http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/03/01/the-education-technology-revolution-is-coming
The Education-Technology Revolution Is Coming
Institutions of learning must learn to incorporate technology or risk being left behind
By SIG BEHRENS
March 1, 2013 RSS Feed Print

Sig Behrens is a president of Blackboard, Inc.
Higher education is the next bubble. Facebook will replace classroom instruction. Textbooks will go away, and some colleges will, too.
In other words, everything is going to change. Or, at least, that's the talk we in education and technology regularly hear these days. It sounds exciting—and, to some, scary.
But it also sounds like what I heard during the dot-com boom of the 1990s when a lot of companies—including Blackboard—began using technology to "disrupt" the education status quo. Since then we've made some important progress, but in many ways the classroom still looks the same as it did 100 years ago. So what's different this time? Is all the talk just hype? Or are we really starting to see the beginnings of major change?
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I believe we are.
There are a lot of reasons but one of the biggest is the way that technology has given rise to a new kind of education consumer—the active learner—who is using technology to drive change in ways that we haven't seen before. In the past, change was usually a top-down process, led by campus administrators, district leaders, and other officials. It was often slow in coming, if at all. Look at technology: Mainframe computing gave way to client/server computing and later intranet computing. These shifts were slow and phased—an orderly rollout from the administration with little urgency or room for consumer choice.
And why would there be? Typically students had few choices of any kind, particularly before new options, globalization, and competition