Miami Student

Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: Campus

The Thunder Room, located in 114 King Library, incorporates an electronic flipchart in a collaborative instruction room soon to be open to students, faculty and staff.

The Thunder Room, a $120,000 real-time collaborative instruction room in King Library, opened its doors to students, faculty and staff yesterday-marking the second time Miami University has led the way in library technology in Ohio.

Thunder, by PolyVision Corp., is an electronic flipchart that enables users to brainstorm and instantly share information with anyone, anywhere in the world, according to Lisa Santucci, head of the Center for Information Management (CIM) at Miami.

According to Santucci, Miami is the first university in Ohio to apply Thunder, originally created for the businesses, to a higher education setting.

This milestone comes as the CIM celebrates its 10-year anniversary. When the CIM lab opened in March 1998, it was the first such facility in the state of Ohio that focused on multimedia and cutting-edge software, according to Santucci.

Santucci said that the university's libraries are constantly looking at new hardware and software, particularly how students use them, in order to improve the way students work.

"Dean (of King Library) Judith Sessions is incredibly committed to providing new technologies for students to use," Santucci said.

The Thunder room includes furniture for 15 people, five projectors, a high-resolution scanner, a color laser printer, two DVD/VHS players, one server and an electronic easel. The room, in 114 King, around the corner from the CIM lab, comes equipped for easy laptop connection as well as the ability to send and receive calls.

With eight different virtual pages up on the wall at a time, students can use the easel to take notes that will appear instantly on the wall. Graphics and videos can then simultaneously be running on one of the other "pages." These documents become instant PDF files that can then be e-mailed or printed with the touch of a button.

Thunder also has a remote feature that allows any authorized person with an Internet connection to be able to add to and comment on the presentation without actually being there.

"Wow. Where can you start but wow? It is fabulous," said Miami President David Hodge, referring to Thunder. "(Miami) has this phenomenal capability to be able to use new products to collaborate. These things don't happen by accident; we are tremendously progressive and forward-looking. I'm not at all surprised to see something like this in a Miami library."

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