All entries for Saturday 29 January 2011

January 29, 2011

Livescribe Pulse Pen in Second–Year Maths Methods Module

Follow-up to Livescribe Pulse Pen – Review from Mike Allen's blog

We are three weeks in to my second-year module, PX261 Mathematical Methods for Physicists II, and it seems a good point to review how things are going. Having had good experiences with my third-year module last term, I was encouraged to continue with the Pulse Pen, in much the same way as before. You can check out the pencasts and other support materials starting at the PX261 home page and as before a comprehensive set of notes, provided as a hypertext document online, is an essential complement to the pencasts themselves.

The audience is bigger for this module: about 175 students are registered, as opposed to 75 for my third-year option PX366. The audience noise is correspondingly higher, especially at the start of each lecture when they are very slow to settle down. Apart from that, most issues of sound quality seem to have been sorted out. The lectures are given in ACCR, the Arts Centre Conference Room. This is not the favourite lecturing venue of my colleagues, and indeed Physics has shifted other classes away from it in drawing up this year’s timetable. But it does have a visualiser. Unfortunately, the AV facilities are not perfect. The fixed microphone is located far away from the visualiser, so it is completely useless. This leaves me to rely on the wireless microphone, a rechargeable type, and very frequently the previous lecturers fail to recharge the batteries so it is dead when I arrive. I have taken to bringing my own batteries with me. Not ideal.

It has been harder to get student feedback from this group, so although I have had one or two positive comments, they are not letting me know whether this approach is working or not. One student has pointed out that it would be better if the writing were thicker, and easier to see on the visualizer, which is probably a fair point. Unfortunately the cartridges provided with the pen come only in one size. Interestingly, I have found some discussion on the Livescribe-related forums, of buying other cartridges and physically hacking them so that they fit the pen; I’m not going to try that.

I have also started to encounter some limitations of the Livescribe product. The supporting software, or rather the pen firmware, is updated from time to time. This process quite often fails, causing technical issues and loss of recordings and/or disconnection between the visual pages and the audio. Sometimes the only solution is to re-record a lecture. The customer support when problems like this occur is not very good. It relies on a user forums system (or on making calls to a telephone number in the USA). Most often, the advice seems to be of the “turn it off and on again” variety, or more precisely “re-flash the firmware and hold on to your butts”. I wouldn’t recommend it for people who have no experience of poor or unreliable support for computer-related things.

Despite all this, I am sticking with it, and will keep the situation under review.