Recently I attended a demonstration of a digital pen by Hitachi (sorry, Japanese-language only) at my university. The plan is to distribute 100 of these digital pens to various teachers and students and see what they come up with in terms of evaluations of its usefulness or new ideas for exploiting this technology. Altho the technology is impressive, I was left rather cold about the possible applications that were outlined by the presenter.
The presentation was given to teachers and staff, and there was much time spent on how having STUDENTS use this could be useful for TEACHERS. The Hitachi digital pen, unlike the the little smartpen from livescribe that Prof. Wesche describes, has no audio-recording facility: it just records what you write. You can send the data either as a jpg or a txt file by email to your computer or cell-phone.
The Hitachi pen records not only what you write, but also how much time you spend writing, how long the pen is (and is not) touching the paper. This data, the presenter told us, could later be analyzed by the teacher to investigate exactly where or at what point students have difficulty in understanding a subject. That put me off right there. Next, we’ll be having students plugged directly into electrodes to “study” (i.e. normalize) how they are (or are not) studying; and giving them electric shocks to keep them concentrating, perhaps.

A further example given was this: a lecturer could analyze the notes taken by students to count the frequency of the lecture’s keywords: did students take accurate notes?
The presentation was of course in Japanese, but I took notes of it mostly in English: had my notes been analyzed in this way, NO keywords would have been found. Or, suppose a note-taker, instead of using the lecturer’s keywords, translated or substituted their own, preferred, terms or expressions? Again, the “keyword analysis” would show very few or no keywords, but this would not necessarily mean that the note-taker had not understood or been delinquent in note-taking.
When I pointed this out, I was told that, in Japan, most university students just take verbatim notes, so this kind of simple analysis was perfectly valid.
On reading Prof. Wesche’s enthusiastic blog entry about the “smartpen“, and watching livescribe’s product demo videos, I find the smartpen more attractive than Hitachi’s digital pen. Is this partly because the Hitachi presentation was pitched to teachers as supervisors of other people (students) using the pen, rather than as direct users of the pen themselves? Perhaps. In any event, I found that emphasis was on the data that can be collected by the pen, rather than on the practical usefulness of the pen as a consumer product. In addition, rather than nurturing student autonomy and independence, collecting and using such data to “help” students seems to me to re-inforce a false belief that is already unfortunately all too prevalent and seems to be gaining rather than losing ground: namely that “education” comes only from licensed and authorized experts who have the learners’ best interests at heart and are therefore justified in almost limitless intrusion into learners’ personal behaviour. Counting how many minutes or seconds a person’s pen is touching the paper, using that information to draw conclusions about that person’s cognitive abilities, then from those conclusions giving guidance or instruction to that person, strikes me as overly authoritarian, if that’s the word I’m looking for. Lines from a song float into my mind: “You raise the blade, you make the change, you re-arrange me till I’m sane”.

Tags: cooltools, education