Another Tablet Update

Although I am not young enough that I learned to type and write at the same time, I am young enough that by the time I entered college, I was doing all of my intellectual work on the computer, so it has been YEARS since I have really done any substantial work by hand.

However, I have found that there are a number of things that I am more interested in writing now that I have the tablet and GoBinder. For example, I am mapping out the information resources in health policy and management class that I will be teaching next summer (if we can sucker enough students into it--I mean, convince enough students to participate), and I could be typing up an outline in Word (or OpenOfficeText), but I'm not. Instead, I'm hand-scribbling notes in GoBinder.

Cutting and pasting is possible but impractical in GoBinder, and so there are literally scribbles on my notes. Why would I choose this replica of a relic (handwritten notes) over the clean, clear typed format that I've known and loved for the vast majority of my intellectual life?

I think it has something to do with the creative nature of this particular work. Each session outline is evolving as I think through it, and changes in one session create changes in another. I had six notes pages open, and was able to pop through them in a very non-linear fashion, adding and subtracting, commenting and annotating as I went. Typing up an outline in MSWord would be a very dry substitute, and actually, I would probably print it out and write all over it anyway.

I will have to type up the outline when it's time to share, and I may get aggravated when I have 18 notes pages at the end instead of the six I am working with now, but for the moment it seems like a real perk to the machine.