GoodNotes is a tool to use with your browser that allows you to set up groups of people, share bookmarks, tags, annotations and spatially invasive note marks on any web page. The project was inspired by student behaviors in the South Bronx, at NYU and by adult learners at the United Nations. What I aimed to do with this project was make an invisible learning tool - something quick and useful, like a swiss army knife. The tool would let you replicate natural behaviors adult students and teachers or peer-to-peer student/teachers had: sharing research, notes and the kind of notes people used to leave with big red pens!

Many students and adult learners don't use libraries - Google is their best friend. But the kind of guidance a guru or teacher or smart peer might provide is absent in the empty broadcast experience of web publishing. Blogs and wikis and other social software are getting at it, there are more powerful relationships than purely social or commercial ones.

GoodNotes is an attempt to create a free open-source tool for students/learners who are fairly tech-savvy to re-socialize online information searching. The goal is to reinforce local knowledge that is located in social groups and allow people to push back against the dominance of the author in the current web model.

We use languages of words, pictures, icons, diagrams, text, sounds, textures, all the time. But we don't use them in isolation. Humans evolved in social groups, like other primates. We evolve our use of language together, through group use. Just take any page in the Oxford English Dictionary and you can track the morphing of language through the centuries. So now, with the Internet invading classrooms everywhere, and the worlds' knowledge being ported to digital forms, we have a more and more massive amount of data every day for learners to jumble through. How can we do it? How can we do it without us imposing a top-down system of organization?

If, as Tim Berners-Lee suggests, the next generation of the global network is not a network of data but a network of meaning, how do we make sure that the meaning is consensually based, and can allow for the kind of and degree of morphing needed to adapt?

One idea is allowing people to push-back against the broadcast. Annotation, commentary, ratings and collaborative features all allow for some push-back. In fact, all of the original concepts of hyperlinked systems assumed collaborative content generation, from Vannevar Bush to Berners-Lee's Web. So why haven't these systems worked? Usability issues are one reason, but the main one is about the social distribution of what we know. What we know is not only embedded in the tools we use, but in the people we know. We care much more about what people say that are local to us - friends, family, colleagues, peers, and gurus. Annotations are only meaningful in relation to who will read them, and this is why many types of top-down solutions often fail. What we know is local, although what is imposed on us is often global.

So what do I propose? I propose an annotation machine, a simple extension to a browser that anyone can use, that allows you to make comments on, bookmark, and classify your own meaning. GoodNotes is a tool for the people to define the semantic web with words and categories and annotation of their own choice, situated within their own working practices. A teacher would most optimally participate in the use of this tool, with groups of learners who use the Internet as a regular and natural extension of their "classroom." The teacher is seen as a guru guiding the use of and creation of the meaning system, watching for language, symbol, and ontology use, rather than a automaton passing out exercises to prepare for standardized testing.


GoodNotes is the final thesis project of Christina Goodness. Christina Goodness is a Masters Candidate at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. The focus of her graduate work has been alternate interfaces for students : educational technology that appears invisible to the learning process. Educational technology minus the worst aspects of "edutainment" is the design goal.


You can contact the designer here: christina@begoodnow.com.