Livescribe Echo Digital Pen System
- Dock-to-desktop upload of notes replaced with seamless USB2 connection. Aside from more simplicity, this allows for pen to be active while in 'dock-mode' or charging.
- Synchronization with 'Tablet' app. This allows docked pen to act as mouse on PC, while maintaining recording functionality (now a drawing program like photoshop can be used while making a paper document in real-time).
- Aesthetic updates: pen caps, rubber pad for writing comfort, sleeker design.
- This pen uses a traditional audio in/out port. This allows the user to chose either standard headphones or the livescribe 3-d recording headset to use with the pen.
To see a comparison of Echo model (2nd generation) and Pulse model (1st generation) with illustrated functions, click here
Overall System of Livescribe Pens:
This 'smart' pen works by combining two independent technologies:
1.
A small infrared camera at the tip of the pen tracks a faint non-repeating dot
pattern (known as the Anoto dot-positioning system) that is printed on
paper*. This spacial referencing allows the pen to store a digital
version of the notes internally, as well as on a computer after it has
been connected with a USB to the pen dock.
2. The pen records
audio and stores it within the pen, which allows all the digitized notes to become time-stamped. When put together, the notes on the
page suddenly act as book-markers into tagged points in the audio track
of the event. This creates an opportunity for visually oriented,
non-linear notetaking.
*For more technical information on how the system works, check their website: www.livescribe.com
How to Navigate the Digital Notes:
These notes can be identified by the
orange Play icon superimposed to the top right of the notes. Click
anywhere on your page of choice to play, and the play arrow transforms
into a full-screen option at the top while a control bar becomes
visible below. This provides, from left to right: play/pause and stop
buttons, an adjustable timeline bar, a volume control and a page
selector (roll over this icon and a numbered list of all pages included
in the document pops up. You can navigate these pages by clicking on
the various miniature pages).
Once
you click on the page, you can watch the notes unfold linearly like a
movie, or non-linearly navigate the page like a map by clicking on any
of the lines, the timeline readjusts to the moment the mark was made). Although intuitive, there is a brief wait time at first
that can cause users some confusion. Although the notes can be
navigated non-linearly, they load like any embedded online movie:
chronologically from start to finish. After your first click on the
page, this load begins, and it completes soon after. You will not experience any wait time in your page navigation after the page has fully loaded.
I
have used tags in a variety of ways to help organize the content
so you can better find your way within the notes.
- Tags relating to
context and subjective material not specifically written down on the
page will be tagged without any prefix (An example of this is schedule). These will mix in with all other tags from the website's tag pool.
- Each active narrator (whose name I am familiar
with) will be tagged by an @ sign before their last name, whether or not
their name was written down on the page (@Schull). This coding is also commonly used on Twitter.
- The prefix -
will be used before tags taken directly from the content of the notes
(-lightening talk).
By scanning the written notes for one of
these tags, you can track down a specific moment in time: click the
word to play the audio from this point. I will often box these words
out in the written notes to make them easier to locate. In terms of
the tag pool on the website, this prefix will easily identify these
tags, and they will always be at the top of the tag cloud list.