I’m the Senior Science Advisor at Livescribe and an instructional technologist like you. (I got my PhD in instructional technology a few years ago at Utah State University and now I’m a faculty member in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University.)

There are a LOT of applications of the Livescribe smartpen in education. Certainly, notetaking is a big one. It turns out that students spend most of their limited cognitive load acting as transcriptionists–copying down as much of what the lecturer is saying as possible. This, unfortunately, doesn’t leave much processing power for anything else, like…thinking. Check out research by Ken Kiewra on this topic.

The smartpen will also be a tremendous tool for creating movies of whiteboard presentations/discussions. Much of information that is created during a whiteboard session is lost. Namely, what was *said* during the creation of the figure, diagram, equation, etc. and the order in which the figure was drawn. With the Livescribe smartpen you can record what was said and what was drawn and save it as a movie. You can even send it to someone else who doesn’t have a pen for them to learn from. (Check out the demo application at the Livescribe Facebook page.)

Another application that I’m really looking forward to is using the pen to provide audio feedback to my students. I’m a big believer that the best instructional technologies are those that don’t require behavioral changes on the part of the student or teacher. So, very soon now, I’m going to ask my students to turn their 10-page papers in to me electronically (which they already do now), I’ll print them out (which I already do)…but this time onto patterned paper. I’m then going to grade them with a pen (which I already do), but instead of writing out long comments in the margins, I’m going to underline or circle a section of their paper and *speak* and record my comments to them. Next, I’ll dock my pen and send the paper back to them with my embedded audio comments. They can open up the paper in Acrobat or the Livescribe desktop app, see their paper with my handwritten markup, and most importantly, they can click on them to hear what I said. (Note: the student doesn’t need to own a pen to view/hear their paper.) What’s the benefit? In studies conducted comparing handwritten and audio feedback, teachers provided 250% more information in audio than in handwriting, it took them 1/4 of the time (which translates into 10x efficiency), students were 3 times more likely to act on information provided in audio form, and students stated they felt that the professor cared about them more when they provided audio feedback. Bottom line: students and teachers don’t have to change their fundamental work behaviors, but tremendous outcomes are produced when teachers use the smartpen to provide feedback. One final word on this application: this would be great in subject areas for which applications of technologies are rare like English Composition (#1 course taken in college).

Finally, I recently received a $300k grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the use of the smartpen to support blind college students in learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Check out this website to learn more about the project:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/smartpen.html

I’d love to talk with you about the opportunities to use the smartpen for foreign language learning–an interest I know you have. (Imagine tapping on a word in a German language textbook to hear it pronounced.) Also, I developed an application for my dissertation that accelerates the acquisition of paired-associates (including foreign language vocabulary) while maximizing long-term retention and fluency/automaticity of retrieval. Don’t you think the smartpen would be a great tool for learning foreign vocabulary?

Have a great 2008.

Andy

PS I stopped by BYU and the Church Office Building in SLC about a month ago and gave a demos to the training departments. They loved the smartpen and will be testing it out soon.