What’s your ETA?

By Ohio State University

they didn’t use powerpoint!

But hadn’t done enough handouts!

ETA=Emerging Technology Assessment

People like us are presented with many investment opportunities into new technologies, but our intake measures tend to be qualitative – just things that catch our attention, or are promoted by enthusiasts. Ohio have developed a flow process to improve capacity to assess emerging technologies.

They got the audience to shout out emerging technologies, and got: podcast, tablets, voip, clickers, gaming, blogs, mash ups, social networking, wikis, e-portfolios, skype, tagging, collaborative spaces, rss, second life, haptic interfaces, video glasses, google jockey, geo tagging, vortals, RFID tags

I offered Pachyderm, but maybe I have been subject to a wind up (no have just looked it up and realise it is experimental email, yeah right)

Most projects sort into 4 piles

• reject,
  
• tweak and innovate,
• build consultation model,
  
• adopt

The paper work they gave out is the investment proposal.

The case study they presented were 3 Professors wanting to use Second Life in their teaching, but instead of the sort of conversation I had with Richard Mather about this, they meandered off into project management lingo. Luckily, I was sitting next to Bryan Alexander during this session and his conversation kept me conscious.

They described their flow chart as follows, almost like poetry:

Clouds are informing,
circles are actions,
boxes with lines conversations,
boxes with dark lines are products,
diamonds are decision points.

I was so far gone by now that it reminded me of some lyrics by a group Keith will never have heard of:

There's more to come, hum hum hum hum, it's so obvious