Introduction
Over the last several years, I have become increasingly interested in the cognitive dimensions of teaching and student learning: how do students, particularly advanced and graduate students, process information, and what role do we play as educators in this endeavor. My interest in student-centered information-processing ranges from the reading materials they are assigned, to their personal computing experiences. Specifically, the contexts of reading assignments and writing research papers involve special needs in the processing of data. By data processing, I am referring to the gathering of terms and ideas based on text, the basic medium of information among students and educators in the humanities and social sciences. Academic writing in these fields is, after all, unlike other writing: it contains its own rules governing aesthetics, clarity, and analysis. Thus, it is with the goal of enhancing the students' processing of empirical information that I embarked on the design of a course that combines the use of Palm Pilots with desktop software specially designed for these academic needs.
Palm Pilots as Vehicles of Transmission
The power of Palm Pilots is clear to anyone who sees the vast number and extensive variety of applications written for this medium. With the arrival of the portable keyboard, however, the expansion of this power became instantly clear to me. People in business and education who depend on the written word to convey their ideas - in contrast to graphic-oriented users in the artistic and advertising domains, or to "number-crunchers" in the financial world - are increasingly coming to see the dramatic enhancements in the capacity of Palm Pilots to transmit their thoughts. I had experienced the ultra-portable capacity to transfer ideas into digital writing as a personal benefit and increased productivity: no more carrying my laptop to libraries to take notes, no more reliance on finding the pages on which I took notes at meetings. It wasn't long before I began to formulate the possibilities of extending these capabilities to my advanced students. As it turned out, the keyboard would become the key to improving on a teaching technique that I have long been using.
For years, I have required students to bring to my seminars two copies of the notes they take on the weekly reading assignments. At the end of each class, one copy of each student's notes is given to me and the other is tossed on the table for anyone to pick up randomly. This way, the opportunity is given to compare one's "take" on the readings with their peers. This practice has served me well in achieving two objectives: first, it has been highly effective in keeping students motivated to complete their reading assignments, and, second, it offers them opportunities to get to know each other in a more engagingly intellectual way. Over the years, I have also encouraged my students to consider using computers for their note-taking, and beyond this, to choose software applications on the basis of what best serves their academic needs and objectives. Lately, my urging that they use computers for their notes has become hardly necessary since virtually all students own or have access to personal computers these days. But two problems have continued to hinder my pedagogical aims, one mechanical and the other cognitive.
The first problem deals with the issue of easy and immediate access to the means for digitizing data. Most students do not own laptop computers, which cost significantly more than desktop computers. This means that students must spend more time in the redundant efforts of taking notes in the library by hand and then transcribing them to their computers at home. Alternatively, they have to spend time and money photocopying the reading material to take home, also an inefficient hindrance.
The second problem is more challenging in that it deals with cognitive matters, with reaping the long-term benefits of entering text into computers, and with dealing with the cumulative nature of the learning process. In the business of higher education, compartmentalizing basic information or knowledge in the humanities and social sciences is best avoided. Indeed, we want students to accumulate information not for its own sake, but in order to be able to compare, contextualize, differentiate, and synthesize the data. Students who achieve these objectives are considered to have mastered the material. Educators who effectively point the way to these objectives are said to have done a good job.
A Challenge to Educators
Professors generally articulate to students the distinction between content and process. At the same time, I've observed that we spend more effort in delivering the first than the second. That is, we are explicit when teaching our advanced students elementary stages of learning, to what, in Bloom's Taxonomy, is called knowledge competence. When we teach, we convey knowledge of the basic features: the dates, events, places, and major ideas of the subject matter.
By contrast, our teaching mode moves in the direction of implicit communication once we get beyond the delivery of knowledge competence, that is, precisely at the point at which we expect students to treat the subject at more complex levels of cognition and higher levels of abstraction. It seems to be that these are the moments in which we should be dealing in an explicit mode with the data understanding and comprehension training. I believe that, as educators, we should be explicitly involved in conveying modes of grasping meaning, translating received and accumulated knowledge into new contexts, interpreting, comparing and contrasting facts, and ordering, grouping and inferring causal relationships. Indeed, we value and reward students who can achieve these laudable goals; in fact, how ironic that we penalize them if, in their research papers, they fail to provides these higher levels of understanding of the material. In sum, as educators we tend to yield too easily to the notion that such processing matters are best left to the students.
Further along the hierarchy laid out in Bloom's Taxonomy for categorizing levels of abstraction in educational settings, we make assumptions about students' capacities to articulate the content in applied fashion. In the end, we spend inadequate time teaching the use of information, the use of methods, concepts and theories in new settings, and the problem-solving tools that can result from acquired skills or basic knowledge. And, finally, while we expect students to achieve analytical skills, we tend to dedicate relatively less to teaching them the means to arrive at them. We don't do enough to train students in seeing patterns, organizing the parts, recognizing hidden meanings, and identifying abstract components from within the body of basic knowledge, the items to which we dedicate much more of our efforts.
When I presented these points to my wife, the professor of psychology, she took exception to my comments. Fortunately, she is not a vengeful sort. But she did remind me that not all fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences leave it to students to sort out the more nuanced levels of cognitive processing and understanding and that, in fact, her field is filled with professors whose endeavors explicitly involve teaching students how to learn. So, she said to me, be careful to be more discriminating when I criticize higher education. Perceptively, I offered to make us a nice cup of coffee.
The Project
So, what does all this have to do with Palm Pilots in higher education? I decided to act on my concerns for the teaching/learning process by submitting an educational technology proposal to FIU's Vice-Provost and Chief Information Officer. The proposal outlined a project that contained the following five objectives: (1) guide student behaviors toward digital note-taking; (2) improve note-taking skills; (3) accumulate and use notes to enhance cognitive skills; (4) create mechanisms that will continue to yield benefits, thereby providing reinforcement for note-taking practices; and (5) strengthen the quality of research papers, in particular, the analytical components.
The proposal received a favorable response and I was given a grant to carry out my project. I will be teaching in the Spring semester of 2002 a special version of my seminar, "Family, State and Society in Latin America." Each student will be provided with hardware and software. Each one will have the use of a Palm Pilot VIIx and a Palm keyboard. In addition, all students will receive subsidies to defray the costs of WordSmith for the Palm, downloadable from www.bluenomad.com. Finally, students will be provided with Nota Bene for Windows (www.notabene.com), a desktop application especially designed for academic research and writing. Nota Bene is an academic suite consisting of three applications: (1) Nota Bene, the suite's word-processing engine, which contains built-in academic manuals of style that automatically lay out the elements of research papers and books (including the MLA style, the Chicago Manual of Style, Turabian, and the American Psychological Association Style Manual); (2) Ibidem, Nota Bene's bibliographic management program, containing the formatting rules for foot/endnotes and bibliographies according to nearly 100 journals and academic styles; and (3) Orbis, the hypertext, boolean-capable, search and retrieval component of Nota Bene.
The ultra-portability of the Palm and its keyboard, together with WordSmith, make possible significant note-taking, which will dramatically facilitate the first objective. Entering notes into a digital medium is no longer burdened by the physical restraints of laptops, such as electrical connections, weight, battery durability, etc. It is no longer necessary to take notes in the library on paper and then transcribe them to a desktop computer at home; also eliminated is the need to photocopy reading materials to take home. Thus, the first objective, to channel student behaviors that result in note-taking, will be enabled by the complete liberation of physical restraints: students will freely digitize their notes in the campus library, saving time and eliminating costs.
The second objective, the improvement of note-taking skills, will involve my interaction with students during the seminar's weekly meetings with their active participation in the learning process, helped by their Palm Pilots. During each seminar meeting, students will be asked to present on that week's readings. Each student I call on to present will beam the notes to me and the other participants. With the notes in front of us, we can all discuss the readings in greater detail, I can bring to bear additional issues, I can raise questions, and elicit comparisons. And throughout this interactive process - taking place in the finest tradition of in-class learning - students will be entering additional information to their notes with the help of the Palm keyboards. By sharing their notes in this venue of discussion and ideas-processing, and by adding to their notes in real-time, students will become agents in the more sophisticated process of applying and contextualizing their basic knowledge competence acquired during the pre-meeting phase of reading and initial note-taking. Thus, students will be presented with opportunities for discussing both the content - the basic knowledge competence - and the processing of the content, which is the basis for achieving the project's third objective: a cognitively more sophisticated way of accumulating notes. Specifically, students will be using WordSmith to tag their notes at different points during the class with terms and concepts appropriate to the issues being discussed. These tagged terms will, in turn, form the basis for achieving the fourth objective: continuing to reap benefits to their notes well beyond the scope of a single semester or a single course. This is where Nota Bene will enter the picture.
WordSmith files can be saved in RTF (Rich Text Format). Once students synchronize their Palm Pilots with their computers, they will bring their RTF WordSmith files into Nota Bene. Once in NB, their notes will automatically become indexed by Orbis, Nota Bene's search-and-retrieval component. This means that each student will have all the words in his or her notes - plus the concepts added and specially tagged in class - available for future searching, consulting, retrieval, and incorporation into their research papers. They will thus reap the benefits of their text databases, which will grow over time. In this way, text that is entered into a computer will no longer be static in some files with filenames long ago forgotten or in some folders that no longer ring a bell. On the contrary, the text created in the Palm by WordSmith, transferred to the PC, and indexed by Nota Bene will remain dynamic and usable in much the same way as text found in the dynamic environment of the World Wide Web.
Orbis will be used as the means through which the students' content is processed; it will serve as the key to improving the organization of parts, in identifying components, and in ordering and re-grouping of data. Students will experience the benefits of having their words and concepts returned to them in rich relationships as they continue to bring to their databases additional sources, including additional readings, lectures, discussions, and materials found on the Web.
This project will serve to link two fundamental components of learning into a seamless whole: the acquisition of basic knowledge, which will be facilitated by the ease of data entry (via the combination of Palm + keyboard + WordSmith), blended with a teaching/learning phase using an explicit delivery mode for data processing in terms of organization and contextualization (via Nota Bene). In this manner, I expect to engage my students in strengthening qualitative data analysis, aided by a combination of Palm-based and desktop-based applications perfectly tailored to student needs and lifestyles.
The final objective will be the improved analysis and greater professionalism of students' papers as they put to use growing data sets and concepts resulting from their research. Furthermore, their papers will be more professional as they follow the stylistic and layout rules of academic fields. Finally, their bibliographic databases will also continue to expand. It is my expectation that this mode of teaching/learning will provide exceptional benefit as students advance in their courses and go on to more productive professional lives.
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Dr. Mark D. Szuchman is Professor of Latin American History and Associate Dean for Faculty and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Florida International University, the public research university in Miami.
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