When this writer went away to college in 1961, the hottest homework breakthrough was Esterbrook fountain pens with pre-filled cartridges that spared us the mess of dipping the tip in a jar of ink and pulling the little pump handle.
Today I’m going to tell you about two new technological advances that you should consider sending to campus with your young ones:
– One Note for Microsoft Office ($99.95), the company’s newest productivity product that can make schoolwork and organizing college life seem something like a cross between a video game and a PowerPoint lecture.
– WiFi Seeker by Morton Grove-based Chrysalis Development, a $29.95 radio receiver on a key chain that can detect the presence of a high speed broadband connection within 300 feet. (www.wifiseeker.com)
These will seem an indispensable duo within the first few days of today’s college life–as I imagine it–with all those inquiring minds hunched over broadband-equipped laptops.
Reading through press releases from a collection of colleges around the country, it’s apparent that students are going to be swimming in school-provided oceans of wireless Internet service on and off campus.
I can imagine the frustration as one must haul out a laptop, fire it up and activate wireless features just to see if you’re actually in a decent hot spot.
The WiFi Seeker is a tiny gadget with four red LED lights that flash as one points in different directions until a network is found. The number of lights switched on shows the signal strength and the direction you’re pointing the lights gives the heading. What a great way to save time and enhance productivity.
Ah, productivity. That’s where One Note comes in, friends and neighbors.
There’s really nothing like it anywhere in the rest of the world. The software works through a graphic display that looks a lot like a traditional 3-ring binder divided into tabs for each class. But these virtual sections are far more than just a way to store the notes taken on computers in classes, libraries and homework sharing sessions.
One Note integrates itself with the rest of the computer, thereby letting a user do things like reach out to the Web for information, copy it and then paste it into whichever subject heading is relevant.
Naturally this includes the rest of the far more expensive Microsoft Office, where one can do stuff like creating a set of graphically gussied-up class notes and then moving them into a PowerPoint show or into a proper Word document.
If shelling out several hundred extra dollars at the school bookstore for Office seems like getting piled on big time, keep in mind that One Note can also turn out proper Rich Text-formatted word processing documents for finished assignments. If you need headers, footers, footnotes and the like, however, you’ll need something like Word.
You can get a more visually pleasing picture of the One Note possibilities by going to the Microsoft Web site where there is a slick Macromedia Flash show demonstrating the major points. That show–and a free but limited sample download of One Note–can be had at www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinf o/default.mspx.
I hope I’m adding value in reporting that my own trials with One Note bear out that you can, indeed, do the stuff shown in the canned ad. Whether even the most gear-headed college kid will want to do all of this stuff remains to be seen.
Still, I started fretting while doing this review that One Note could be a dangerous time trap in which one gets so wrapped up in making notes look neat that the actual purpose–homework–gets shunted aside.
The demo shows a term paper on James Joyce as an example of the powers of One Note.
The Joyce project becomes one of the notebook tabs simulated across the top of the screen, along with tabs for each item one adds to the ever-growing database.
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The Joyce notes start with a black and white photo of the great Irish writer, complete with black eye patch and tweed jacket. Alongside is an Excel graph that uses a pie chart to show the body of Joyce’s work broken out by the number of pieces written each year. Below it are hot links to many of the James Joyce-related Web sites posted by everybody from Ulysses nuts to pirate sites where somebody has scanned in the enormous, incomprehensible, free form (to say the least) novel “Finnegan’s Wake.”
There is sweet irony in that running down the side is what One Note calls a side tab that includes the mythical student’s to-do list, including: “Read Finnegan’s Wake.”
As if anybody ever has.
This, of course, underscores my qualms about getting so swept up by the novelty of working with One Note’s rich set of features: The actual purpose of the exercise gets neglected.
Then I remember what Mrs. Hurley, my History of Western Civilization professor said about my shiny new green Esterbrook. “Don’t come crying to me, Mr. Coates, if that gadget breaks down during the final.”
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.