Confessions of a Papyrophile

I totally made that word up, but I needed a catchy title. The point is:  I love paper.  When I compose a poem, for instance, I will use an entire legal pad writing draft after draft with a finely sharpened pencil, or the rare perfect pen.  When I take notes, I annotate the text.  I love flipping through my old college English books.  Reading the marginalia is like revisiting a diary.  Once, I loaned my copy of The Winter of Our Discontent to someone at work, and she mentioned how much she enjoyed reading my margin notes. I had forgotten that I'd annotated it.  I blushed as if she'd peeked at my underwear.

So when my Digital Writing professor assigned us a brutally boring 20 page article on annotation to read, I printed it.  Then, I read it with a yellow highlighter and mechanical pencil both in my right hand just like I always do.  When I dozed off, I shuffled the papers to see where I'd left off reading.

I have to admit this was a cowardly act.  I should have tried to use my Google notebook.  But the article was just so long and paper and pencil feel so right.

Like many of my students, I went back did my prewriting in the "assigned" way after I'd done it my own way, transferring my highlighted passages and marginalia into my Google notebook. However, as I made the transfer, I discovered that Google notebook replicates my analog notetaking fairly well.

While I can't write directly on the text, I can write next to it.  And I was able to clip, annotate and store

Sample annotation

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, one of my favorite ways to prewrite has been to use notecards, manipulatives really.  I move them around, sort categories, lay out diagrams.  As far as I know, I can't diagram in my Google notebook, but I can sort and categorize my notebook entries and drag them around the notebook page just like notecards.

I didn't need to invent a complicated system of tracking sources for my bibliography (...the source number goes in the upper right hand corner of the note card and corresponds to the number on the bib card...).  If I clipped a section from the article, my Google notebook automatically hyperlinked to the source.

My notebook page

It's unfortunate that I was working on this article alone because in my opinion the greatest classroom potential of Google notebooks is its export and sharing options.

When I taught research using notecards, I would tell students that the payoff for laboriously creating those 50+ cards would happen when it was time to type their outlines.  Once we'd sorted the cards into piles, all they had to do was flip through the cards in order and type their slug lines.  Voila, instant outline.  Well, in my Google notebook, I can organize my notes and simply export my them into Google docs.  I would then have my key ideas and evidence already in order, and I could just sort of write around them filling in blanks with explanation to craft my first draft.

Export

Share

The other excellent thing I can do is share my notebooks with work partners.  We could collaborate, sort of build a database of information and ideas before we start writing.  If I'm so impressed with my own annotation, I could even publish my notebook as a web page. 

And, as a teacher, I would never have to store 35 packs of 50 notecards in a box under my desk as insurance against the next year's plagiarism.

In the end, the only significant limitation of my Google notebook is that I still miss my notecards.  I like to lay them out on the table and move them around, all of them out all at once where I can see them.  The relationships I establish between cards as I move them become the analysis and explanation in my writing.  No, Google Notebooks isn't perfect software.  Fortunately, it can be paired with other kinds of digital notetaking.  Creating an overview of my notes from the article in Inspiration before sorting notes in my Google notebook gave me the analysis I needed to name sections on my notebook page.  (But why pay for Inspiration, when I could download VUE or Compendium for free?) My needs as a concrete random thinker have been met.

Digital Annotation vs. Analog Annotation

Moving little color-coded circles around on the screen led me to decide which ideas belonged where and how to organize them as a whole. 

But since I'm calling this posting a confession...at the same time, I feel bitter imagining those future legions of high school students who will get to plan their papers this way.  It's almost too easy to discover relationships between ideas this way.  This is exactly how I feel about math students using those super-duper calculators nowadays.  By God, I had to figure out how to graph that nonsense with a pencil and paper.