It looks like a simple pen. It’s the same size, the same weight, and it has that same metallic finish. It even writes like a regular pen writes.

Looks, however, can be deceiving.

Livescribe, Inc., a technology-based communications company created by Jim Marggraff, could change the way students take notes with the Pulse Smartpen, invented in 2007. The pen is just beginning to gain attention nationwide and has been featured on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ and in The New York Times.

The Smartpen contains a small computer and a high-speed infrared camera. The camera snaps 72 photos per second of a piece of Livescribe-provided dot paper, paper specially designed with microdots so that the camera can recognize the writing. The computer, via a USB plug, has the ability to recreate the handwriting it sees on the page on the user’s computer screen.

The Smartpen also has voice recording capabilities, enabling it to link what is spoken in lectures to what is written on the Livescribe dot paper. When a user taps the words written on the paper, the Smartpen replays the recording from the exact moment the note was written.

The pen can operate for more than five hours at a time, recording audio and writing notes before it needs to be recharged, and the two gigabyte model can hold more than 200 hours of audio. The two-gigabyte model runs at $169 and the four-gigabyte model sells for $199.

‘The pen can do so much stuff,’ said Zack Yeremian, a junior sport management major at Syracuse University and a campus representative for Livescribe. ‘It’s the only thing you really need to bring to class because it’s like everything’s built in with touch technology. It’s minimalizing our effort and allowing students to maximize a lot of different techniques of listening: being able to absorb and still write it down and be able to go back and get everything from it.’

There are 75 campus representatives, known as ‘scribes,’ that cover 55 major universities across the country. Representatives were trained at the University of California, Berkeley, over the summer. Yeremian said he is building awareness of the pen by setting up tables in Schine Student Center and demonstrating how the Smartpen works.

Yeremian said that SU’s Office of Disability Services has looked into using the pen for its students.

Livescribe said the Smartpen combines what it calls ‘all four modes of communication’ – reading, writing, speaking and listening. This helps students handle ‘information overload on a daily basis,’ according to the company’s Web site.

‘You don’t have to write out so many things,’ Yeremian said. ‘It will just make you more attentive because it’s helping you out with your writing skills, your note taking skills and your listening skills.’

The notes taken and the audio recorded can be uploaded to any computer and can be posted online in the Livescribe Community, where it can be e-mailed or shared with other users. The company also uses ‘pencasting,’ which allows the user to share notes online via blogs, Web sites and Facebook. The pen can also act as a language translator, a calculator and even a piano, one of the Smartpen’s applications.

David Lankes, director of the Information Institute of Syracuse at the School of Information Studies, owns a Smartpen and said the pen may not be useful to every student.

‘It’s built around assuming that you’re a really good note taker because you can find things, you can hear what was going on at the same time, you can really compile things,’ Lankes said. ‘The thing is, if you don’t take notes, and you weren’t willing to do it before, you probably won’t do it again.’

Lankes said he uses the product when editing his doctorate students’ dissertations and recording his lectures. The recordings allow Lankes to create a podcast for his students. He said he likes what he called the ‘durability’ created by the product – the things discussed in class will last longer than the class itself.

Livescribe is already on its second generation of the pen. Those on campus who use the pen said they have not experienced any trouble with the pen itself.

This is something that Basil Bourque, a junior sport management major, said caught him off guard.

‘I’ve actually been really surprised,’ Bourque said. ‘I guess I expected it to be a little problematic, with it being a relatively sophisticated device, but I haven’t had any problems.’

lefulton@syr.edu

Published on November 10, 2009 at 12:00 pm

Contact Lorne: lefulton@syr.edu