CAREER: From Pen and Paper to Computer: An Emerging Notetaking Paradigm for Students

传统的笔记时代即将结束，学生们只用纸和笔来做笔记。随着数字技术的崛起，高等教育中的学生现在被期望从各种各样的电子来源收集和吸收信息，最突出的是互联网，以完成他们的许多学术任务。学生通常需要从多个不同的网页收集、编辑、注释、组织和保存信息，这一过程被PI称为信息同化。由于信息同化活动通常不仅仅是一个连续的、不间断的课程，学生需要支持跟踪他们正在进行的工作过程，以便他们可以轻松地回忆和重新参与以前的工作。虽然信息同化在某些方面类似于传统的纸面笔记概念，但信息同化代表着一种新兴的笔记范例，它涉及检索、整合和存档数字信息，不幸的是，现有的软件应用程序没有很好地支持这些信息，因此用户往往被迫依赖特别和无效的方法来完成工作。学生不仅很难从网络和其他来源(包括数字和手动)创建和集成一套个性化的笔记，而且他们还缺乏一个中央储存库，可以从各种不同的互联网接入点存储和检索他们的笔记。在这个项目中，PI将探索这些问题的解决方案。她将寻求在数字时代扩展笔记理论，通过设计、实施和评估基于网络的集中式电子笔记本(e-Notebook)来帮助学生管理他们快速发展的学术信息同化任务。她将在这项研究的第一阶段进行民族志研究，分析笔记是如何被记录、维护、使用、重新访问、解释和整合的，以便更多地了解数字时代如何影响学生学习和内化笔记的能力，以及笔记的基本组成部分是否与我们广泛依赖电子媒体之前的情况不同。然后，PI将遵循以用户为中心的设计方法，重点是参与式设计，以开发一种电子笔记本应用程序，该应用程序为学生笔记记录者提供最关键的功能，与其他电子资源无缝结合，并可从各种地点和计算机平台访问。PI将通过一系列纵向研究来评估这款电子笔记本，这些研究追溯了最初提出的许多理论问题。广泛的影响：这项工作将导致开发一种新的工具，帮助学生综合信息并更好地利用跨学科的知识。虽然最终的原型有可能立即影响到国际和平研究所的学生群体，但这项研究对整个社会的潜在长期好处是深远和重大的，因为电子笔记本可能很容易被其他机构和参与信息同化过程的普通网络用户采用，并最终缓解我们社会不断增长的纸张消耗率。

The days of traditional note-taking, where students use only pen and paper to record notes, are quickly coming to an end. With the ascendance of digital technologies, students in higher education are now expected to gather and assimilate information from a wide variety of electronic sources, most prominently the Internet, to accomplish many of their academic tasks. Students commonly need to gather, edit, annotate, organize, and save information from multiple, disparate web pages, a process the PI refers to as information assimilation. Because information assimilation activities often extend beyond a single continuous, uninterrupted session, students require support for tracking their ongoing work processes so that they can easily recall and rejoin previous work. Although similar in some ways to the concept of traditional note-taking on paper, information assimilation represents an emerging note-taking paradigm that involves the retrieval, integration and archiving of digital, often web-based information which, unfortunately, is not well supported by existing software applications, so that users are often forced to rely on ad hoc and ineffective methods to get the job done. Not only do students have a difficult time creating and integrating a set of personalized notes from the web and other sources (both digital and manual), they also lack a centralized repository from which they can store and retrieve their notes from a variety of different Internet access points. In this project, the PI will explore solutions to these problems. She will seek to extend the theory of note-taking in the digital age by designing, implementing, and evaluating a centralized web-based electronic notebook (e-notebook) to help students manage their rapidly evolving academic information assimilation tasks. She will conduct ethnographic studies in the first phase of this research to analyze how notes are recorded, maintained, used, re-accessed, interpreted, and integrated, in order to learn more about how the digital age affects a student's ability to learn from and internalize his/her notes, and if the basic components of notes are different than what they used to be prior to our extensive reliance on electronic media. The PI will then follow a user-centered design methodology, with heavy emphasis on participatory design, to develop an e-notebook application that supports the most crucial functions for student note takers, that works seamlessly in conjunction with other electronic sources, and that is accessible from a wide variety of locations and computer platforms. The PI will evaluate the e-notebook using a series of longitudinal studies that tie back many of the theoretical questions originally posed.Broader Impacts: This work will lead to development of a new tool to help students synthesize information and make better use of knowledge across disciplines. While the final prototype has the immediate potential to affect the student population at the PI's institution, the potential long-term benefit of this research to society as a whole is far reaching and significant, in that the e-notebook might be readily adopted by other institutions and by general web users who engage in the process of information assimilation, and ultimately alleviate the ever-increasing rate at which our society consumes paper.