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Facing the information flood with Tablet PCs

Abstract

We present the application OneNote by the use of Tablet PCs in a sophomore lecture at Technische Universität Berlin, aimed at teaching students how to cooperate in their project-work using a collaborative platform. The implementation is described and a first evaluation is presented. Finally, a highly desirable extension for integrating mathematical notation is outlined.

Introduction

Information flood is an essential aspect of the digital age1, 2, 3. Consequently, organizing information of a specific subject efficiently without losing the overview is difficult. In education and especially in academic education, information management is a sensitive topic for freshmen and sophomores. Many students are overburdened with the new situation at university having to organize and manage all the new knowledge getting from lectures. The use of new media by lecturers and students provides an opportunity to overcome these challenges. Unfortunately, many of appropriate software applications need a lot of training time. In addition, lecturers cannot spend endless time to prepare a perfectly computerized course induced by the complexity of these software applications. What can we do for both parties?

Focusing on the social skills like communication, coordination and cooperation as nowadays’ important factors in education, collaborative software applications possess a high potential to support the learning, teaching and research processes at university by the means of the new media and new technologies4, 5. As a part of the GALILEA project, introduced at the Technische Universität Berlin, the new gender sensitive Bachelor of Science program “Natural Sciences in the Information Society”6, 7, 8 provides two new innovative lectures, which started in winter term 07/08 and summer term 2008, respectively:

1. Scientific Information Management (freshmen lecture) and 2. New Media in Education and Research (sophomore lecture)

This innovative program is designed to be very interdisciplinary while offering a broad spectrum of lectures in natural sciences, mathematics and computer science to a manageable student group of about 30 persons. The lectures “Scientific Information Management” and “New Media in Education and Research” were tailored to complete this program, are part of the compulsory lectures, and are perfectly suited to introduce concepts of Information Management using Tablet PCs in education.

To overcome the above described challenges, we use the collaborative platform Microsoft OneNote 20079, 10 (c.f. figure 1 for a screenshot) in the lecture “New Media in Education and Research” as a software application especially for Blended Learning Scenarios. One Note is a digital notepad with the flexibility of a classical handwritten notepad. Because of its affinity to other well-known office products, it is easy to use after a short training period. The use of OneNote in this context is based on the fundamental assumption that nearly everybody knows

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Jeschke, S., & Knipping, L., & Natho, N., & Zorn, E., & Pfeiffer, O. (2009, June), Facing The Information Flood With Tablet Pcs Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--4965