52. COLLABORATIVE, SEARCH-BASED NOTE-TAKING

Department: Computer Science & Engineering
Faculty Advisor(s): William Griswold | Beth Simon

Primary Student
Name: Roshni Malani
Email: rmalani@ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-534-9669
Grad Year: 2009

Abstract
Students often treat the knowledge presented in lecture as self-contained, rather than as part of a larger body of knowledge. Also, many student activities, such as note-taking and studying, tend to be individualistic in nature. Our premise is that collaboration amongst students is crucial to their learning and is most effective when selfish individual actions are shared with the community of users with minimal additional overhead. Furthermore, we believe that content found on the Web can supplement lecture materials with more examples and can provide students with key insights and intuitions. Thus we developed an easy way for students to search the Web using terms from lecture materials, to save search results automatically within the context of lecture, to share them automatically with everyone in the class, and to browse anonymously the terms and results of their peers. This system will encourage students to explore a wide variety of resources that will provide alternative explanations, more examples, and multimedia demonstrations related to lecture content. Minimizing the time and effort required to search will encourage inquiry-based learning. Storing the search results in the context of lecture materials will provide relevant information when reviewing for exams. Viewing other students' work will not only result in easily discoverable related content, but also help students learn how to refine search terms. Thus, by automatically archiving and sharing the search results, a new style of note-taking emerges, and students can benefit from each others' explorations.

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