My university has WLAN in the lecture halls like most universities nowadays although most of them have not defined a usecase.
Oliver Wrede wrote an article about Notebook conferences, where he tries to verbalize how Network access can be used *during* conference and teaching talks. He presents the SubEthaEdit Notes from the blogtalk conference as an example. What are they smoking at blogtalk? These notes are nearly unreadable, and as summaries really bad.
Philipp writes his summaries after the talks while he is traveling home by train, they are much better to read, although (or because) they are written by only one person.
Volker Weber’s observations are much more realistic.
I only take my notebook into boring classes and talks, because if the topic is something more serious than “social software” you have to concentrate 100% on the speaker to get an idea what they are talking about and to not loose track.
4 thoughts on “Notebook universities”
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Well, they are notes, not write-ups. Have you looked at the wiki source or at the resulting wiki-page (which, I agree, doesn’t make much sense as they haven’t been reformatted properly after I stuck them in?
Thanks for your comment. I just read your blog entries, and the english one sounds like the goal of the editing is not to produce a valuable document, but to enjoy the collaboration.
Maybe that’s the reason why nobody reformats them. So maybe a better solution would be to put them on the net as textfiles and link to them from the wiki.
I enjoyed trying to read the french one, but my french is too bad to understand the content between the lines and with Babelfish it is even worse.
The French write-up is more a general overview of the conference, not so much about the collective note-taking 🙂
I think a big issue is the formatting — if we had been able to wiki-format everything from the start, on the spot, it would make it easier for others to participate once the text is on the wiki.
Taking Collaborative Notes at BlogTalk
A detailed write-up of the collective note-taking operation we ran at BlogTalk. We took notes together using SubEthaEdit and then posted them to a wiki so that they can be further annotated. The story, and questions this experience raises for me.