In Note-taking as an Art of Transmission, Ann Blair makes us think about note-taking’s fundamental role by allowing knowledge transmission, which most people take for granted. In her words, “notes recorded from reading or experience typically contribute to one’s conversation and compositions,” and it perpetuates a “cycle of transmission and transformation of knowledge, ideas, and experiences.” (p.85) Note-taking was and is a crucial factor for us to evolve as a society. For me, that became very clear in Blair’s explanation of how learning practices based on note-taking enabled us to access cultures based on oral knowledge transmission:

“From earliest antiquity, teaching was mostly oral; what we know of ancient teaching is largely dependent on the notes that listeners took. What we call the works of Aristotle, for example, are thought to be mostly composed from student notes.” (p. 91).

As I am a learning experience designer and often use digital tools for collaborative note-taking, the most interesting thing I found in the reading was her argument on how our tools shape note-taking, and that current digital technologies are still to be better analyzed by scholars. Based on this call for action, I will share my thoughts comparing two tools for note-taking that I often use in my professional routine: Mural and Google Jamboard. I will share their main characteristics and use the authors’ framework with the main functions of note-taking (storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting) to reveal their affordances, especially in how they enable collaboration and flexibility in adding notes.

Mural

With a free and paid version, Mural is an online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work with digital notes.  

In terms of storage, users can write text and upload images as files from the computer or the web. After creating whiteboards, users can keep them online or export them in different formats (PDF, PNG, PPT, HTML and CSV). 

Users can organize their notes using templates, such as “user journey template,”” brainstorming template” etc. Inside each of them, they can outline a way to read the notes, as we can see in the picture below:

Mural workspace

The tool has a search bar, which is a helpful tool for finding specific information inside the notes. Whiteboards can also be arranged in different rooms, which is essential when working with different teams or projects.

As sticky notes are good for short texts, it naturally makes the writer summarize information. However, as Mural enables users to add hyperlinks t the notes, summarizing becomes easier. 

Anyone with an account can create, share and join boards with other users, take notes simultaneously and organize them, changing their position, size, format, and color. As each board enables a good level of zooming in and out, users can insert a good amount of notes and organize them easily. Users can also add different media, such as images, icons, videos, and audio, and use hand drawings instead of text. It provides excellent features for synchronous activities, such as timer and voting tools.

Google Jamboard

Jamboard is a digital interactive whiteboard developed by Google to work with Google Workspace. It is free, but to use it, you have to create a Google Account. Users can draw, create shapes and lines, add text, use sticky notes, and turn their touchpoint into a digital laser pointer. In terms of storage, users can keep their files online or export them in PDF and PNG.

Users can organize their notes using different colors and sizes and also divide them into different whiteboards, which are pretty similar to slides, as we can see in the images below:

Google Jamboard 

Jamboard facilitates summarizing note-taking not just because of the post-its but also because the zooming is a bit limited. Users can’t add too many sticky notes, drawings, and images on only one board.

Final thoughts

Both tools are excellent to collaborative note-taking. People can use them for free and on different devices. 

However, Mural usually requires an extra step which is having people sign up if they want to create their own whiteboards. Sometimes that can also be the case using Jamboard, but as many people already have a Google Account, the signup step is less frequent. 

In terms of flexibility, Mural is way ahead of Jamboard. It is a much more sophisticated tool, providing more options for adding media, facilitating groups, and organizing content. On the other hand, Jamboard is a simple, easy-to-use tool, and I prefer to use it when I have to work with people that are not so tech-savvy.