Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences, Networking and Emerging Technologies, and EDUCAUSE2007

Service oriented architecture is all the rage. Vendor products like registries, ESBs, XML gateways, and WSM promise "SOA in a box." But SOA is actually about process and culture. What's hype and what's reality? What can it do for you? Where do you start? The University of Washington will describe its nascent SOA initiative and lessons learned.

At LSU , student government is extremely active in a spectrum of campus issues, including IT. Like many universities, LSU has a technology fee, but unlike most, student oversight is required by state law. Far from finding this oppressive, students have become "angel investors," initiating investment and stimulating interest in emerging technologies.

Given the unrelenting pace of technology innovation, keeping up with developments is often a daunting challenge. What methods do you use to learn about new and emerging technologies? How do you identify the promising ones that you might pursue later? Join us to share insights and tips from colleagues.

New technologies and infrastructure that extend bandwidth and power to the seafloor are being developed within the Ocean Observatories Initiative of the National Science Foundation. A major component of this effort involving construction of major cabled subsea networks is focusing on science and education programs that will make use of this unprecedented interactive access to study the northeast Pacific Ocean. The last frontier on Earth—the deep sea—will be accessible to a global community of scientists, educators, decision makers, and learners of all ages. New technologies will enable new approaches to studies of ocean and earth processes that, for example, regulate global climate, absorb greenhouse gases, generate earthquakes and tsunamis, support major fish stocks, harbor life in the extreme environments of sea floor volcanoes, and form vast mineral resources.

Clickers. Podcasting. Second Life. How does a university choose which emerging technologies to pursue? This session will share Ohio State University's structured process for evaluating e-learning projects, the emerging technologies assessment (ETA), which has been tested in numerous projects. Through collaboration and role-play, participants will conduct a case study assessment of an emerging technology using the ETA toolkit.

The five-stage process is organized around a flowchart that details steps for taking an emerging technology from the idea stage through the information-gathering stage to planning and executing a pilot. It specifies stakeholder involvement and includes multiple checkpoints that permit early termination where appropriate. The end result is a recommendation to administrative leadership about whether to adopt the technology. The materials for this session will include documentation, examples, and forms that outline the goals, inputs, and outputs for each stage of the process. Participants will leave with a model they can adapt to their own institutions.