GB (holding up to 400 and 800 hours of audio, respectively) and features a slimmer design, microUSB connector, and 3.5mm headphone jack. Additionally, the Echo is compatible with Livescribe's new Application Store, which offers apps ranging from an American Heritage dictionary and Spanish language phrases to a unit converter and games.
Check out the positive reviews the Echo has been garnering from PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld, and be sure to check out that NY Times Magazine article. The Livescribe Echo 4 GB and 8 GB smartpens are available for ordering now.
--Agen G.N. Schmitz
