Foresight Snippets – No. 8
[Originally published] 15 March 2001
- Research in the Business World
- Cashing In on the Future
- Privatising the University — the New Tragedy of the Commons
Scanning Retrospective, No. 7
Foresight Snippets – No. 7
[Originally published] 28 February 2001
- Would You Like a Mobile Phone With That?
- Cloning: Could Humans Be Next?
- A Framework for Making Sustainability a Practical Reality
Citation managers for futures scanning
During our futures scanning – doing what I like to sometimes call ‘futures intelligence analysis’, which therefore makes us ‘futures intelligence analysts’ – we need a way to capture and retain the information about the scanning ‘hits’ we find.
Scanning Retrospective, No. 6
Foresight Snippets – No. 6
[Originally published] 14 February 2001
- A University That Wants Students to Stay Away from Class
- Report: On-line Training ‘Boring’
- Setting Standards for Web-Ed
Scanning Retrospective, No. 5
Foresight Snippets – No. 5
[Originally published] 30 January 2001
- The Untethered Campus
- A Hydrogen-Fueled “People’s Car”
- Living Under the Hole in the Sky
Scanning Retrospective, No. 4
Foresight Snippets – No. 4
[Originally published] 15 January 2001
- Does Reading Harry Potter Cause Global Warming?
- Oops! A New Bio-Weapon
- Back to the Future: 2001 — Is Tablet Computing About to Go Mainstream?
Scanning Retrospective, No. 3
Foresight Snippets – No. 3
[Originally published] 15 December 2000
- What price the “.tv” domain?
- You’d better be good! Darth Vader is coming to the lecture hall
- Everything old is new again: phone numbers vs URLs
Scanning Retrospective, No. 2
Foresight Snippets – No. 2
[Originally published] 27 November 2000
- Cellular Phones: Are They Safe to Use?
- You’re Hired — Now Stay Home!
- Lasered Lawns
Scanning Retrospective, No. 1
Foresight Snippets – No. 1
From the Foresight & Planning Unit
[Originally published] 17 November 2000
by Joseph Voros
- Universities Begin Creating Palm-Sized Versions of Campus Web Pages
- GM Goat Spins Web-Based Future
- Stick Your Finger in Your Ear and Go “Ting-a-Ling-a-Loo!”
Futures Scanning – A Retrospective View
The background
In August 2000, I was hired as a strategic foresight analyst in the Foresight and Planning Unit (FPU) of the (then) Office of the Vice Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology. Part of this role was to conduct futures ‘scanning’ – by looking at the education ‘landscape’ through a ‘foresight’ time-frame much longer than is usual in conventional strategic planning; in our case, it was 10-20 years out. This obviously means that today, in 2021, the ‘future landscape’ being ‘scouted’ back then has since come to pass and become history. Hence the motivation for this experiment – to look back at what were picked up then as impending signals of change, and to compare what was reported in those days as future possibilities with what eventually came to pass as historical actualities. It has taken two decades to reach this point of being able to conduct such a ‘retrospective longitudinal assessment’ – and hopefully it should prove to be both interesting and instructive. It may also allow some real-world-data calibration of the utility of the heuristic principles for scanning described in the previous post. Continue reading “Futures Scanning – A Retrospective View”
