Technology Assessment

Due Date: Monday, November 28th

For this assignment, you will be evaluating a specific communication technology product in order to assess its worth in supporting group practices in an electronic environment. Such examples might include Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, zaplets, Groove, LiveBoard, Linux OS collaborative capabilities, Eudora email with Mood Watch, NetMeeting. The list could go on and on.

You don't have to provide an exhaustive assessment of your particular technology, but you do have to provide enough information so that other people in class can get a good sense of what the technology does and how it could benefit (or hinder) interactions in professional workgroups. You can explore either a readily available commercial application (shrinkwrap), or a shareware or freeware application developed by individuals and made available over the Internet. In either case, your assessment can take the form of a narrative of personal experience with the technology or a description of other people's experience with the application.

In exploring this technology and writing to us about it, you should try to include the following:

• A brief, non-technical summary of how the technology works. (Could be gleaned from descriptions of the technology posted on a web site. Answers the question, "what does it do?" One or two paragraphs).
• Background information (if available) about who designed this technology and how it has evolved over the years. (who designed this technology, how long has it been around, how has it changed over the years -- two paragraphs tops.)
• An analysis of various features the technology claims to offer members of professional workgroups. (Once again, could be gleaned from product descriptions -- bulleted list running maybe a page at the most.)
• Your evaluation of how well this technology might or might not support the interactions of members in professional workgroups. (Basically, your conclusions as to how well this technology might support group interactions; this is the only real part of this assignment that requires you to think; the rest is mere reporting).
• A description of actual or potential scenarios in which the technology is currently used. For example, which companies or online communities, if any, have adopted this technology? If it is a fairly new technology, in what scenarios do you think it might be used in the future?
• A brief summary of two academic or journalistic articles (if available) that have mentioned or critiqued this technology. (I am not talking about a full-blown lit review; I'm talking about a summary of one or two short articles on the product, if you can find them).
• A short list of Web resources (if any) that might further educate readers about this technology.

Your technology assessment report should be about 5-6 pages in length, but you may write more if you so choose. If you are having trouble choosing a technology for this report, please let me know, and I'll help you find one just right for your particular interest.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or suggested revisions to this assignment description. The old assignment description is available at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/592/assessment2.html , should you choose to write your paper on the previous case scenario. But I really think you'll find this newer assignment much easier to write and more fun to research.