Collaborative Note Taking with NoteMesh
NoteMesh is definitely an interesting project. Think about it: you take notes in class and then you come back to your dorm, jump on the net, and you review, edit, adjust, and correct the notes with the rest of your classmates – pretty neat.
Essentially, NoteMesh is a wiki for class notes and I think that it has the potential to take off if it can build a critical mass of students at a particular school. However, it’s not going to be easy.
Actually getting students to type up their notes after sitting through the grueling hours of class isn’t exactly easy. From my experiences, students usually don’t want to take the extra step when it comes to adding additional work to their already busy and hectic school schedules.
Though the service makes perfect sense, it’s going to be a hard puppy to scale and gain critical mass. The college market is extremely fickle and not prone to continuing unnecessary school work outside of the classroom unless they have to –- heck, students already have a hard enough time getting homework done, let alone typing up their class notes.
I’m in NoteMesh’s corner and would love to see their project gain traction. If they can gain a few evangelists to get the ball rolling by actually typing their notes up, then I think they may have a chance.
3 Comments
Taylor
September 28th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
While I’m all for collaborative learning, I know of many students in competitive fields who would only use notemesh for their own gain and not share anything.
Notemesh could certainly help, but if you really want to get better grades, the trick is to study smarter. A few college buddies and myself have created a web app to help you do just that.
check it out at http://gradefix.com
Liana Taylor
October 9th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Dave,
I don’t this this project is quite “simple & sexy”
David Askaripour
October 9th, 2006 at 10:22 am
@Liana: Yeah, I agree. Their service, in my mind, is not likely to scale. Students simply aren’t going to take the extra step to re-write their notes online. There’s just note enough “value.” I “do” think that it makes sense in theory and that it may very well help them study, but students, quite frankly, don’t care about taking the extra step no matter what. Unless they were paying students to write the notes… then I just don’t see it happening on a large scale.
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