I got the whiteboard blues

How many meetings have you been in that you were so busy trying to copy down the whiteboard, that you've missed a portion of the meeting? Here's some tools that might help.

I may live in the ivory tower, but I've also spent many years in both the private sector and the federal government; and I can tell you that everyone has had problems of copying down whiteboard work and missing a key point of the meeting or class. One of my favorite pieces of kit over the years has been the Mimio Stick by Virtual Ink of Cambridge, Mass. It's a foldering plastic doodad that sticks to the upper left corner of a white board (or the top of a flip chart) and using markers in an ergonomic holder you just go to town. The system seems to use infrared to tell the system which color pen holder you're using, and also when you have a pen down condition. Then it uses ultrasonics to get xy positioning on the white board up to 4foot by 8foot.

The other cool thing is that you can also add a piece of software that turns the pens into a mouse and also can do handwriting recognition. While not cheap, they're a heck of a lot cheaper than a traditional smart board. Now, combine that with "Wall Talker" in place of a traditional white board and you have a meeting room that screams collaboration. Wall Talker is basically a wall paper that can either be a projection surface, a whiteboard or both. They even have both wood and aluminum edging to give it a finished look, and trays for markers. I've been up to the developers area at the Spirent Honolulu offices and the short walls in that area are covered with the stuff. Programmers can markup the walls with impunity so that project status is seen by all the programmers as they head to their cubes...Here's a scan of the brochure I snagged from a wall paper supplier in Honolulu...just find a wall paper or design firm..I'd wager they've probably heard of the stuff. Grab a scan of the WallTalkers brochure.

My other big problem is that we are really trying hard to make sure that we don't leave our inconvenienced team members out and have been looking for ways of improving the collaboration tools while also fulfilling our ADA requirements. To this end we're looking at creating the classroom/meetingroom of the very near future. With walls covered by WallTalker, and drawings captured by Mimio Capture, we then make sure that everyone both in the classroom and off campus get to see and save the whiteboard images and the audio from the instructor. To this end we're looking at a project from Microsoft Research called ConferenceXP. Sounding similar to work done at Argonne National Labs designed for supercomputer education (Access Grid), ConferenceXP creates a peer to peer collaboration environment that combines functions that services like WebEx/MS-LiveMeeting have, but on a smaller scale. So while the base system is designed for multicast, this group seems to have recently adding in functions that allow folks to also participate via unicast.