“Make a previNOTE”
The time has come to start college and a young and eager freshman takes their first steps into the university library. Overwhelmed, this student quickly sits down at a desk and starts on the first assigned university homework. The online databases are filled with countless e-books, academic articles, and scholarly texts all unknown to this student. How will this student succeed with an overwhelming academic article and grasp all of the necessary information? This is where PreviNote comes into play. PreviNote works with the university online databases to track the changes and annotations a previous reader has made, keeping them visible to any current reader. This way, while reading any given article a student can access insightful, helpful, and clarifying annotations in the PreviNote database. The new student struggling to understand their work is now being indirectly helped from peers before, being guided through the course work in a constructive manner. The purpose of this technology is to keep a large database of annotations and notes on scholarly articles for future access. This database will serve as a comprehensive resource for students who are seeking new insights and a helpful guide for their readings and studies. Students will be able to access the helpful annotations through online university catalogues after the University has installed the PreviNote application into their server. Once this has happened, students who acess PDF documents online will be prompted with the option to highlight, make a note, add an annotation, draw comparisons and contrasts in the text. After the reading students can then download that document with their own annotations and select annotations from previous readings they found helpful to remain on the document after saving. Readers will have the ability to turn off the visible annotations so as to not distract the reading process. However, PreviNote will encourage a close reading and rereading giving the student the opportunity to read once making their own notes and then going back to see what others have noted before hand.
With the widespread use projected for our product one of our key selling points about this product is the interactivity between students reading the same text. Not only will students be able to pull ideas and clarifications from students previous, they will be able to ask questions and answer inquiries made by others. Professors will also have access to this interface. And with students registered under their specific university professors will be able to mark points of interest, add in questions to help guide the reading and response to annotations. PreviNote provides an extremely interactive interface that truly allows students to excel in challenging academic reading.
In current education almost all scholarly work can now be accessed online as we are experiencing a “paradigm shift” to more digital technologies (Hayles 1). It is rare to see a student without a laptop, or without access to one. In addition, e-readers have become increasingly popular with the widespread usage of the Kindle, the Nook, Google Books and especially the iPad. The most common ways of reading are now through online books and PDF’s. PreviNote builds onto the existing reliance on technology for reading and adds an additional and user-friendly purpose. Current technology doesn’t allow you to seamlessly make notes and annotations that efficiently auto saves while you read online. With this new app PreviNote builds off existing technology to enhance productivity, a feature in society we are in danger of loosing. With PreviNote there is no need to “transition between a ‘view’ and ‘edit’ mode in order to make changes to the text”, as this technology, similar to Word Star, derives from the longhand form of composition (Kirshenbaum, 8). The demand for this product is already there as e-readers, laptops and iPads are widely used. Accessing this technology will be as simple logging into the university database website on a computer or smartphone app to complete readings on the go.
As Katherine Hayles addresses in her text “How We Think”, human attention is a precious resource and PreviNote works to grasp the readers attention in a way that will make texts much more accessible to the reader. PreviNote will address “hyper reading, which includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting and juxtaposing texts” as it will function as a “strategic response to an information-intensive environment, aiming to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information” with the various annotations markings in the text (Hayles, 12). PreviNote will also allow readers to practice “close reading” which “correlates with deep attention… that prefers a single information stream” but needs a “pedagogical [strategy] that recognizes the strengths and limitations of each cognitive mode” through a heightened attention to what each annotation means in the text (Hayles, 12). PreviNote thus allows readers to practice hyper reading and close reading at once while only using one visual mode on the screen to do so.
The added feature of the database here allows for the creation of a “special history” that will “[open] the door to new strategies that, rather than using narrative as their primary mode of explication, allow flexible interactions between different layers and overlays” (Hayles, 15). Thus the added database of annotations that PreviNote provides enhances the cognitive reading experience, as readers are now able to interact differently and creatively with the text.
The target audiences for this product vary, but the main audience will be all college students, teenagers and young adults from age’s 18 – 21, who might struggle with a difficult reading and would benefit from additional notes professors at these academic institutions. These are the society members who will be actively reading and writing who will benefit from previous annotations. Undergraduate students already have a knowledge of simple technology such as their online university catalogue, giving them very easy to PreviNote when they go to find an article.
This application will be manufactured virtually as the nature of the product is so. What will be needed is a program that allows students to modify PDF documents online and that is also capable of auto saving this information for future users. The PreviNote headquarters will need a large infrastructure for computer hard drives that will be used to remotely store all of the data. Our product will be simply distributed, as the application is virtual and can be downloaded on any computer. PreviNote will act as a plug in, similar to Zotero, the popular citation generator. Although PreviNote will be installed, ideally, on all university computers, students can download the plug in on their computer and register with their university so as to see the most effective annotations.
PreviNote seeks to enhance the learning and reading experience for college students and institutions worldwide. With our dynamic interface students will bring creativity to reading that has been missing. Collaborating will be made that much easier all with the help of PreviNote. Students who have a question or interesting thought will be prompted to just “make a PreviNOTE”!
Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2012. Print.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes, A Literary History of Word Processing. N.p.: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.