Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Although the users have had only a few minutes for familiarizing with the system
and used it during one of their normal lectures, they made a considerable amount
of annotations. We collected a total of 1983 handwritten annotations during three
lectures. In average, each user made 68 annotations (
SD
29) during a 90
minutes lecture. Figure 5.10 shows a histogram of the number of annotations that
each user made during one lecture. A high variability between participants was en-
countered, ranging from only 7 up to 141 annotations per participant. This is in-line
with findings reported in the literature [109, 92]. In contrast, we found no significant
differences between the different lectures. On average each user annotated 63 % of
all available slides, making 2.6 annotations on each of these slides (
SD
=
29,
N
=
7). Fig-
ure 5.11 shows a histogram of how many annotations were in average made on a
slide by a single user. No relation between the time within the lecture and the num-
ber of annotations was found. All slides were annotated by at least one participant.
The ten most frequently annotated slides contained an average of 41 annotations
(
SD
=
1
.
=
.
8), while only 2 of the 122 slides contained one single annotation. This
shows that the participants were active throughout the entire lecture and that no
temporal “hot-spots” of very high or very low activity existed.
Advantages mentioned in comparison to electronic systems without paper sup-
port consisted of the possibility to easily make annotations during class and to work
with formulas. For instance one student reported in the interview an experience
with a Web site designed for group work of mathematics students, which was not
accepted and not used by the students since it was by far too complicated to enter
formulae with the keyboard. Advantages with respect to pure paper environments
were better orientation in the digital document, quicker access in later semesters
without the need to keep a physical folder in range and better support for group
work. Several users reported that a drawback of the system is that the Anoto pen has
only one fix color. Instead, they would prefer a pen that can switch between various
colors. This is an area for improvement of Anoto pens. Another problem was that
many users felt irritated because the pen vibrated sometimes when it was used for
writing over printed text, which is a technical problem occurring from time to time
with currently available Anoto pens.
With respect to the annotation of printed documents, CoScribe covers an aspect
which is highly important for efficient use and which has not been addressed by
previous work: the layout of the printed documents. The participants had different
preferences concerning the layout of printed slides, which underscores the impor-
tance of flexible layouts. Roughly 75 % of the participants reported in the interviews
to prefer only two slides per paper sheet, as this leaves free areas for annotations.
The remaining participants preferred four or more slides per page. All left-handers
wished having the free annotation areas to the left of the printed slides, while right-
handers preferred them to the right. Positioning the free areas below instead of be-
sides the slides was judged less appropriate, since the items on the slides are typ-
ically organized in vertical order and it would therefore be more complicated to
relate notes to individual items.
5
