Cool Technology of the Week

Harvard Medical School has a digital curriculum. We offer podcasting, streaming videos with voice recognition indexing of content, over 100,000 PDFs/Powerpoints, and hundreds of simulations. One technology, we've never implemented is electronic whiteboarding - capturing the handwriting and doodles of lecturers.

During the annual Massachusetts CIO retreat last week, I was introduced to a simple form of whiteboard called the Livescribe Smart Pen. This pen, about the size of a laser pointer, digitally captures video of handwriting and the audio of the presenter. It's the cool technology of the week.

Software tools bundled with the Pen make it easy to share the contents on the web using Flash.

Here's an example of a whiteboard session at the retreat reviewing the architecture of health information exchange activities.

The Livescribe pen is an interesting tool for capturing development sessions and sharing initial requirements with a group. I can imagine using it with Facebook and other social networking collaboration tools. A Livescribe pen and Facebook is certainly less expensive than outfitting classrooms with digital whiteboards. We'll see how the faculty react!