OASIS Tech Reviews

In this cubicle, you'll find a wide variety of articles and reviews which "take apart" the newest technology and look at what's under the hood. In this month's issue, we're presenting two thorough articles, in which Jacques Morin offers no-nonsense commentary on both Tablet PCs (Article below) and a series of How-To Tech books .

Article 1: Who Said it was Easy?
Article 2: Tablet PCs: Write or Not? (below)

A Tablet PC – Write or Not?
Article by Jacques Morin

Why not?

The Tablet pc is a quirky device with a troubled past. Using handwriting as the main input method rather than a keyboard has been around as a concept since 1989 when Jeff Hawkins¹ came up with a device called a GRiDPAD² Poor sales eventually led to cancellation of the product line, however, and Hawkins went on to form a small hand held device company called Palm Computing (but more about that another time). While the Tablet PC was at the leading edge of the computer revolution in the 1990's, it never entered the mainstream in spite of its advantage as a tool for students and teachers.

Why not? In order to answer this question, I decided I would use a Tablet pc for several weeks. I have been using one of these devices all summer long in courses at UNC and with everyday applications. On my very first day of using the Tablet PC, I was hooked! OASIS provided a Compaq Tablet as the demo tool of choice. It is certainly compact and very versatile. I can use it as a regular computer complete with a removable key board or as Tablet using the battery operated pen.

To scribble notes on a computer screen as fast as you can with a pen is indeed a novel idea. With some tweaking and experimentation, plus software like Journal Writer supplied with Windows XP for Tablet PCs and Microsoft's One Note, I was able to import Powerpoint documents and annotate directly onto the slides with my own handwriting. Although the software is slow importing content, being able to use the pen was ideal for class. The pen converts easily from a marker or ball point to a highlighter in a wide range of colors. With the keyboard in place, alternating between typed text and handwriting is a breeze!

A sample of the journal page is pasted below – which includes the use of color and various drawing tools.

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

As a basic laptop computer the Tablet is a bit small – both the screen size and the keyboard. On the plus side, however, it is easily carried in a knapsack. The whole thing is about 10 inches long and 8 inches across – almost as big as a regular notepad. Considering its many advantages why has the Tablet PC not been adopted by computer users in the classroom?

I think there are two basic issues with Tablet PCs. One, material produced by instructors and provided to students still follows the paper-based model of learning. Instructors produce PowerPoint slides that are intended for class presentation and not intended to be annotated on-screen by students. The second issue and a much more difficult one to resolve is that journals or annotated files are actually image files saved with a specific Microsoft extension used with the MS Journal application. In a typical class this summer, presentations in Powerpoint typically included 60 or 70 slides for a 3 hour lecture. Once imported into Journal and then annotated, these files became very large, often exceeding 1GB if the original slides also included embedded images. Sharing your notes with classmates is simply not possible or practical at these sizes. The files are too large and cumbersome to import back to a Microsoft application such as Word or Powerpoint.

So is a Tablet PC right or not for the classroom? It's hard to say – while the excitement of taking scribbled notes on a laptop has long worn off for me, the idea of sharing electronic notes remains a very cool concept. But unless a large portion of your peers have access to Tablets, sharing is not practical at this stage of the technology development. What is clearly needed is a better software platform to ease the import/export complexities and to avoid saving information as image files.

In summary, Tablets are nice toys to have for use in a classroom environment but are limited as yet by the current restrictions of the software. As further advances are made Tablet computing may become more popular. For now, it's on the leading edge and filling a small marketplace niche for users looking for a novel, compact note-taking device. To access more information about Tablet computers and current development in this area, as well as published articles on the use of Tablets in the classroom visit these websites:

Microsoft's view of Tablets – from revolution to evolution

Windows Network article – Tablet's future

Tablets in the classroom

Syllabus – Technology for Higher Education

NOTES

¹ That's not how the brain works – Technology Review July/August 1999

² History of the Tablet PC web site