On the one hand, they have incredible potential. These have been met with some controversy. Playing Games and Applicationsįinally, Livescribe offers applications. Add the ability to navigate from place to place within a pencast by clicking on a note or jumping to a timestamp, and you have something that’s closer to DVD technology than simply a pen that records sound. Combining the two into something resembling a motion picture is new. The pencast is usually the most surprising feature of the Livescribe for new users. Lacata uses pencasts to record supplementary lectures for his students, showing on paper how to work through a math problem while he explains his steps. Later, you can play your notes back as a pencast - a little movie where the notes gradually appear in sync with the audio. Instead of jotting down notes or recording your voice during a brainstorming session, you can do both. The Echo's pencast function makes mind-mapping with the pen extremely useful.
Instead of notes, you've recorded a mind-map. When Lacata's students take notes, 'the pen alters their writing style: Instead of verbatim snippets of Lacata’s instructions, they can write 'key words' - essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream.' Essentially, it offloads the raw-data–recording component of note-taking to the audio stream, while placing the tagging, indexing, thinking and questioning components firmly within script.
