Livescribe Pulse Pen – Review

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

My 3rd-year course is over, and it is time for a review. I managed to post pencasts for every lecture: two thirds of the lectures used a visualiser, so the recordings were made live, and one third were scheduled in a room without a visualiser, so they had to be recorded in my office afterwards. I deliberately restricted pencasts to one A4 page each, lasting 10-15 minutes, because re-recording would otherwise be a major investment of effort, and editing is not feasible. So each lecture typically contained 3 or 4 of these pencasts. They are all available on the Livescribe web site, links can be found on my PX366 module page

Student feedback was overwhelmingly positive. They really appreciated being able to go over the material in this way (supplemented by a comprehensive, and more conventional, set of lecture notes also provided online). Two of the three slots per week were scheduled at 9am, so turnout was going to be below average in any case; also some students had timetable clashes with other courses, so they also were grateful for the chance to play back the lectures that they missed in this way. I got a lot of encouragement from the students during the course, and plenty of favourable comments on the feedback forms.

Technically, the pen worked quite well, once I got some control over the sound levels. This was the main problem. With the built-in microphone picking up the scratching noise of pen against paper, and too much background noise arising from suspending the pair of microphones over my shoulders as suggested in the Livescribe documentation, I settled on fixing them to some kind of makeshift stand, to be placed as far away as permitted by the cable. Initially, I fixed them to a small figurine of Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit fame) but sadly, he fell over backwards one day and broke his neck. So instead I used a heavier figure, an outsize Lewis chess piece. You can see both of these illustrated here together with the special notebook used for the notes, and the pen with connecting cable. I experimented a bit with sound levels; most successful was to follow Livescribe’s advice and pick “Automatic” setting of microphone sensitivity; my one attempt to set it at “Lecture Hall” sensitivity ended up with me sounding like a Dalek. Positioning the microphones as far away as possible, with some kind of shielding against audience noise, was reasonably successful. The quality is never brilliant, but it seems comprehensible. The only remaining problem, never solved, was an occasional period of noise, like a rushing sound, presumably due to some dodgy contact or effect of static electricity, apparently uncorrelated with anything actually happening in the lecture. We just have to put up with this.
I am sufficiently encouraged to try this same approach with my larger second-year course, next term, on Mathematical Methods. We’ll see how it goes …. watch this space.

Michael Allen : 15 Dec 2010 22:44 |  Tags: Livescribe |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem