3M Donates 42 'Ideaboards' to Baylor

WACO, Texas -- 3M Co. has donated 42 high-tech "Ideaboards," to Baylor University. The boards are valued at more than $4,000 each.
"The Ideaboard is one of the latest innovations in meeting technology, and we hope that through the donation of this equipment, that we can demonstrate the efficiencies that technology can bring to the classroom," said Russell Bridges, government and community relations manager for the 3M Austin Center.
"Ideaboards" are white boards that capture written material and automatically save it on a PC. According to Dr. Corey Carbonara, professor of communication studies and associate vice president of the Institute for Technology Innovation Management at Baylor, the boards will make a tremendous contribution to collaborative learning and will allow for a new method of distance learning.
"The use of the Ideaboard creates a collaborative learning environment that allows students to work on projects that don't necessarily have to be in the same place. And because of that live activity that takes advantage of the new standards of white board conferencing, it allows students to be prepared for the real way in which telecommunications have revolutionized business meetings," he said.
"It also allows faculty members to collaborate with other faculty members in real time to edit documents, and it allows students who are working on theses or dissertations to have a live session electronically with their professors and actually edit those documents live," he added. "Ideaboards also allow for the ability to store and to network anything written on these boards in a live net-meeting session with any computer equipped with that software any where on the planet."

The Ideaboards will be distributed to various locations on campus, including the department of museum studies, the office of organizational development, the Hankamer School of Business, the School of Engineering and Computer Science, the School of Education, the information technology center, the career services center and the office of development.
"The Ideaboards are excellent presentation tools, because they add an interactive component to traditional presentation technologies," said Dr. Joel Thierstein, associate professor of telecommunications, who attended a recent Ideaboard information and training session. "I am very excited about getting one of these boards."