Thursday June 22, 2006

The Approachable Tablet PC

Last month, I started using an IBM Lenovo Tablet PC at work. Our Head of I.T., another Tablet owner, warned me that Tablets are like magnets. He said that people - strangers - would now stop me everywhere I went, and he was right. I am now stopped consistently in the airport, approached on the street, and interrupted in coffee shops by people interested in the Tablet or, it sometimes seems, just interested in chatting and using the Tablet as an ice-breaker. When I attended the Educause Southeast Regional Conference in Atlanta this week, I had a particularly interesting Tablet-related experience.

I took all my notes for the Conference on the Lenovo. I love the flexibility of stylus-based, handwriting recognition text entry. Now I can draw diagrams in my notes, write in the margins of electronic documents, basically doing anything I can do with pen and paper, and have a digital file as the end product.

So, I attended a large-group discussion on Tuesday and the session was generating lots of input from the participants. Suddenly, the facilitator stopped the conversation mid-stream and asked if someone would volunteer to take notes and capture all the ideas bouncing around.

I am not much of a note-taker, and I confess to looking down at my feet when this request was made. The room was silent for a long time and when I looked up, the entire room was looking at me and smiling. We all started laughing, and the facilitator said 'Would you mind?'

This situation was strange to me because so many other people in the room were taking notes on pen and paper or on their laptops. I didn't know a soul in the room, while many of the other attendees seemed to know each other well. I was participating vocally like everyone else. I could only think that the Tablet made me the unanimous note-taker choice.

I thought maybe people saw me scribbling with my stylus, so it was obvious that I was taking notes already. But, like I said, there were plenty of people writing on pads of paper. Then, I thought, maybe I was singled out because my notes were digital. But, what about all those laptop users in the room? Aren't typewritten notes going to be more legible anyway? Maybe participants assumed that the laptop users were really just websurfing, checking email, or doing other work? Do people just identify the tablet as a specialized 'note-taking' tool - moreso than a legal pad and ballpoint pen?

This phenomenon is interesting to me because librarians often deal with 'approachability' issues at the reference or information desk. The nature of library work now requires some sort of computer at these service desks. However, patrons feel uncomfortable approaching librarians who are working on or sitting at a computer. Maybe librarians need to carry Tablets at these service points instead?