It's being hailed as having the ability to revolutionize lectures and classes for college and university students by dragging the lessons into the technological era.

Livescribe's Smartpen is a pen and computer hybrid, which will be able to record audio from lectures and take down notes in ink, but its unique technology will allow it audibly read from pages for the student.

“When I hand it to people they think it's a magical device,” said Andy Van Schaack, Livescribe's senior science advisor and a professor of research methods, instructional design and the use of technology to support teaching and learning at Nashville's Vanderbilt University. “It's pretty cool, there's no doubt about it, but it's a pen. So you just write with it like you would any other pen. But it's also a computer [and] has everything a computer has - like a microprocessor, memory, microphone, speaker, a display and earphones. So it's also a computer.”

The pen is one of the innovative ideas dreamt up by the company's CEO, Jim Marggraff, who has spent years improving teaching with technology including LeapFrog Enterprises' popular LeapPad Learning System. Marggraff has been working with paper based multi-media for a long time with the emphasis put on making the paper come alive to help make education not just easier for the teacher, but more comprehensive for the student. But the key to the technology is the company's main goal, which isn't just to facilitate learning, but to make people more efficient at both work and school.

“As a student trying to listen to [your teacher] - but you're also trying to take notes,” Van Schaack explained. “There's only so much of that that you can do in a lecture, your brain can only work so quickly and you're scared of missing key words and quotes. What if your professor says something that's going to be on the midterm and you were writing the comment down that he'd said previously and you just missed it. What this pen can do is not only capture the ink that you write, but also it finds the audio while you're writing the ink.”

The pen itself can then be docked to a PC or laptop allowing the audio, or information picked up from the paper using a camera in the tip of the pen allowing the student to search keywords from lectures and seminars.

The trick is to remember that the pen can't read just any piece of paper.

“The real key concept is that when you tap the pen on the word, it does not read the word,” Van Schaack stressed. “It's reading the dots underneath the word, so the page has to be programmed. But it's something you'll be able to do in a couple of months with our development tools.”

What the technology allows you to do is print out a page of information onto the dot paper using a computer program with which you've highlighted words or phrases. Once they're highlighted it then allows you to record audio to add to the page.

In an example that Van Schaack used, if you were to write an essay on Rwanda using the program and were worried your readers wouldn't be able to pronounce the country's name, you could add it as audio so that when they tap the pen to the word ‘Rwanda' it would allow them to hear the word.

Mathematics also provides an interesting aspect to the pen, as it can, in of itself, double as a calculator in a sense.

“When the pen comes out you'll be able to write down an equation on a piece of dot paper,” continued Van Schaack. You can write down 22 X 14 and when you write the equal sign it will calculate the answer for you. Now you can't immediately write out a triple integral - we're not going to have software in the pen immediately that can do complex mathematics, it can do mathematics that regular people can do.”

And a notebook with Van Schaack's programmed calculator can be provided on the inside cover of spiral bound notebooks making the ease of using the pen that much more simple.

“With respect to instructional technologies, the best ones are the ones that don't require any change in behaviour on the part of the learner or the teacher,” Van Schaack said. “A lot of really cool instructional technologies require that you as a student change, or I as the teacher, have to change something pretty dramatically, and people don't like to change.”

But apart from reading and mathematics, he believes the pen will benefit not only students, but also their professors, as it will help making marking easier and less time-draining than the traditional method of hand-marking and returning the document to the student.

“Students expect professors to give you a lot of feedback, which is great,” Van Schaack continued. “But as a teacher providing feedback takes a lot of time. If I print the papers on this dot paper, I can take my pen, circle something and say ‘you made a really good point here, but it's important that when you make a statement as bold as this that you make at least two citations' and then I tap the page again and now I've just recorded an audio comment for the student.

“So I do that for the entire paper, and the paper gets e-mailed back to you. Now you don't need to have to have a pen- you just look at it as a PDF file or on the window and you see where I've circled the statement and you just click on it and you can hear my voice.”

The time it takes to grade the paper is then drastically reduced since it takes less time to talk than transcribe, but he also believes that students are much more receptive to audio corrections because they're personal and don't come across as cryptic.

Van Schaack also quoted studies that have proven that professors give 250 per cent more information when giving audio feedback versus written, and it took them a quarter of the time to do it, therefore making the pen 10 times more efficient than conventional methods.

“I have 90 students in one of my courses and I like to give lots of feedback,” said Van Schaack. “But I also like to play with my five-year old twins, and this is going to allow me to do it with 10-times the efficiency.”