http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=885115


An interesting article on digital pens. Personally, I don't like writing by hand, although software that would convert sketches to finished diagrams would be neato. Now all "they" have to do is put small gps units in the pens, so that everything you write and everywhere you go can be constantly tracked, monitored, and evaluated!

It's the virtual paper in this article that interests me:

"The Anoto pen is equipped with a camera that looks at the tip of the pen—not at the ink, but at a pattern of almost invisible dots, 0.1mm across, that are printed on special [expensive] paper. With 36 dots to a 2mm square, Anoto's developers have found a way to offset each dot slightly from its neighbours, so that each square on the paper is geometrically unique.

The implications of such a uniquely addressable surface means that a jotting pad imprinted with the Anoto pattern can have one area for making notes, another for ticking a box that says “Send this note as e-mail”, or still another saying “Send this note as a fax”. The system is being designed so that a Bluetooth wireless chip in the pen will transmit the information to a nearby base station or personal computer for processing, storage or transmission over the Internet. Above all, says the company, getting the information off the page has to be seamless and to create as little incremental effort as possible for the user. Otherwise, people may applaud the digital pen's novelty but find it just too fiddly to bother with."

So Anoto is creating, in essence, another virtual layer or space in addition to the internet. And you're locked into buying proprietary Anoto paper. As expensive and potentially divisive as proprietary pens and paper sound, it still piques the interest of my inner geek. Part of me likes the idea of every note I scribble being digitally archived and indexed. Of course, while cleaning out old files the other night I went through a folder of nothing but stuff written on scraps of paper and realized that much more than 90 percent of what I jot down is crap. (a variation on Sturgeon's law). And of course, my inner panopti-researcher wants to give digital pens to a first year writing class and track all of their composing.

From the article's conclusion:
-----------------------------------------------------
With children now learning to use computers before they even tackle handwriting, there is a danger that the pen might become an unnatural way to create text. There is also a risk that, in their rush to perfect the technology, digital-pen pushers may misunderstand why people use pen and paper in the first place.

In his musings on human-computer interactions, Professor Norman points out what every newspaper reporter and college student has long appreciated—that it is the act of taking notes that counts, not the notes themselves. “It focuses the mind, minimises the tendency to daydream, and forces the person to reflect upon the events being recorded so intensely that, at the conclusion of the event, the notes themselves can usually be discarded.” Whether digital pens will help people do that better or worse is something that has yet to be judged. But it will surely be an interesting experience finding out.
------------------------------------------------------