Practitioners of the Jiro Kawakita (KJ) method, a method for organizing ideas, typically use paper labels and four-colored ball-point pens to record their ideas during the creative thinking process. A similar approach is used in group KJ method sessions; however, the effectiveness of capturing and sharing the diagrams and information is limited because of the large amount of paper required. Considering the merits of the conventional paper-pen approach and the demand for quick sharing of diagrams after a session, we designed and implemented a system to digitize group KJ sessions--not just the diagrams but also the details of the creative process. We used digital pens during the session to capture the position and orientation of labels as well as their content. We confirmed the efficiency of our system by applying it to several GKJ sessions.

The problem with traditional Brain Writing (BW) is that the users are restricted from viewing all sets of ideas at one time; and they are also restricted from writing down more than three ideas at a time. In this research we describe distributed experimental environment for BW which was designed to obtain better results and can thus eliminate the problems of traditional BW technique. The actual experimental system is an integration of three BW modes with mutually different features and characters. We conducted three different tests implementing this environment, and confirmed quality and quantity of ideas generated by three different groups. It was confirmed that unrestricted inputs are effective in generating a large quantity of ideas, whereas limiting the number of sharable/viewable ideas shows better tendency in some aspects. However, qualitative evaluation results were not confirmed as different functions show variant results. The evaluation of the functions that support viewing and sharing of ideas show that synergy is not always an advantage in generating ideas. The results of number of ideas in correlation with time show that 20 minutes time was appropriate to conduct BW in distributed environment.

Note taking is a fundamental activity for learning, and many software tools which enable students to take digitized notes have been proposed. Digitized notes are advantageous because they can be easily edited, rearranged, and shared. Although many note-taking tools have been proposed, there has been little research to examine the effect of note annotation and rearrangement with a digitized tool in terms of knowledge acquisition. Therefore, we have investigated the effect of note annotation and rearrangement on how well lecture content is remembered by learners. By annotation, we mean adding both handwritten and typed text, and rearrangement includes moving and deleting handwritten notes. We developed a simple note-taking application specialized for explanation, and evaluated it through a laboratory experiment with eight participants. The results show that note annotation and rearrangement significantly improved how well the participants remembered lecture content. Thus, the effect of annotation and rearrangement on remembrance was confirmed with respect to digitized notes.